[This piece was written in October, 2003. The text vanished, however, only to be relocated and reassembled today.]
The first view one gets of New Lanark, arriving as a tourist either by car or by coach, is from above as one strolls down the steep path that takes you from the parking lot into its center. The impression is awesome, as Robert Owen must have hoped it would be. The single gaze takes in the whole industrial village, which is thus confined and manageable, while the buildings are of such magnitude that they seem to stretch beyond the ken of the gazer. The immediate effect is to conjure up both the possibilities and impossibilities of Utopia, a self-contained world that seems impervious to the raging conflicts of class, race and gender going on beyond the valley, but which necessarily accompany the new arrivals as they stroll downward.
There is a nice comment William Morris is supposed to have made after reading Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, that were he to be conscripted into one of Bellamy’s utopian communities he would lie on his back and start kicking.[1] But, Robert Owen’s version of utopia, at first glance, seems rather more appealing than Bellamy’s, and one can imagine that were William Morris to have found himself in New Lanark at the beginning of the 19th century working in one of Owen’s cotton mills, he would have lain on his back and started screaming had someone forced him to leave, to go and work at another cotton mill. This sense of Owen’s utopian achievement is readily reproduced in The New Lanark Conservation Trust’s restoration of the industrial village.
How came I to be trudging down this footpath, family in tow? I had not been hit on the head. I had not taken a draught of a drug to cure my neurasthenia. Nor was I dreaming. We were merely tourists making our way up from England towards the west of Scotland, with our ultimate destination, the island of Jura, where we planned to stay in a converted “Wee-Free” church and walk, weather permitting, along the Paps. But we had taken a small diversion off the A74 for a reason beyond the fact that we, the parents at least, are trained labor historians.
About 180 years ago, my great-great-great-grandfather, one Dr. Anthony Todd Thomson, had taken his new bride on a tour of the Highlands. His wife, Mrs. Katherine Byerley Thomson, who would go on to be a historian of some renown during her day and be quickly forgotten afterwards, was introduced by her husband to the smart set of Edinburgh before driving through the newly cleared Highlands, reciting as they went James Thomson’s The Seasons (a volume of which Anthony would later edit and publish), and visiting almost every spot of significance to Walter Scott, who seems to have been the major influence on the young bride’s later writings. All the details of this trip were described by Anthony Todd Thomson in an unpublished journal of the tour, a typed transcript of which is in my possession.
Descending from the Highlands, and after visiting Glasgow briefly, the Thomsons traveled south into Lanarkshire, on a circuitous route back to Edinburgh, where they would catch their steam packet back to England. Stopping in Lanark, Thomson, who had been closely connected with the contributors to the Edinburgh Review during his days at Edinburgh University medical school, and so was of a liberal persuasion, wanted to visit Robert Owen’s mills nearby and learn more about the New Lanark “experiment.” He sent a letter from his hotel in Lanark to Owen and was invited to have tea, after visiting the nearby waterfalls.
When our own small 21st century party had reached the bottom of the footpath, we turned the corner onto the road from Lanark that the inhabitants of New Lanark now use to drive to their residences, and which would have brought Thomson down to the village. On the left, the row of tenements that housed the laborers when the mill was in use was visible. These have now been restored for use by some of the town dwellers, many of them local craftsmen, others of them workers in the New Lanark museums, and still others commuters to nearby towns and cities.
Across the road, in front of and overlooking the mills, we saw the mill owner’s and manager’s house. This is perhaps most noticeable for its relative modesty, and for the fact that it is in the heart of the town. Owen had possibly read enough of Jeremy Bentham to know that in order for his utopia to work successfully he would need to be in a position to keep town dwellers under surveillance both when they toiled and when they rested. Unlike the mill owners in other situations (one thinks of the homes of “robber barons” in Holyoke, Massachusetts, for example), Owen did not want merely to look down on his mills from afar and keep his distance from the lower orders. Instead, the visitor senses from the proximity of this dwelling to those of the workers (and this is emphasized in the museum’s literature about the mill owner) that he felt a great, almost paternal, commitment to his workers.
However, this building was Owen’s residence only in his earlier days as manager of the mills, when the owner lived away from the town. By the time that Thomson visited in 1823, Owen was also living half a mile away at Braxfield. Thomson’s account of his meeting with Owen and his family was not altogether flattering:
We were introduced into the drawing room to Mrs. Owen and her daughters; Mr. Owen and his sons, with a foreign Count, whose name I could not ascertain, not having yet left the dining room. Mrs. Owen is a little woman, with plain features and very simple unaffected manners. She received us with an open frankness, which, instantly, shewed that her welcome was sincere, and not merely the result of habitual politeness. Her conversation was like herself, simple and commonplace; but it displayed her desire to entertain us and to remove that reserve, which every stranger is apt to feel on a first introduction. In a few minutes Mr. Owen made his appearance, accompanied by his two sons and the Count. He is about the middle stature; of unprepossessing appearance, his features being sharp and rather harsh, but his eye is good and his gaze steady and penetrating. His gait is awkward, and his attempts to appear easy display a want of that self possession which is the genuine characteristic of an original well bred gentleman. His conversation does not flow easily except upon the subject of his own plans; and, when expatiating upon them, he can scarcely be said to converse, for he is impatient of contradiction, and can allow of no doubt being expressed of his ultimate success in completely altering the present structure of Society. Happening to say that Ireland was an excellent place for trying the experiment of establishing his system, he kindled at the expression "experiment", and replied, with some warmth, that it was no longer an experiment, and, in a very short period it would be universal.[2] His reception of us was stiff and rather reserved at first; but in a few minutes, he began to talk on the subject of our tour, and mentioned several places which he thought we should have visited. As he was professing to accompany us to visit the evening schools, at his establishment, two Quakers were introduced, with whom he appeared to be familiar, as he took one of them by the hand, and welcomed him by the name of "friend Cruickshanks;" who, introduced his friend and began to converse on business. Friend Cruickshanks was invited to visit the schools with us, but he objected; and we were, therefore, turned over to the guidance of young Mr. Owen and the Count, with whom we forthwith proceeded to New Lanark.
Before entering the museum, we walked down the slope towards the mills, and turned left to walk along a path towards the river. It had not been raining for about half an hour, surprisingly, so we felt we should take the opportunity to see around the buildings while we had the chance. The loud, fast-rushing river, part of the Clyde making its way down towards Glasgow, powered the mills accounting for their location in this valley. As the Trust’s website describes the origins of the mill town:
While poets and artists and tourists in search of the sublime came and went, two visitors in 1783 looked at the falls with a different eye. David Dale, son of a grocer, and prosperous cloth merchant accompanied by Richard Arkwright wondered if the power of all this water could be harnessed to drive cotton spinning machines. Arkwright had invented one called "the water-frame" which needed too much power to be used by an individual family (as was common with spinning machines and looms at the time). They wanted to incorporate hundreds of these machines in one location and use a common source of power to drive them all.[3]
While this is the beginning of the Fall of Clyde Nature Reserve through which many inviting pathways weave past sandstone gorges and dramatic waterfalls, for us, as it was for Dale and Arkwright, it is an alternative beginning for considering this village and its achievement. The tourist coming down the hill from the parking lot is forced to contemplate the sheer magnitude of Owen’s dream world construction, but the walker, coming towards the town along the Clyde, is confronted with the possibilities of nature, providing the power through which any experiment – utopian or dystopian – might occur.
To run his mills, Dale had diverted water into a fast moving canal and it is the small channels and falls that lead off from this canal, sending the water hurtling back down to the river, which turned the carbines. The huge wheel of one of these, exposed to the open, where once a mill had stood before it had been burned down in the 1870s, now turned quietly and aimlessly. We wandered on, not reciting Wordsworth or Coleridge to ourselves; nay, not even Robbie Burns.[4] Our predecessor, Thomson, had felt no restraint on this score, however:
The noise was tremendous; but, it was a continued roar…; the wind, also, which had risen to a brisk gale, mingled its rushing moan through the trees, and the hollow amphitheatre of the rocks, forming the basin, echoed back the sounds. It was in truth a proper scene for impressing the mind of the Minstrel – where
“Waters, woods, and winds, in concert join
And Echo swells the chorus to the skies.”
The sky’s chorus returned to us in the form of raindrops, so we returned to the entrance of the museum. This is in the former community center, or “Institute for the Formation of Character,” in which the village folk of New Lanark gathered for their celebrations and for other recreation. We entered and paid our fee, which allowed us to go through the mills, into the school building, inside Owen’s house, into a cooperative grocery, and finally inside a restored worker’s tenement. Cheap at half the price, we said to ourselves, meanwhile thinking that we were making a quite weighty contribution to Scotland’s economy, in return for learning about its heritage.
And, Scotland, we found, was the other utopia here on display. After walking through a door behind the cash register we found ourselves traversing a tube-like bridge across to the mill, and once inside the mill, we were invited to sit in a conveyor, which if it had been found going up the side of a Cairngorm mountain, would have been mistaken for a Bellamy-esque version of a ski lift. Instead, this was dazzling moving tour through a history of New Lanark. But, as lights flashed on and off and laser images appeared and disappeared, we found we were being guided by a young Scottish lass from the future. Treating us rather like Julian West in Looking Backward, this 22nd century Dr. Leete informed us that she had come from a time when humans had solved the problems of society, leaving the visitor to wonder at the great changes wrought by devolution and the recent political separation from Westminster.
But, also like West, we were invited to look back to the past, to the time of irrationality, and witness the harshness of the time, but also the brave attempts of Robert Owen to deal with some of the problems vexing humans in the late 18th and early 19th century. The displays were powerful, revealing all the hardships, but they were also elevating, placing Robert Owen in the vanguard of some of the great reformers of modern societies, from Mohandas K. Gandhi through Martin Luther King, Jr., and on to Nelson Mandela. Indeed, one alighted from this modern-day Brougham with a sense of possibility, and our kids had been reached by the simplicity and clarity of this young Scot from the future.
But after this, came sound and fury, signifying not much. By which I mean that the operating system of the mill was working at full tilt and producing very little. Only one of the spinning machines is up and running, but the sound is absolutely deafening – the sound of nature’s fall now seeming quite tame after all, if it had not led to this. A man was working the machine, tying up the loose threads, as a laborer would have done in the days when the machines were being run for profit, walking back and forth with the machine. Signifying nothing, perhaps, but suggesting enough about the conditions of yore, that were I to be conveyed back in time and forced to operate one of these machines, with all the dust and all the noise, alongside other machines making similar sounds, I tell myself I would have lain on my back kicking and screaming, begging to return to my nice bourgeois job with my nice bourgeois students in dystopic America.
After this we are directed into the corner of the spinning room and watch a black-and-white movie about the cotton production process. This was both captivating and moving. Of course, the production process began with slave plantations of the cotton South, from which Owen would have drawn his raw materials in spite of his political opposition, and no doubt that of Friend Cruickshanks, to the institution of slavery.
The story then continued with the stevedores loading the cotton onto the ships, its arrival in Glasgow, and transportation in wagons down to New Lanark, before being spun into thread for weaving. In the process of following this story, the visitor is made intimately aware of the connections between the young child scampering in and out of the spinning jennies cleaning away all the lint, and the young black slave picking the cotton at harvest time. Suddenly, the transnational connections are made evident, and we immediately sense that Owen’s contributions may indeed be linked in some way to the black southerner in the United States, a transplanted Indian peasant today working in Mumbai mills, and the erstwhile resident of Apartheid South Africa.
After stopping in the store to shop for woolen clothing to protect us from the chill and damp of the Scottish summer, it was time for lunch. Where better to go than down to another mill in which is housed, the four-star New Lanark Mill Hotel, an on-site hotel and convention center? This is not a run-of-the-mill convention center – though, actually, I suppose that is what it is. Visions of holding a labor history conference flashed before our eyes, as we spooned down the potato leek soup – pretty much the only thing that fit within our budget. Not only would such a conference be held close to the point of production (and what, after all, is the point of production if not to make possible a labor history conference?), but it would also be in an atmosphere of luxury that any self-respecting labor historian must need.
Back to reality, away from utopian visions of the ideal academic conference: It was now time to investigate Owen’s school system. Arriving six years after the completion of the new school building, Dr. Thomson had described it at considerable length thus:
In the centre [of the village] is the building containing the schools. It is set apart for this purpose; and is a long regular edifice, with a pediment in the middle, crowned with a small spire. It contains within it four large rooms, with a spacious lobby or entrance hall on the ground floor. Owing to the space occupied by this hall, the two rooms on the ground floor are smaller than those above; but they are nevertheless large apartments, and are furnished with benches and forms, which are placed close to the wall so as to leave a considerable open space in the centre, which is evidently intended for the convenience of visitors. One of the rooms above is furnished with a gallery and has benches at one end only; and the other is seated, something in the manner of a chapel with a pulpit at one end, and a more extended rostrum, or elevated bench with a desk before it, which stretches nearly across the rooms, at the other end. All the rooms were lighted by lamps suspended from the ceilings.
On entering the hall of the schools, our attention was attracted by a beautiful little boy, who was standing near the door. He was apparently dressed in the Highland garb; but on being spoken to by young Mr.Owen, he quickly threw off this attire and presented himself to us in the costume of a Roman citizen; and assuredly, Brutus was never more finely represented in miniature, than in the person of this juvenile cotton spinner. The child was about six years of age, well formed in limbs and person, with a beautiful, open, ruddy countenance, shaded by a fine, curled head of hair. The dress was a white, twilled cotton tunic, without sleeves, which buttoned over the shoulders descended no lower than the knee, and was confined round the waist by a leather belt, which was fastened with a buckle in front. The head and the limbs were altogether uncovered. We were informed that this was the general school dress of all the children under a certain age; and that the dress of the girls differed from that of the boys only in falling a little below the knee, and in having no leather belt. On our little Roman it was extremely becoming; but the beauty of this child would have rendered any dress graceful: the dress, however, is easy, simply elegant, and in my opinion admirably adapted for children, as it is in no degree cumbrous, and leaves the limbs and arms free for any species of exertion.
On entering the first school, we found about forty lads employed in writing, cyphing<sic> and in acquiring arithmetic and book-keeping; superintended by a very intelligent young man as teacher. The ages of the pupils differed from fourteen to twenty. They appeared very attentive; and some of them wrote good, current hands; whilst others displayed that they had made some progress in the higher rules of arithmetic. Mr. Owen informed us, that this school was, comparatively, thinly attended on this evening, but as the scholars had been ten hours employed in labour during the day, and no compulsion was employed to bring them into the school the attendance was very different on different evenings. The boys, however, were more anxious to improve themselves than the girls; for, in the opposite apartment, which was the female schools, the number of girls employed in the same studies as the boys in the first school, did not exceed twenty. They wrote in general, however, better than the boys; and we were struck with the facility with which they acquired a neat, current hand, by at first learning to form waving lines across the paper; then making these complex; and ultimately, connecting letters together.
Along with other tourists, we entered the building and went into a theater and were informed about the life of one child who had lived in New Lanark in the first decade of the 19th century. Annie McLeod, appearing before us as a hologram played by a young actress of about 12 years, introduced us to the life, and death, of a single child. Annie had been the child of a group of Skye Highlanders displaced by the clearances making their way to America, before a storm had incapacitated their ship. Owen had welcomed many of the stranded migrants to his village to work in his mill. It is in a story such as this that Owen’s achievement is perhaps most evident. For his utopian experiment is most frequently compared to other industrial sites, and in such a contrast it seems like merely an enlightened version of business paternalism, of the kind that would be practiced by Cruikshanks’ Friends, the Cadburys, for example. But when it is placed in the Scottish context, and considered in light of the clearances and the ravages of the countryside by the woolen industry, the transformative possibilities of slave-grown cotton for the landless and starving Scottish peasant becomes all the more noteworthy.
Annie McLeod was not to live beyond her twelfth year, however. While several opportunities had been available to her that other industrial laborers would not have been able to conceive, learning to read, write and do arithmetic, in her case this was all cut short by a bout of pneumonia, which brought home the harsh realities of disease in early 19th century Britain.
After seeing this film, we ventured upstairs to the classroom. We wandered around the room that had been restored to roughly how it might have appeared at the time that Dr. Thomson and his spouse had visited. We came upon the model of skull head and, lo and behold, a label alongside it, mentioned Dr. Thomson. The label mentioned many educators’ interest in phrenology at the beginning of the 19th century, and quoted from the Thomson journal in the following manner:
Observing that some of the boys were very quick in calculations, I enquired whether the teacher understood craniology; and being answered in the affirmative, whether he had observed any extraordinary development of the organ of numbers in those who had displayed extraordinary talents for figures. He replied that he had not remarked any extraordinary development of that organ, in such boys; but that a case had, lately occurred, which had greatly shaken his faith in phrenology. A boy had come into the school, who had the organ of numbers so strongly marked that he had pointed it out as a fine demonstration of the organ to other boys; and yet, this boy was incapable of being taught the simplest rules of arithmetic, and could scarcely put two and two together. Several of the boys verified this anecdote. It added another fact to many which I have collected, which tend to prove the absurdity of the doctrine of Gall and his adherents.
Thomson, as one of the founding professors of the University College, London, medical school, never lost an opportunity to speak out against practices that he felt might constitute quackery, so it is perhaps fitting that this should be the one passage from his journal that is on display in New Lanark, courtesy of my father, who had sent this information on to the museum’s curators.
But, lest we imagine that Owen’s village dwellers were tied only to production and educational pursuits, there apparently was room for entertainment, something of which Annie McLeod had informed us. The Thomson party witnessed a dance occurring in the school building:
Leaving these schools, we proceeded upstairs, and saw another party of the children dancing in the room, which I have already mentioned as having a gallery in it. The dances were country dances; and the steps were pretty well executed, although the only music was execrable scraping on a violin. We enquired whether the boys have permitted to choose their partners and were informed that this privilege was confined to the elder boys. The younger children seemed to enjoy this exercise; but the elder did not appear to dance with that vivacity, which is the characteristic of the Scottish peasantry. Some of the girls were good looking: but in some there was an air of pertness, which did not impress us with the most favourable opinion of their modesty. The room in which the dancing was going on, was decorated with drawings of objects of Natural History; quadrupeds, insects, shells and mineralogical specimens on a large scale and coloured. These are employed as illustrations of lectures on Natural History, which are delivered in this room three times a week. Geography and History are also taught by very large maps, pictures of towns and chronological tables. This mode of appealing to the sense of sight in these studies, tends greatly to facilitate their acquisition; particularly to individuals whose minds have not been prepared by previous acquirements. The propriety however, of such studies for cotton spinners has been, seriously questioned; and were we to regard the sole time and occupation of these persons as being barely sufficient to supply them with the absolute necessities of life, I would admit that any study which did not directly tend to lessen their daily toil, and increase their means of subsistence, was labour lost; but, when I am informed that these people are required to labour ten hours only in the twenty four, I can see no reason why a cotton spinner should not be able to pass his leisure time in a rational and instructive manner; and surely nothing tends more to expand the mind and to elevate the ideas, than the study of Natural History. Do those who deprecate all education for the poor, intend to recommend the ale house as the best place of recreation? Is such a place likely to increase the religious, moral, domestic and loyal virtues of any one? Can a man, who makes a beast of himself, in a pot-house, prove a good husband or a good subject? Or is more discontent to be dreaded from a person who finds amusements in every blade of grass which he presses beneath his foot, and traces the finger of the Almighty in the structure of every insect, than from him who knows the existence of a Diety only from the instructions delivered from the pulpit, and looks upon him rather as a Being dreadful and vindictive, than all wise, omnipotent, and abounding in goodness and mercy? If the world has not been made for a few, but for the whole mass of mankind, it is evident, that the extension of intellectual acquirements must tend to increase the sum of human happiness.
Which goes to show, I suppose, that no observation regarding workers’ entertainment by a member of the middle-class could be lost as an opportunity for lecturing on moral uplift; though at least the worthy doctor was open to the idea that the Scottish peasantry might have more wants than merely to toil in drudgery.
Our own tour turned to the 19th century dwelling and the cooperative grocery, two of the only former tenement homes not now used by Dr. Thomson’s fellow members of the bourgeoisie. In the dwelling one can see why young Annie did not make it to adulthood, with the crowding that must have troubled these workers, though not perhaps as much as their contemporaries in Manchester. In the cooperative store one learned the origins of the Cooperative movement at the Co-op grocery stores that became ubiquitous in the twentieth century and provided a clear marker for working-class culture and Britain’s class stratification. Indeed, Owen’s contribution to the emergence of the cooperative movement was widely acknowledged as his most lasting achievement.
Information about some of his other less successful experiments, is to be found in the basement of the Owen house. Here one may learn about Owen’s American ventures in Indiana. A few years after Thomson’s visit, in 1825, Owen decided that he ought to attempt another experiment on a yet grander scale on the American frontier. Along with his son, Robert Dale Owen, he endeavored to set up a colony at New Harmony, Indiana. This colony never really got off the ground. Robert Owen returned to New Lanark and retirement, leaving his son to endeavor to make his mark in the New World. This he did, going on to become a prominent educationalist and then an elected member of the United States Senate. Thomson had been somewhat disparaging about this young man who showed him around the school, writing, “His son does not appear to possess the natural powers of mind, and the energy of character of his father, although his education and his acquirements are superior. He was several years under M. Fullenberg, and is now endeavouring to introduce some of the plans of the Academy at Hofwyl, into the Lanark establishment.” But, he was clearly a man of ideas also, and one who was able to sway opinion, as he would help to do in Indiana where he maintained strong opposition to the institution of slavery.
We could not linger long looking at this American experiment, however. Our children had had their fill, and we had to return to the car for our northward journey. Like Dr. Thomson before us, we were all suitably impressed by Robert Owen’s performance on our behalf. We were not so troubled as he by the absence of religious practice in the experiment, not seeing it as its downfall:
Mr.Owen is reported to have no religious principles, and to attend to none in the regulation of his community. We had no opportunity of verifying this account; but we heard a chapter read from the bible, when the schools were dismissed; and we were informed that the morning instructions are always prefaced by a hymn sung by the children. This looks a little like religion; but if it terminate here, and no religious principles are instilled into the children and youth of the establishment, for the general regulation of their conduct, little good can be expected from the most perfect plan of government, where the passions and ordinary feelings of our natures are to be the sole mainsprings of every transaction of life.
We had not seen this as a problem, and after reading of the cant of the slave master’s religion, it was a welcome relief to leave religion at the top of the hill with all the other unbelievers. But, the limits of Owen’s project, as annunciated by Dr. Thomson, were apparent nonetheless:
In a local, manufacturing community, in which the chief object is to secure a succession of labourers, fitted to the tasks they have to perform from early habit; and rendered, comparatively comfortable by the education bestowed upon them, the plan of New Lanark is likely to succeed; but to spread it over general society, to extinguish all the feelings, which from the commencement of society have been considered as the most valuable in the human character, to crush ambition, emulation, benevolence, heroism, poetic fancy, enthusiasm, religious fervor, and devout piety; to level ranks, and make men truly passive drudges, labouring for a mere subsistence, as bees of a rational hive, is a dream of a discordant brain, which, were it even realized, could never exist for even a very moderate period.
And that, I think, was William Morris’s point, in response to Edward Bellamy’s utopian vision, though his own sensibility was that of the socialist trying to push for change without dampening the human spirit.
But, what was important for us now, was to head north to that land of tourism made accessible by the ’15, the ’45, and the clearances, where lairds and their friends could come up from town to do a spot of shooting in August, while the descendants of the land on which they played would be in Pennsylvania engaging in a spot of bagpipe playing and tossing the caber. For we, after all (to borrow from Gandhi), were clearly ready for civilization – for heroism and poetic fancy in a world of inequality. If only it wouldn’t rain.
Notes
[1] This may just be apocryphal. One can imagine that E.P. Thompson would have made a good deal out of such an utterance in his biography of William Morris, since it would have fit so well with Thompson’s own sense of political theater. A.L. Morton, while quoting extensively from Morris’s review of Looking Backward in Commonweal, also does not mention such a comment, even while it would have helped cast off Morris’s News from Nowhere from Bellamy’s earlier work; Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin Press, 1977), and A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), pp. 193-226.
[2] Of the many attempts to replicate New Lanark, the only one that met with reasonable success was at Ralahine, in Ireland; Morton, The English Utopia, p. 169.
[3] http://www.aboutscotland.com/water/clydenl.html
[4] All of whom, along with (at different times) J.M.W. Turner, and James Thomson, had visited the Falls.
