Robert Owen at New Lanark

Some revolutions are declared from a barricade. Others are entered through a counting-house door on a wet January afternoon, by a man with a ledger under his arm and a quiet conviction that the arithmetic of cruelty is also bad arithmetic. The age of the steam-loom had its prophets of inevitability, men who said the children must be worked because the spindles must be fed. It took a draper's apprentice from a Welsh market town to walk into the loudest mill in Britain and answer them, not with a sermon, but with a set of books.

THE DRAPER'S SON

Robert Owen was born at Newtown in Montgomeryshire on the fourteenth of May 1771, the son of a saddler and ironmonger who also kept the village post. He read every book the local clergyman would lend him, and by ten he was behind a draper's counter in Stamford, learning to fold muslin and to read a customer's purse at a glance. At eighteen he was in Manchester, in the cotton trade. At twenty-one he was manager of Peter Drinkwater's Bank Top Mill at three hundred pounds a year and a quarter of the profit, an arrangement no Englishman had ever offered to a Welshman of that age. He learned the trade from the carding-room upwards: the temper of the rovings, the dust in the air, the cough in the spinners by their fourth winter. He married Caroline Dale of Glasgow in September 1799. Her father owned four water-mills on the upper Clyde, four miles south of Lanark, where two thousand souls worked in the noise.

THE COBBLED YARD

On the first of January 1800, in the pale Lowland light between the Number One and Number Two mills, Owen stood in the yard he now managed. The Clyde was loud below the weir. The bell rang the hands in from their New Year hour. He had bought the place the previous summer with two Manchester partners for sixty thousand pounds: a sum so large it was, in plain reading, a wager on his own judgement. He watched them file past him: Lowland women on the throstle frames, mule-spinners with their forearms ridged, and the pauper-apprentices, five hundred of them, brought up on six-year indentures from the poor-houses of Glasgow and Edinburgh, ages seven to twelve, fed in the dormitories above the counting-house. One in ten of them, by the parish books, died each year of consumption. He knew this before he walked through the gate. He had come, in part, to see whether he had the stomach for what he already intended to do.

A SECOND IN THE COUNTING-HOUSE

A man with a ledger has a particular kind of decision to make. The trade press of Manchester held it as settled that the cotton industry could not survive a shorter day, that the orphan apprentices were a necessity of the spindle-count, that philanthropy and dividend were enemies. Owen had, in his Drinkwater years, kept a private set of figures that disagreed. A rested spinner broke fewer threads. A fed child learned the frame faster. A clean stairwell cost less than a fever. The figures were not sentimental; they were merely true. Standing in the yard, his partners' capital in his hands and his father-in-law's name on the deeds, he could have run New Lanark as it had always been run, taken his ten per cent, and called himself a reformer in the evenings. The easier path was the one already cut. He chose the other. He chose it because, as he would write thirteen years later in A New View of Society, any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means. The sentence was already forming, that January afternoon, in the rhythm of his pacing on the cobbles. He would prove it on the books. He would publish the books. Westminster, faced with a column of figures, would have to either read them or admit it would not.

THE MILLS UNDER HIS HAND

He went to work. The day came down by stages: fourteen hours at the start, twelve by 1810, ten and a half from 1816 onward. He stopped taking pauper-apprentices and refused, against the prevailing law, to employ any child under ten. He raised wages and held them through the cotton slump of 1815, when the mill ran four months at a loss and he paid the hands out of capital. He built clean houses with two rooms and a sculler. He opened the village shop on the twenty-first of January 1810 and sold tea and oatmeal at cost-plus-five, the surplus going into the school fund. On the first of January 1816, sixteen years to the day from his arrival, he opened the Institution for the Formation of Character, with its dance-floor and its natural-history cabinet and its infants of two to six taught by song and by question, the first such school in the world. He installed the Silent Monitor by every frame, a four-sided block of wood, black, blue, yellow, white, turned to show each operative's conduct of the previous day. He was watched in return. He preferred it that way.

THE VISITORS

By 1815 New Lanark was the most-visited industrial site in Europe. The register at the Institution counted twenty thousand named callers in a decade. The Grand Duke Nicholas came in 1816, stood in the schoolroom while the children danced a quadrille, and offered, it was said, two million roubles for a Russian copy and the loan of two million surplus Britons to populate it; Owen declined both. Archduke Maximilian came. Daniel O'Connell came. Jeremy Bentham bought into the partnership in 1813 and never visited but read every quarterly account. Lord Sidmouth came in 1819, fresh from the cavalry at Peterloo, and walked the dormitories in silence. The visitors took notes; the mills paid a dividend; the books were open on the counting-house table. The character of man is, without a single exception, always formed for him, Owen told the House of Commons committee in 1816, and never by him. They wrote it down. They did not, in the main, act on it.

THE FAILURE THAT DID NOT UNMAKE THE THING

In 1824 he sold his share and sailed for Indiana. He paid George Rapp's Harmonists one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars for the town of Harmony on the Wabash and renamed it New Harmony. He thought a community could be built from a printed constitution and a willing population. It could not. The settlers quarrelled; the constitutions multiplied; within three years the venture had broken and most of the forty thousand pounds he had carried from Lanark was gone. He came home in 1829 to lead the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834, which the Whig courts broke within a year on the Tolpuddle prosecutions. He died at Newtown on the seventeenth of November 1858, eighty-seven years old, and was buried in St Mary's churchyard within sight of the house where his father had folded leather. The townspeople opened a museum to him there in 1902.

THE LEDGER STILL OPEN

The mills on the upper Clyde passed in 1881 to the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, ran on co-operative ownership until 1968, and stand today in the care of a Conservation Trust. UNESCO inscribed them on the World Heritage list in 2001. Three hundred and fifty thousand visitors come through the yard each year. They walk the cobbles between the Number One and Number Two mills, climb the stair to the Institution for the Formation of Character, and stand in the room where the infants once sang. What was decided here, on the first afternoon of a new century, was not the abolition of the factory but the proof that it could be run otherwise and still pay; that the British working day was a matter of choice, not necessity. The proof has outlived every counter-argument urged against it. On a wooden frame by the schoolroom door, the Silent Monitor still hangs, four sides painted, turned now to white.