THE SPECTATOR REVIEWABOOKS
Patrick Cosgrave on George Meredith Reviews by Christopher Booker, Enoch Powell, Simon Raven and Auberon Waugh
Charles Wilson on Robert Owen
Myth, as every comprehensive schoolboy knows, is more important than reality, especially in social history. Robert Owen has long been an integral part of the myth of English socialism. In some sense both these books* extend and refine the myth. For the prime source of Owenite myth is the autobiography, with its odd mixture of Utopianism, business acumen and smug self-congratulation. To this, however, Mr Butt has added a valuable critical introduc tion correcting most of the more serious distortions introduced by the author himself while also defending him against some of the ex parte criticisms of his opponents.
Professor Pollard and Mr Salt have collected a learned team of specialists to extend the work of earlier biographers like Podmore and G. D. H. Cole, and historians like W. H. Chaloner who have already modified and deflated Owen's eloquent account of his own accomplishments. Apart from some predictably pious genuflections and dutiful tributes which occasionally smack more of the Wayside Pulpit than of scholarship, this is a readable and academically respectable addition to Oweniana.
Owen (as Mr Butt remarks) became a legend in his own lifetime. He was pre-eminently the poor boy who made good and was therefore dear to the hearts of the middle classes. When he turned to social and educational reform, he gained allies and admirers amongst the aristocracy, working-class politi cians and humanitarians. But these gains were at the expense of his original reputation which was torn to shreds during his emergence as a full-blown pantheist, sceptic, and socialist-communist. Hence the apparent contradictions in the character which begin to tumble out of these two books. Owen was the Utopian who worked everything out in £ s d, thus fathering the remotest schemes of social improvement on the left while at the same time stimulating on the right the ideas and activities of practical reofrmers like the Salts and Peases as well, later, as the Cadburys. William Lever and other enlightened despots of private industry who built model villages replete with schools, libraries and houses to redeem the condition of the new industrial working class. Likewise (as Margaret Cole observes in her essay), Owen's own character flatly denies his doctrine that men's characters are shaped wholly and exclusively by their social enviroment.
Owen was the embodiment of humility and kindliness, yet he found it easier (like many others of a fanatical turn of philanthropism) to confer these gifts on his inferiors than on his equals. The autobiography is uncomfortably anxious to show him scoring sharply off the alltoo-numerous partners and colleagues with whom he quarrelled. The ' communities ' which he and his followers tried to establish as harbingers of a new society all failed, not least because (as R. G. Garnett writes in his essay on them) Owen "was not really interested in community development, nor was he at least capable of cooperation." He was in fact a paternalist, an individualist and an autocrat and a firm believer in oligarchical benevolence. Hence his impatience with all forms of improvement sought through parliamentary reform. Hence his love of a lord (noble approval always seemed necessary to set the seal on any Owenite proposal), his indulgence of bishops and archbishops, in spite of his growing disapproval of organised Christianity, and his admiration for Cavaignac, Louis Napoleon, the Prince Regent and the Emperor of Russia. Owen remained at heart the selfmade-man. The Great Exhibition made an irresistible appeal to the old technological Adam in him; as an octogenarian he was swift to see the millennium crystallising in the Crystal Palace.
Economic historians will continue to argue over Owen's claims to be a business genius. Was he? Or did his brand of entrepreneurship consist of floating out to fish on a high and profitable tide? Of getting in while the going was good and getting out before it went bad? Here again the truth still has to be finally sifted from fiction. More than one writer here suggests that the social experiments of New Lanark are better attested than its business activities. Up to a point this is true : but the precise contribu tion of Owen to educational theory and progress also remains obscure. Mr Silver's essay only underlines the fragmentary nature of the evidence in this respect when he quotes the description by George Combe (a phrenologist!) of the romping, dancing, noisy, happy children at New Lanark in 1820. It is often said that Owen was against discipline in education. Yet Mr Butt's description of the New Lanark school is hardly one that would commend its system to those modern permissivists who seem to regard Owen as their original : "A sense of belonging to the community was instilled into the children by uniform dress, drill, community singing and physical culture." This sounds more like Madchen in Uniform than a Hampstead comprehensive.
It is difficult to believe that Owen, so autocratic in business and politics, was as ' advanced ' in educational theory and practice as is sometimes supposed. Engels was plainly unjust (as he often was in dealing with English conditions) when he accused Owen of proceeding "with great injustice towards the proletariat." But he was on firmer ground when he criticised him (along with other English socialists) of being too "dogmatic," too abstract, too metaphysical, too little conscious of the need for a political strategy and (above all) too unsuccessful.
In a scintillating essay on 'Owen's Mind and Methods' — full of keen judgment and ironic wit and far the best thing in the Pollard-Salt collection — Margaret Cole asks where Owen fits into history, noting that the Webbs and E. P. Thompson fail to fit him in anywhere, that Leslie Stephen rather unhelpfully found him to be "one of those bores who are the salt of the earth" and that G. D. H. Cole, though sympathetic, rated him "a little mad." Her own conclusion is that Owen was like a fine motor-car with a "flaw which causes the engine to race wildly so that it makes a great noise, while the car refuses to move." This is perceptive, though I suspect that it sounds less generous than it is meant to. For whatever his defects, Owen has become central to the socialist myth not only in England but also elsewhere. A great grand-daughter of Owen arriving for the ancestral 0 Be Joyful earlier this month was reported as saying, "In Asia Robert Owen is considered a prophet in the same way as Confucius is." In this she was perhaps nearer the mark than Mr Butt, who compares him to Gandhi (though admitting that he founded a school not a party). He certainly resembled Confucius in that the orthodox version of his life is filled with inaccuracies and legends invented by the prophet and his followers to fill in the gaps and improve on the not always attractive truth. Owen became in his own lifetime and since his death not merely a legend but a powerful guru, with (as Mr Butt points out) a remarkable gift for hypnotising his audience. Neither his ideas nor his practices were in the least unique or original. He was exaggerated, unpractical, tiresome, self-opinionated, irritating — yet engaging (" Why should we ever irritate?" he asks significantly in one essay). If he had never existed, socialism would have had to invent him. Indeed, it is clear that Owen is up to a point an invention. Much of the fascination of the Prophet of the Poor as an object of popular interest (like much socalled Shakespearian scholarship, hagiography and New Testament criticism) derives not from the evidence but from the lack of it. His power derives in considerable measure from his ability to puzzle and confuse. A millennialist in an age of millennialism, he was naturally attracted to the US, then as now the natural mecca for millennialists. The mid-Victorian encyclopaedia which sandwiched him between the Shakers and the Mormons was not far wrong. It was in harmony with Harmony Hall that its creator should have ended his days consulting (through American mediums) with Franklin and the Duke of Wellington, keeping up with the peerage to the last. Of that age of cranks of genius he was the most genial and entertaining. He deserves to be remembered.
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