A New View of Society
The four essays in which the manager of the New Lanark cotton mills set out his doctrine that character is formed for the individual, not by him, so that any community can be given any character by the right circumstances, training and education. Owen describes how he reformed the village and its mills, plans his Institution for the Formation of Character and an infant school, and calls on government for national education, poor relief through public work and an end to the State lottery. Engels counted Owen among the great utopian socialists.
- Edition
- Everyman’s Library no. 799, A New View of Society and Other Writings (London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927), main text only: the four Essays on the Formation of Character with their dedications, in the revised text of Owen’s later editions, and the Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark (1816). Words voted from seven archive.org scans of the Everyman plates; Owen’s footnotes, printed inline there, restored as notes.
- Source
- Internet Archive
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Contents
- Dedications 21 min 11
Four dedications and addresses, gathered at the front of the later editions. The first, to William Wilberforce, praises his freedom from sect and party and asks his help in bringing Owen’s principles into legislation. The second, to the British public, asks readers to test those principles against every known fact. The third, to the superintendents of manufactories, argues that care for “living machines” pays as well as care for inanimate ones, promising returns of fifty to a hundred per cent. The fourth, to the Prince Regent, offers the essays as the outline of a preventive Plan of Government that will remove misery without public disorder.
- I First Essay 21 min 10
Owen states his principle: any general character, from the best to the worst, can be given to any community by proper means, and those means lie with the people who govern. The poor majority are trained into crime and then punished for it; the rest are taught principles they do not practise. The time is ripe: Napoleon’s career has exposed selfish ambition, and Bell and Lancaster have shown what education can do. The happiness of self, rightly understood, requires the happiness of all. The change can come without revolution, and governments should set up national plans for forming character from infancy.
- II Second Essay: The Principles of the Former Essay Continued, and Applied in Part to Practice 46 min 14
Owen draws the consequences: no one is to blame for a character formed for him, so crime should be prevented, not punished, and judges born in St. Giles’s would have been the condemned. He then tells the story of New Lanark: David Dale’s mills and pauper apprentices, the demoralised village, and how a stranger from Manchester (Owen himself) overcame its distrust and reduced theft, drunkenness and sectarian quarrels by prevention and kindness, opened a store selling at cost, kept children under ten out of the mills and schooled them. He ends by proposing a national system for forming character and public employment for the surplus working classes.
- III Third Essay: The Principles of the Former Essays Applied to a Particular Situation 1 h 4 min 9
Owen describes the New Institution at New Lanark: a playground and infant school taking children as soon as they can walk, where each must make his companions happy; a school teaching reading with understanding, facts and arithmetic; evening lectures and dancing for adults; a church teaching a creed of “fundamental facts” about human nature; drill for boys; and a savings scheme for old age. At the centre is the claim that character is always formed for him, never by him, and that his will has no power over his opinions. The plans are submitted to readers free of the prejudices of commerce, law, party and sect.
- IV Fourth Essay: The Principles of the Former Essays Applied to Government 1 h 13 min 24
Owen applies his principle that character is formed by circumstances to the government of Britain. Since the State can train its people to any character, its first duty is a national system of education. He proposes reforms to be introduced gradually and without loss to anyone: dropping religious tests from the Church, taxing spirits and closing gin shops, ending the State lottery, and undermining the Poor Laws. He criticises the schemes of Bell, Lancaster and Whitbread, outlines an Act for national schools and teacher training, and asks for statistics of labour and public works, chiefly roads, for the unemployed, rejecting Malthus's checks on population.
- An Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark 1 h 15 min 18
Owen's speech to the villagers at the opening of the Institution for the Formation of Character on 1 January 1816. He describes the infant school, day schools, evening classes and recreation the building will house, and its four aims: the good of the village, the neighbourhood, Britain and the world. He traces all wickedness to the ignorance of past generations, sets out the false principles on which society rests and the facts that refute them, and attacks religious dogma. He promises a coming “Millennium” and new communities, while urging his hearers to obey the existing laws until change comes peacefully.