Owen · 1800
Robert Owen at New Lanark
On the first of January 1800, Robert Owen, twenty-eight years old, the Newtown-Montgomeryshire-born self-made Manchester cotton-manufacturer, took over the management of the New Lanark cotton mills on the upper Clyde in Lanarkshire, a complex of four water-powered mills employing about two thousand workers (about five hundred of them pauper-apprentice children of seven to twelve years old, brought up from the Glasgow and Edinburgh poor-houses on six-year indentures), which Owen had purchased the previous year from his father-in-law David Dale with two business partners. Over the next twenty-five years Owen ran New Lanark as a deliberate experiment in industrial paternalism: he reduced the day from fourteen hours to twelve and then to ten and a half; refused to employ children under ten; opened the world's first infant school in 1816 for the under-fives of the mill's workers; raised wages, built clean housing, opened a co-operative shop that sold goods at cost. The mills became the most-visited industrial site in early-nineteenth-century Europe (about twenty thousand visitors over the years, including the future Tsar Nicholas I, the Habsburg archdukes, and most of the Whig and Tory leadership of the British political class). Owen's *A New View of Society* (1813) and *Report to the County of Lanark* (1820) became the foundational texts of British co-operativism and utopian-socialist thought. He emigrated to America in 1825 to found the community of New Harmony in Indiana (which failed in 1827) and returned to Britain in 1829 to lead the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834. New Lanark is, since 2001, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It is the early afternoon of the first of January 1800, on the cobbled mill-yard between the Number One and Number Two mills at New Lanark on the upper Clyde, four miles south of the burgh of Lanark, in pale Lowland Scotland winter light. He is twenty-eight years old. He is Robert Owen, born at Newtown in Montgomeryshire on the fourteenth of May 1771, son of the small-shopkeeper Robert Owen the elder and Anne Williams, apprenticed in the Lincolnshire draper's trade at ten, in Manchester in the cotton-industry from eighteen, manager of the Drinkwater Bank Top Mill at twenty-one (the first salaried-manager position in the English cotton industry, on the salary of three hundred pounds a year and a one-quarter profit share, a unprecedented arrangement for a twenty-one-year-old in 1791), a successful Manchester cotton-manufacturer at twenty-eight, married in September 1799 to Caroline Dale, the eldest daughter of David Dale the Glasgow banker and the founder-owner of the New Lanark mills.
He has, on the first of January 1800, taken over the day-to-day management of the New Lanark mills under a partnership arrangement with his father-in-law and two Manchester partners (the Atkinson and Borrodaile partners had bought the mills with him in 1799 for £60,000, an enormous sum). The mills employ about two thousand workers in total: about fifteen hundred adults (mostly Lowland Scottish women on the spinning frames; men on the mule-spinning operation; a managerial cadre of about thirty Manchester-trained foremen) and about five hundred pauper-apprentice children aged seven to twelve, brought up from the Glasgow and Edinburgh poor-houses on six-year indentures, fed, housed and worked in the mills' pauper-apprentice dormitories.
He thinks: the pauper-apprentice system is the cancer at the heart of the British cotton industry. The children are worked fourteen hours a day on the spinning frames. The apprentice dormitories are overcrowded and the tuberculosis death-rate among the pauper-apprentices is about one in ten a year. The system is, in plain reading, the British working class being eaten by the British capital.
He thinks: I have, by my Manchester experience, the evidence that the mills can be run profitably on a ten-and-a-half-hour day, with the children educated rather than worked, with the adults on fair wages and clean housing, and with the mill-shop on cost-price-not-truck-wages. The evidence from Manchester is that the productivity of the rested-fed-and-housed workforce exceeds the productivity of the exhausted workforce by about a third. The economic case for the philanthropic management is, in plain reading, a better profit-margin.
He thinks: the experiment at New Lanark will be the public-record demonstration of the economic case. The mills will, on the public account-books, return a better profit on a philanthropic basis than on the pauper-apprentice basis. The publication of the account-books and the Statistics of New Lanark will be the public-policy argument that the Westminster Parliament cannot, on the evidence, refuse.
He runs New Lanark on the philanthropic-paternalist principles for the next twenty-five years (1800–1825). He reduces the day in stages: fourteen hours in 1800, twelve in 1810, ten-and-a-half from 1816 onwards. He refuses to employ children under ten from 1816 (against the Robert Peel 1819 Factory Act's statutory nine-year-old limit, which Owen had lobbied to set lower). He opens the Institution for the Formation of Character on the first of January 1816, the first infant school in the world (for the children of the mill-workers aged two to six, on Pestalozzi-and-Owen pedagogical principles, in the purpose-built schoolhouse with a dance-floor, a music room, and a natural-history collection). He opens the village co-operative shop on the non-truck principle (the shop sells goods at cost-plus-five-per-cent and pays the surplus into the village welfare fund) on the twenty-first of January 1810.
The New Lanark mills become, by 1815, the most-visited industrial site in early-nineteenth-century Europe. By the visitors' register at the Institution for the Formation of Character, about twenty thousand named visitors come through the mills between 1815 and 1825, including the Grand Duke Nicholas (the future Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, who visits in 1816 and reportedly offers Owen the two-million-rouble grant for a Russian replica of New Lanark, which Owen declines), Archduke Maximilian of Austria, Daniel O'Connell, Lord Brougham (who introduces Owen at the 1819 House of Commons), Jeremy Bentham (who becomes a Owen partner from 1813), Lord Sidmouth (the Home Secretary, who visits in 1819 in the aftermath of Peterloo).
Robert Owen left Britain in 1824 to attempt the establishment of a utopian community at New Harmony in Indiana (which he had bought from the Rappite community of George Rapp for $135,000, the largest single private real-estate transaction in the United States of 1824). The New Harmony community failed within three years (1825–1827) and lost Owen most of the £40,000 fortune he had brought with him from New Lanark. He returned to Britain in 1829 and led the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834 (the first national federated trade union in British history, which collapsed within twelve months on the Tolpuddle Martyrs deportation and the Whig government's prosecution-by-conspiracy law). He died at his birth-village of Newtown in Montgomeryshire on the seventeenth of November 1858, eighty-seven years old. He is buried at the St Mary's churchyard at Newtown, beside the Robert Owen Memorial Museum that the Newtown townspeople opened in his honour in 1902. The New Lanark mills were taken into the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society in 1881, ran as a co-operative-owned mill until 1968, and are, since 1974, in the care of the New Lanark Conservation Trust. UNESCO World Heritage status was granted in 2001. The mills, the Institution for the Formation of Character, the Owen counting-house, and the village co-operative shop are open to the public daily; the attendance in 2025 is about three hundred and fifty thousand visitors a year.