Owen, ROBERT, social reformer, was born a saddler and ironmonger's son, at Newtown, in Montgomeryshire, 14th May 1771. He had a poor education, and was put at ten into a draper's shop at Stamford, but a few years later shifted to Manchester, and by nineteen had risen to be the enterprising manager of a cotton-mill with five hundred hands. In 1799 he married the daughter of David Dale (q.v.), the philanthropic owner of the celebrated cotton-mills at New Lanark, on the Clyde, and, having induced his firm to purchase the concern, settled there next year as manager and part-owner. Here he laboured with constant zeal to teach his workpeople the advantages of thrift, cleanliness, and good order, and organised with a wisdom far before his time a system of infant education. In 1813 the business was reorganised, so as to give Owen a freer hand for his philanthropic schemes, under a firm content with a profit of 5 per cent., of which Jeremy Bentham and the Quaker William Allen were members. By this time Owen had thought out a religious creed for himself, and he now began his social propagandism in A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character (1813). His works at New Lanark quickly became famous, and attracted visitors from all parts of the world, while his advice on social questions was sought, if not always followed, by statesmen. Owen's thoughts on the pressing social questions of the day finally drove him to socialism rather than co-operation as a solution, but he lost much of his influence on the wider community by utterances on religion that were at least honest, if not discreet. His socialistic theories were put to the test of practice in experimental communities at Orbiston near Bothwell, and later at New Harmony in Indiana, at Ralphine in County Clare, and at Tytherly in Hampshire, but all were completely unsuccessful. In 1828 his connection with New Lanark finally ceased; and, his means having been exhausted in the American experiment, the remainder of his days were spent in restless secularist and socialistic propagandism. In his old age his mind fell into the comfortless vagaries of spiritualism. He died at his native town, 17th November 1858.—His son, ROBERT DALE OWEN, was born in Glasgow, 9th November 1800, and went to America in 1825 to help his father in founding his short-lived colony at New Harmony, Indiana. He finally settled in America in 1827, edited the Free Inquirer in New York, acted as a member of the Indiana legislature, and entered congress as a democrat in 1843. Later he helped to remodel the constitution of Indiana; acted first as chargé d'affaires, next as minister at Naples (1853–58); debated divorce with Horace Greeley; supported the cause of emancipation by vigorous and able pamphlets; and made his name widely known as one of the chief advocates of spiritualism in the United States. He died on Lake George, New York, 17th June 1877. Of his books need only be mentioned the spiritualistic Footprints on the Boundary of another World (1859), and Debatable Land between this World and the Next (1872); and Threading my Way, an autobiography (1874).—Two other sons, David Dale Owen (1807–60) and Richard Owen (born 1810), achieved contemporary eminence as geologists.
See SOCIALISM; G. J. Holyoake, History of Co-operation in England (1875); Owen's Autobiography (1857), and further, that edited by his son (1874); also the Lives by A. J. Booth (1869), W. L. Sargant (1860), and Lloyd Jones (ed. by W. C. Jones, 1890).