Non-fiction
Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves: How Victorians Collected the World
Fiction
Kissing Alice
Obedience
Marlford
Altick, Richard, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1978)
Anon., ‘Shelley and the Tremadoc Embankment’, Welsh Outlook, 17, No. 6 (June 1930)
Appadurai, Arjun, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Barnatt, John, ‘Chatsworth: the parkland archaeology’, in Landscape, Archaeology and Ecology, Vol. 6, 2007, pp. 13–17
Berg, Maxine, Technology and Toil in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: CSE, 1979)
Booth, Michael R., Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Briggs, Asa, Victorian Things (London: Penguin, 1998)
Buder, Stanley, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Carey, John, ed., The Faber Book of Utopias (London: Faber and Faber, 1999)
Cherry, Gordon E., Cities and Plans: The Shaping of Urban Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Edward Arnold, 1988)
Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992)
Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1990)
Suspensions of Perception, Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2001)
Creese, Walter L., The Search for Environment: The Garden City Before and After (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, expanded edition 1992)
Cyfeillion Cadw Tremadog, Tremadog: Historic Planned Town (CCT: Tremadog, 2008)
Darley, Gillian, Villages of Vision (London: The Architectural Press, 1975)
Davis, Terence, The Architecture of John Nash (London: Longacre Press, 1960)
Devonshire, Deborah, Duchess of, The Garden at Chatsworth (London: Francis Lincoln, 1999)
De Vries, Leonard, Victorian Advertisements (London: John Murray, 1968)
Dyer, Gillian, Advertising as Communication (London: Routledge, 1989)
Eaton, Ruth, Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002)
Evans, Martin, European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and its Aftermath (London and New York: Routledge, 2002)
Flint, Kate, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Gaskell, S. Martin, Model Housing from the Great Exhibition to the Festival of Britain (London and New York: Mansell, 1987)
Gilpin, William, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (London: R. Blamire, 2nd edition, 1794)
Ginswick, J., Labour and the Poor in England and Wales 1849–1851 (London: Frank Cass, 1983)
Grant, Kevin, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa 1884–1926 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005)
Gunn, Simon, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class, Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
Harrison, J. F. C., Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: the Quest for the New Moral World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969)
Hilton, Matthew, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (London: Macmillan, 2000)
Hunt, Christopher J., Lead Miners of the Northern Pennines in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970)
Jeremy, David J., ‘The Enlightened Paternalist in Action: William Hesketh Lever at Port Sunlight before 1914’, Business History, 33.1 (January 1991)
Lever, William Hulme, Viscount Leverhulme (Boston, Mass., and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927)
Levine, Philippa, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838–1886 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Lewis, Brian, So Clean: Lord Leverhulme, Soap and Civilization (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008)
Llywelyn, Robin, Portmeirion (Portmeirion: Portmeirion Ltd, n.d.)
Loeb, Lori Anne, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
MacKenzie, John M., ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986)
Mangan, J. A. and James Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987)
Marchal, Jules, Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts: Colonial Exploitation in the Congo (London: Verso, 2008)
MacCarthy, Fiona, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1994)
Miller, Andrew H., Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Muthesius, Stefan, The English Terraced House (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982)
Outka, Elizabeth, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism and the Commodified Authentic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Pollard, Sidney and John Salt, Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor. Essays in Honour of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of his Birth (London: Macmillan, 1971)
Price, Richard, British Society 1680–1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Price, Uvedale, Essays on the Picturesque (London: Newman, 1810)
Raistrick, Arthur, Two Centuries of Industrial Welfare: the London (Quaker) Lead Company 1692–1905 (Buxton: Moorland, 1938)
Ravetz, Alison, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (London: Routledge, 2001)
Richards, Thomas, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990)
Royle, Edward, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A Study of the Harmony Community (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)
Steegman, John, Victorian Taste: A Study of the Arts and Architecture from 1830 to 1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970)
Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)
Storry, Mike and Peter Childs, eds, British Cultural Identities, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2002)
Summerson, John, John Nash (London: George Allen, 1935)
Vernon, Anne, A Quaker Business Man: The Life of Joseph Rowntree 1836–1925 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1958)
Watkin, David, The English Vision: the picturesque in architecture, landscape and garden design (New York: Harper & Row, 1982)
Watkins, Charles and Ben Cowell, Uvedale Price: Decoding the Picturesque (Woodbridge: the Boydell Press, 2012)
Weiner, Martin J., English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Williams-Ellis, Clough, The Pleasures of Architecture (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924)
Portmeirion: The Place and its Meaning (London: Faber, 1963)
Wohl, Anthony S., Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London: Dent, 1983)
Zlotnick, Susan, Women, Writing and the Industrial Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 2001)
WE BEGIN HERE: midwinter; mid-country; short, cold days. I come from the north, crossing open moorland before joining the main road through the Derwent Valley. Frost clings late to shaded hedges and pavements; the light remains metallic, dusky. The Derbyshire gritstone from which the houses are made lives up to its name and gives the villages a sombre, pragmatic air – a grittiness. Despite all the comfortable 4x4s, the seasonal lights and cosy fleeces, it’s possible to imagine a tough life here, a not-so-long-ago past, bitter and thankless and industrial.
In the steep-sided gorge the river runs rapid and frothy, the rock pressing through with emphatic solidity. It’s a landscape that encloses and intimidates; although mostly it’s a mediated place, a trail of roads and signposts and drystone walls, it still offers brief moments of genuine, discomforting ruggedness, glimpses – nothing more – of something wild and brutal. It’s like watching a piece of classic theatre with a dark villain stalking the back of the stage: there’s the barely concealed promise of melodrama and menace.
A few miles from Cromford the natural landscape gives way to the distraction of a small town, Matlock Bath. Its original identity as a spa resort has become muddled, almost erased. Boxy 1980s cable cars dangle over Georgian and Victorian villas; the genteel row of buildings crouched beneath the lead mines on the Heights of Abraham is home to shops with a seaside feel, selling candyfloss, coloured windmills and car stickers. Beside the river there’s a formal public gardens where eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors would stroll and chat, making brief acquaintances and indulging in small flirtations between taking the waters, but at this retreat – favoured by Josiah Wedgwood and Lord Byron and John Ruskin – a line of motorbikes now glints reflections along the length of the town; bikers in expensive leathers sprawl on the walls. This is still a meeting place, a place of convergence, but it thrums to the sound of powerful engines.
A little further along the road from Matlock Bath is the huge red-brick and gritstone edifice of Masson Mill, squeezed between the rock face and the river, simultaneously brutal and elegant. Built in 1783, it’s a demonstrative expression of industrial progress. Driven at first by a single waterwheel, the mill drew its power from the Derwent alongside but its architecture suggests ambitions and influences far beyond the valley: the Italianate style – with a bell cote and a projecting exterior stairway – links it to a powerful cultural past. With its combination of stately European magnificence and practical efficiency, Masson Mill became the pattern for mills around Britain well into the nineteenth century. Now it is both a World Heritage Site and a shopping mall. Apparently it attracts almost half a million visitors a year, although the working textile museum – boasting the world’s largest collection of bobbins – is probably less of a draw than the designer boutiques. Certainly on a Saturday afternoon only a few weeks before Christmas, the car park is full even though the museum is closed for the season.
At Cromford, just half a mile further on, the mill is more discreet. It could easily be missed. The main road cuts between the industrial site and the village square, separating one from the other; many travellers pause only at the traffic lights on the A6 before moving on again towards Derby. There is a fleeting sense, perhaps, of well-made old buildings on either side, enough to attract a quick glance, but Derbyshire is full of well-made old buildings; many of its villages are pretty and substantial, with wells and walls and churches, stone cottages nestling against green hills. Why pay particular attention to this one?
Turning at a set of traffic lights, I wind downhill. The lane narrows by a wide gate, a heavy wall stacked above it; either side two round towers thrust out like turrets. It could be the entrance to a castle or a prison. But it’s the mill, its fortress-like presence suddenly imposing. The wall goes on, high and featureless, barricading the lane and creating closed, urban perspectives until quite suddenly, a few hundred yards further on, the prospect opens out: there’s a wooded hill, the river widening between grassy banks and meandering under a stone bridge. The geometric certainty of the mill buildings dissipates into open waste ground by the canal, a scruffy collection of low walls and ruins, a wide gravel pathway. A wedding is just finishing at the church further down the lane: the bride and groom are standing by the gate, shivering, the photography not quite accomplished. The guests are picking their way over the scrubland, tripping in high heels around the puddles and clutching thin shirts across their chests. Mallards approach them hopefully. The bells ring.
In 1771, during the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Cromford was like many other Derbyshire hamlets, a scattering of poor cottages whose inhabitants were dependent on farming or small-scale mining. What set it apart was its water. This is a place where Bonsall Brook gushes between rocky banks, fast and furious. It is also a place where natural and man-made water courses run together: as well as the brook, there is Cromford Sough, which took over thirty years to dig, draining the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lead mines deep in the hills, allowing the miners to work below the water table. It was said never to run dry and never to freeze.
To this place of constant streams came Richard Arkwright, a new breed of entrepreneur, an organiser, an inventor, a man of energy. He was thirty-nine years old and anxious to improve his small textile factory in Nottingham where the machinery was driven by horses. He was in search of something more reliable and efficient than exhausted animals, and at Cromford he found it. Water. In August 1771 he signed a lease to the land and to rights to the brook and the sough. In addition he bought Steeple Hall in the nearby village of Wirksworth and demolished it. The stone was transported to Cromford and by December the mill was built.
It’s not easy to reimagine Arkwright’s leap of faith. The connection between water and power has become an ordinary thing, an outmoded phenomenon. We’ve all learned about it at school, and we’ve all seen waterwheels. The idea of using water to drive machines has the sepia tint of heritage about it, a quaintness. But Arkwright’s vision was truly extraordinary and experimental. He was attempting to change the way in which the world operated, to drive modernity in new directions. When the mill at Cromford was complete – the world’s first water-powered cotton spinning mill – nothing of this kind had ever been seen before. It was hi-tech and high risk. As one stands now in the well-trodden yard, with its craft shops and interpretation panels, it requires an effort to appreciate this, an unremembering of the intervening years which have made this type of place familiar.
The mill building is five storeys high, each floor crammed with small, square windows. It has a certain brutal charm to it, but it might be considered ugly: the roof, flat and slight, seems out of proportion to the huge stone walls, an ill-fitting hat on a broad face. Arkwright, however, was unconcerned by architectural aesthetics. He was driven by a very practical, industrial vision and by 1775 his experiments with mechanisation had allowed him to take out a patent on ten types of machine for tackling many of the spinning processes, including carding and cleaning the cotton. The following year, he demolished an old corn mill on Bonsall Brook to make room for a second cotton mill, bigger than the first, seven storeys in height.
The industrialisation here took place with remarkable rapidity. Within a decade, Cromford was transformed from a nondescript hamlet into a world-leading centre of manufacturing and state-of-the-art mechanisation. Its landscape was altered beyond recognition, its water trussed and tamed, its old buildings demolished, improved and expanded. And all this activity, of course, required a change to the way people lived – and to the number of people who would call Cromford home. By the early 1770s, the first mill was employing 200 workers in twelve-hour shifts, carding and combing cotton during the day and spinning at night. When the second mill was opened in 1776, over 500 villagers celebrated with a parade, following a band to the new building where they were treated to cakes and ale. At all hours and on all days, Cromford was noisy and bustling, modern and anxious, a place of change and disruption where old habits were dislocated and new ones not yet formed: ‘The rural cot has given way to the lofty red mill and the grand houses of overseers; the stream perverted from its courses by sluices and aqueducts will no longer ripple and cascade,’ noted John Byng, 5th Viscount Torrington, when he visited. ‘Every rural sound is sunk in the clamours of the cotton works, and the simplest peasant is changed into an impudent mechanic.’1
To accommodate the workers who were part of this ambitious vision for Cromford, Arkwright created a village. Up the slope from the river, on North Street and Cromford Hill, he built rows of gritstone, three-storey cottages, each with a living room and bedroom and extra windows on the top floor to allow more light for framework knitters, who worked the yarn that was made at the mills. A chapel was constructed in 1777 and the following year the Black Dog Hotel (which has since been given the paler, less aggressive name of the Greyhound) was built in the market square, usefully accommodating a bank in the same building and designed to cater for the constant stream of business visitors. Finally, in 1790, Arkwright – now with a knighthood and in the exalted role of High Sheriff of Derbyshire – managed to secure the right to hold a weekly market on Saturdays, so reinforcing the village’s identity as a self-sufficient commercial centre. With the road running down one side, the marketplace linked Cromford to growing mercantile hubs: there were daily coaches to London, Birmingham, Sheffield and Nottingham. Occupying the flat land between the workers’ houses and the mills, it also buttressed the domestic streets from the blatantly industrial activity near the river. Arkwright himself lived at Rock House, overlooking his original mill, although in 1788 he purchased a nearby estate from Florence Nightingale’s father for £20,000 and began work on the creation of a grander residence which he named Willersley Castle.
The housing for the workers here at Cromford was the first planned industrial housing in Derbyshire, and some of the earliest in the country. Walking between the terraces, you quickly become aware how reminiscent the rows of cottages are of the mills: the high walls and small windows, the low, flat roofs, the blank stone frontages all recall the much larger buildings a few hundred yards down the hill. Today, the doors and windows are all painted to match each other, a tasteful shade of pale blue. Just at the end of the row, on the final door, someone has hung a small red Christmas wreath, a sharp moment of colour, but apart from this it becomes difficult to see where one cottage ends and the next begins: the lines of windows run into each other, and there is a single unbroken view, closed off at the end of the street by a pair of old yews and, beyond this, by the primary school. Built later than the cottages, in 1832, it’s a low line of buildings around a square courtyard: with its large arched windows and tended gardens, it has a slightly ecclesiastical air, like a cathedral close or church almshouses.
The houses on North Street are featureless mill cottages constructed in a monolithic, undifferentiated block, successfully concealing their internal spaces behind the impersonal symmetry and simplicity of the facade. There is nothing very distinctive about them: there are similar rows in other Derbyshire and Yorkshire towns, with the same upper-storey windows, narrow doors and neat, undecorated stone. They are resolutely plain, sharing something in common with the modernist, even brutalist, architecture which shaped cities during the 1960s and ’70s. I wonder what on earth I can say about them. Apart from its status as such an early planned village, there seems little to remark on here at Cromford. It doesn’t seem a very good start for a book.
But something happens around the corner at the far end of the street, just beyond the yews, where the village school is fenced off with black metal railings and set behind small neat lawns. As you turn down between the school and the end of North Street, back in the direction of the mill, the view changes. A different Cromford is revealed, untidy and evocative. This is the back of the 1776–7 mill cottages. The top windows which are so evident on the front elevations have been blocked in here; low extensions have been added to provide space for toilets and kitchens, modern conveniences. But what is most striking is the view of the gardens, a jumble of tiny lawns and allotments, paths and pigsties, precarious satellite dishes, washing lines strung across small spaces, the ubiquitous trampoline enclosed in netting. And in this patchwork of land confined between houses and hidden from easy viewing, I begin to glimpse some of the contradictions of a place like Cromford, some of the tensions and complications, the things that make it interesting. Here, where Arkwright’s cottages turn their blind backs on his mills, there is a way of connecting with the people who lived in these houses, growing food and keeping animals, bringing memories and habits from generations of country living to this new environment. Faced with a completely new way of life, forced into the factories and cut off from the collective consciousness of the past, the villagers at Cromford tended little squares of land as a way of improving practical conditions and rooting themselves in a different world. Today, despite years of transition and advance – despite the enormous impact of the Industrial Revolution – it’s this evidence of hope and family, of idiosyncrasy and brief life, which remains.
The repercussions of the Industrial Revolution were merciless and abrupt. It seems obvious, but nonetheless it’s worth remembering: the world was being quickly and irrevocably transformed, both physically and philosophically. And of course this was not just a process of technical invention, scientific discovery and capitalist enterprise – it was an evolution in the way ordinary people lived. On Friday 7 June 1776 a lead miner from Cromford called Anthony Coates hanged himself in one of the buildings hunkered over the mineshaft at Wirksworth, a market town around two miles distant, where the land rises away from the Derwent Valley. He was forty-two years old and married with three children. The local press attempted to explain the circumstances of his suicide: the Nottingham Journal suggested that he had been reckless with the family finances, having ‘sold three Cows, by which his Wife maintained the Family, and ’tis suppos’d he went to Manchester Races, (and) lost all the money’; another newspaper also claimed gambling was at the root of the tragedy, but reported that the money had been lost at Newmarket. The detail of the affair seems unimportant. What is important is that physical changes at Cromford were impacting on individual lives. Five years after the building of the mill, the families who for generations had made their money from lead mining in the area were no longer flourishing – attention and prosperity had shifted to a new factory system of spinning cotton, to Arkwright’s mill and the village surrounding it. Those who were left behind, bound to the old ways of life, were vulnerable and desperate. Taking a walk around Cromford, pausing within the symmetrical grasp of the terraces, I am brought face to face with evidence of what was happening 250 years ago, and its far-reaching effects.
These few cottages – Richard Arkwright’s speculative village – established a pattern which was to recur throughout the country and the following century. Perhaps the best-known example of an early industrial village is at New Lanark Mills in Scotland, which sprang directly from the Cromford model. In 1784 Richard Arkwright was asked to travel north to view the Falls of Clyde with another entrepreneur called David Dale. It was a difficult journey, leaving Glasgow on poor roads and entering deep into the isolated and marshy Clyde Valley. But it was a spectacular place. By the early nineteenth century, as roads improved, it would become a major tourist attraction, a popular stopping point on the route from the Lake District to the Trossachs: William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and J. M. W. Turner were among those who came to admire the landscape.
Of a practical turn of mind, however, Arkwright was impressed less by the aesthetic impact of the scene than by its natural resources, particularly the rapid flow of water and its potential for providing reliable power. At Bonnington, about two miles upstream of Lanark, the River Clyde changes from a broad, placid river; it rushes through a reddish sandstone gorge, cascading in a series of waterfalls or ‘linns’. Having seen the site, Arkwright immediately agreed to partner Dale in an effort to establish cotton mills there, providing technical expertise and training suitable men while Dale undertook the building work. The partnership proved short-lived: after just over a year the agreement was dissolved. But Arkwright had already left his mark, both in the systems employed in production and in the architectural character of the site which included both workers’ housing and the projecting stair bays and Palladian windows which are a feature of Masson Mill.
Elsewhere, too, Arkwright was in demand as a kind of investor-consultant. At Stanley Mill on the River Tay near Perth, he entered into another brief partnership with George Dempster, building a typical first-generation Arkwright-style mill with a factory village attached. Greg’s Mill at Styal in Cheshire – very close to the modern megalith of Manchester Airport – was constructed in 1784 to house Arkwright’s water frames, and a nascent village was established close by. At first this was little more than an apprentice house to accommodate the pauper children who provided the bulk of the workforce, but by 1820 a more recognisable settlement had been developed, including a school and a chapel.
After Arkwright’s departure from New Lanark, Dale continued to expand, quickly building four mills and attracting a population of over 1,500 workers, including almost 500 children brought in from Glasgow and Edinburgh workhouses – who were given food and lodging but no wages – and a large number of families from Skye and the Highlands who had been shipwrecked off the west coast of Scotland shortly after setting sail for a new life in America. Dale was, on the whole, a benevolent employer and the factory flourished, but living and working conditions were still difficult: shifts were long; most families lived in one room in large tenement blocks with little sanitation; theft and drunkenness were commonplace.
It was the arrival of Robert Owen, a Welshman working as a mill manager at Chorlton Twist Mills in Manchester, that was to transform New Lanark into a lauded model of industrial welfare and housing. Owen came from Newtown in the upper Severn Valley, a self-contained community that relied on the woollen industry. Then, as today, this was a pleasant but isolated country town with few opportunities for the budding entrepreneur; by his late teens Owen had completed a draper’s apprenticeship at Stamford in Lincolnshire and moved on to London, trying his hand as a haberdasher’s assistant. By 1788, at the age of seventeen, he had moved on again, working for Sattersfield & Co., a Manchester silk merchant, pandering to the fashions of the rapidly expanding middle classes. Owen seems to have had an eye for a trend and a profit. Despite his experience in wool and silk it was cotton which struck him as the fabric of the moment and perhaps the future. He decided to invest in the making of spinning machinery and to concentrate his efforts in the burgeoning cotton mills. By the age of twenty-one he had been appointed manager of Bank Top Mill in Manchester, where he was responsible for 500 workers, as well as another Arkwright-style factory at Northwich in Cheshire. His salary was an impressive £300 a year. Just three years later, having earned a reputation for efficiency and innovation, he went to work for the Chorlton Twist Company, a much larger operation with London partners and international trade connections.
Owen’s rapid rise through the ranks is a clear indication of his taste for business and networking, his entrepreneurial talent and his sheer ambition. The site at New Lanark seemed to offer him everything he needed to nurture these qualities to the full – in September 1799, he married Dale’s eldest daughter, Caroline, and invested £60,000 in his new father-in-law’s business, becoming the managing partner a few months later, on 1 January 1800. He immediately turned his attention to improving the commercial efficiency of the mills – and to developing the workforce housing into a more recognisable village community. Over the next twenty years he provided schooling, recreation and a general store where workers could buy basic goods at close to cost price and where the sale of alcohol could be monitored, creating the kind of company village which would act as a prototype for many that came afterwards.
Owen’s progress was apparently unstoppable and his confidence unshakeable: when his business partners voiced unease at the extra expense incurred by what they viewed as unnecessary welfare expenditure, he simply bought them out and relaunched the business with new investors. In 1813 he began to publish evangelical essays in which he expanded his philosophies to his fellow businessmen, to the political elite and ‘to the dispassionate and patient investigation and decision of those individuals of every rank and class and denomination of society, who have become in some degree conscious of the errors in which they exist’. These essays were ambitiously titled ‘A New View of Society’ and were couched in the language of Enlightenment conviction, expressing confidence that truth would ultimately make itself known, errors would be recognised and lasting change would result.
In particular, Owen’s essays attempted to articulate the value of human life and suggest limits for the expansion of the factory system. On the subject of ‘Man and Machine’, for example, he wrote with fervour:
Many of you have long experienced in your manufacturing operations the advantages of substantial, well-contrived, and well-executed machinery.
Experience has also shown you the difference of the results between mechanism which is neat, clean, well arranged, and always in a high state of repair; and that which is allowed to be dirty, in disorder, and without the means of preventing unnecessary friction, and which therefore becomes, and works, much out of repair.
In the first case the whole economy and management are good, every operation proceeds with ease, order, and success. In the last, the reverse must follow, and dissatisfaction among all the agents and instrument interested or occupied in the general process, which cannot fail to create great loss.
If, then, due care as to the state of your inanimate machines can produce such beneficial results, what may not be expected if you devote equal attention to your vital machines, which are far more wonderfully constructed?2
In the space of just a couple of years, Owen poured out his vision into four essays, which became increasingly Utopian in tone, anticipating the coming of a better age that would see his ideas put into practice. He urged the government to intervene to counter rising levels of poverty and unemployment, and he set out proposals for new self-contained communities to be established by philanthropists, parishes or the state.
In many ways, these communities were an extension of the idea of the model village. Based on his experience at New Lanark, Owen proposed settlements of between 300 and 2,000 people on land of between 1,000 and 1,500 acres. These ‘townships’ would be largely agricultural in nature, combining a nostalgia for a pre-industrial lifestyle with a strict form of communism which made no concession to individual needs or desires: work, machinery and wages would be shared equally, with each person over the age of fifteen being given ‘according to his needs’; the entire community would live in one large, square building, with public kitchens and mess rooms; children under three years of age were to be taken into communal care while older children would be placed in dormitories and allowed only occasional parental visits.
Owen’s vision took the basic outline of the model village to its extreme, removing it from its new industrial context to a rural setting that rooted it in an idealised past and which isolated the inhabitants so thoroughly that every aspect of their lives could be planned and managed. His proposal suggests both a remarkable confidence in the pioneering social engineering he was trying out at New Lanark and a distrust of the industrial lifestyle which underpinned it. It had its roots in the traditional discourse around the idea of Utopia, the perfect place, a place of order and harmony where the beauty of the architecture reflected the collective happiness of the community.
Drawing on Plato, who described the perfect city state, the term ‘Utopia’ was first explored by Thomas More in 1516. His work attracted immediate attention and the Utopian ideal continued to intrigue and inspire philosophers and politicians over the following centuries: in the seventeenth century, Johann Valentin Andreae developed his version in Christianopolis (1619) and Francis Bacon re-examined the marvellous mythical city of Atlantis to create his vision for a better world in New Atlantis (1627). By the mid-eighteenth century, the concept was firmly embedded in social and literary culture: David Hume was discussing the ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ in his Political Discourses (1752) and Samuel Johnson was setting his moral tale of happiness, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, in a mythical Utopian valley.
Owen’s ambitions sit neatly within this tradition but rather than develop one large perfect metropolis, his Utopian future was organised on a system of smaller settlements. He was confident that these communities would become so widespread and active that in time they would merge into larger ‘federatively united’ associations, creating ‘circles of tens, hundreds and thousands’ of townships across the country. In this way the villages would, he claimed, ‘be found capable of combining within themselves all the advantages that city and country residence now afford, without any of the numerous inconveniences and evils which necessarily attach to both those modes of society’.3
Owen’s revolutionary ideas for a scheme of linked villages were never tested: none of the planned settlements was ever built and the village at New Lanark was the closest he came to trying out his vision on the ground. But his writings did attract attention, giving him a platform on the national stage to address some of the major political concerns of the late eighteenth century: popular education, the impact of the factory system, the condition of the working class, Poor Law reform and economic regeneration. ‘My four essays … and my practice at New Lanark had made me well known among the leading men,’ he boasted.4
Not all the attention was welcome, however. Many of Owen’s suggestions were quickly rejected, and even ridiculed. Critics pointed out that the ideas were not, in fact, as new as he liked to claim: ‘It may be true but it is not new,’ wrote William Hazlitt. ‘… it is as old as the royal borough of Lanark; or as the county of Lanark itself … as the Utopia of Thomas More, as the Republic of Plato.’5 In addition, Owen’s humble background and rapid rise to riches meant that many influential commentators simply regarded him as a charlatan and a chancer, speculative and scheming. They pointed to the enormous sums he was spending on what, they claimed, amounted to propaganda campaigns and self-promotion.
More controversial still was Owen’s insistence that the townships should be free of religion. His conviction that in his Utopia there ‘would be no public worship – no avowed recognition of God, no belief of responsibility to a higher tribunal than man’s’ drew the wrath of the Established Church and ensured violent opposition to his writing from the powerful Anglican hierarchy. Indeed, even many Nonconformists found Owen’s anti-religious stance difficult to stomach: William Allen, a Quaker and one of the early partners at New Lanark, complained after the publication of ‘A New View of Society’ that Owen was promoting ‘a manufactory of infidels’.6
Undaunted, Owen continued to spread the word, taking his message to Europe in 1818. A few years later, in 1822–3, he undertook a lengthy tour of Ireland, visiting Limerick and Clare and holding a series of public meetings in Dublin in an attempt to persuade the government to act as agent for his proposed reforms. But again, the message was not well received – disastrously, his ideas apparently ‘caused a feeling of horror’ among Irish landowners and manufacturers.7 Typically, Owen brushed off such criticism and continued to articulate his vision with unabashed enthusiasm. If anything, the more people objected, the more determined he became – and the more extreme his blueprint for the ideal village.
Having failed to convert European minds to his most radical concept for a model settlement, Owen turned to America. In 1825, in an energetic middle age, he purchased the town of Harmony in Indiana, USA, a settlement along the Washbash River established by a Christian sect known as the Harmony Society. He broke up his family, leaving his wife and two daughters in Scotland and taking his four sons and another daughter across the Atlantic with the intention of establishing a community based on his principles of social reform, the ultimate expression of the ideal of the self-sustaining village which he had nurtured at New Lanark.
Owen’s American dream was quickly over. The experiment proved chaotic and unworkable and just days after his arrival in March 1825 he was already confiding uncharacteristic uncertainties to his diary: ‘I doubt whether those who have been comfortable and content in their old mode of life, will find an increase of enjoyment when they come here. How long it will require to accustom themselves to their new mode of living, I am unable to determine.’ His son Robert was harsher still in his assessment of the scheme, which, he said, was an impossible muddle: ‘a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in’.8
The town soon became overcrowded. It lacked sufficient housing, and there was a shortage of skilled craftsmen and labourers. The production of crops and materials was too poor to allow for self-sufficiency and there was little experienced supervision or management: Owen himself spent only a few months in residence. The community struggled on for a couple of years but finally disbanded into a series of smaller, squabbling groups in 1827, dissolving in constant quarrels over ownership in 1829. It was not possible, it appeared, to take the planned settlements of Cromford and New Lanark as archetypes for anything more ambitious and adventurous; it seemed as though the strong paternalistic direction of an Arkwright or Owen was the essential ingredient in holding together the disparate interests of a working community and shaping a village.
At New Lanark, Owen’s character certainly loomed large. He considered the mills and village to be a very personal experiment: as his work attracted more and more attention he attempted to rewrite the early history of the project, taking complete credit for the development of the site, giving no mention to Arkwright’s influence and reducing Dale’s role to little more than an incidental footnote. In particular, Owen increasingly articulated the value of his experiment as a potential bulwark against a dangerous rising tide of working-class defiance and the uncertainties of international upheaval and manoeuvring, which alarmed his allies and threatened the growth of business. Moving to London to work on his essays in 1812–14, Owen arrived in a volatile city buzzing with news of Wellington’s victories, Napoleon’s progress, the war in the United States and a series of political and economic crises at home. He mixed with politicians and intellectuals, reformers and philanthropists, refining his ideas of the model village and what it might achieve. A mark of the mixture of influences – and the ambiguity of Owen’s position – can be seen in the dedication of his first essay of 1816 which was addressed to both William Wilberforce – an Evangelical Christian MP, leading reformer and anti-slavery campaigner – and the Prince Regent – a hardline conservative, even reactionary, and a vociferous opponent of political reform.
In Europe the effects of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s subsequent rise to power were being strongly felt: the dissemination of revolutionary ideas was inspiring widespread social and political protest while opposition to Napoleon’s expansionist policies was creating unrest and financial hardship. By 1812, when Owen was beginning his series of essays, Britain was not only deeply involved in the European arena but had also been drawn into direct conflict with the United States, waging war at sea, fighting battles on the difficult American–Canadian border and attacking the south and Gulf coasts of the US in a number of invasions. Inevitably, the economy suffered, but at particular risk was the cotton trade which relied on raw materials from the US as well as the export market it provided. At the same time, to make matters worse, domestic protest was also targeting the cotton industry: the years 1812–13 saw the Luddite movement at its most active, breaking into mills and wrecking machinery in an attempt to protect jobs.
The government’s response to these multiple challenges was to suppress discontent as quickly and effectively as it could. Legislation was pushed through to prevent organised protest: the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, for example, were put in place by Pitt’s government to counter the threat of a workers’ strike; following the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, the ‘Six Acts’ clamped down yet more repressively on the right to assemble and protest. Local militia were formed in many areas; articles in the press were censored. Anyone regarded as a radical or troublemaker was vigorously prosecuted. Owen’s more personal response to such upheaval was to re-emphasise the role of the village. As industrial contexts became more uncertain and old habits more widely disrupted, he spoke up for the New Lanark-type settlement as a means of social engineering, asserting control and enforcing conformity.
Little of Owen’s writing about politics, education, law and social order was new – but the simultaneous development of the village at New Lanark was the first time many of the ideas had been seen in practice. It was the settlement, rather than the rhetoric of A New View of Society, which demonstrated how economic progress and political change could be managed by applying practical solutions to the major problems of the period: poverty, poor housing, diet and health, and lack of educational opportunity. In the same year as Owen’s essays were published in book form (1816), he opened at New Lanark an Institute for the Formation of Character, a direct practical expression of his belief in ‘environmentalism’ – that is, that character was not determined by divine creation nor inherent in race or class but was instead a product of the environment in which people grew up and worked. If he was able to prove this at New Lanark, then the experiment would have significant implications for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century planning and reform: if people were malleable and could be shaped by their surroundings, then changing those surroundings could ultimately produce an ordered and submissive workforce.
At the opening of the Institute on New Year’s Day 1816, Owen gave a lengthy speech to 1,200 gathered villagers: ‘It must be evident to those who have been in the practice of observing children with attention,’ he said, ‘that much of good or evil is taught to or acquired by a child at a very early period of its life; that much of temper or disposition is correctly or incorrectly formed before he attains his second year.’ It was clear, then, that children were to be the focus of the new Institute – although technically separate from the school, it was to act as a school by another name. But the curriculum consisted of more than the usual three Rs. Alongside an elementary education in literacy and numeracy, geography and history, the children received dance and singing lessons, ‘standing up 70 couples a time in the dancing room’ and forming harmony choirs of over 200; they also took part in regular military-style drills ‘with precision equal, as many officers stated, to some regiments of the line’; conformity was further enforced by a rather remarkable uniform, a ‘beautiful dress of tartan cloth, fashioned in its make after the form of a Roman toga’.9 Evening classes, balls, lectures and concerts were held in the Institute for adults.
In many ways, the Institute provided a progressive education, and the emphasis on teaching children rather than making them labour in the mills was a step forward in improving conditions. The example at New Lanark, along with Owen’s campaigning, proved influential in forcing the government to act on child welfare although it was a further three years until the 1819 Cotton Mills and Factories Act put legal limits on the employment of those under sixteen years of age and it was 1833 before a modest burden of education provision was placed on factory owners. In addition, difficulties in enforcing the law meant that much was still left up to individual factory owners and managers: many mills continued to force workers, including children, into long hours in poor conditions in the search for profit.
For all the attention paid to working families, however, Owen’s brand of rationality and progress was also clearly deployed to his own pragmatic, commercial ends. The mill was at the heart of a new type of far-reaching global capitalism which linked Britain to the New World and beyond, to an international marketplace that relied on both the worst inequalities of the slave-laboured cotton plantation and the excitement of a burgeoning consumerism. The village at New Lanark, despite its modest size, was an important part of this worldwide trade, a small but not insignificant cog in the growing mechanism of commercial success. The activities on offer to residents here were designed to make the business operate smoothly. The Institute was intended to produce well-trained, tractable and amenable workers, shaping them from infancy so that the mills could be harmoniously run. It provided a way of keeping an eye on future generations and weeding out troublemakers at an early age, with implications not only for productivity at New Lanark but for the success of the much larger global enterprise in which the village was invested.
Even the architecture of the site reinforced notions of civil obedience. If you take a walk around the mills and village, what becomes evident is how the design allows for supervision and control: Robert Owen’s house stands centrally between the workers’ housing and the mill buildings, well placed for the observation of movement to and fro; in the mill buildings themselves, large open-plan spaces act both to accommodate new forms of cotton-working machinery and to facilitate easy observation of the workforce; the Institute sits just the other side of the mill race, visible from both Owen’s house and the mill; the yard in front of it, where military exercises took place, can be seen from all sides. This is a place built to discourage individualism, disobedience and secrecy; it’s a village where privacy is not accounted for, or considered necessary. Its physical structure perfectly expresses the gap between those being watched and those doing the watching.
The New Lanark village would provide, Owen claimed, ‘a model and example to the manufacturing community’ with implications for the entire country: ‘Without some essential change in the formation of their [the workers’] characters,’ he warned in a Statement Regarding New Lanark