"Living Machines": Performance and Pedagogy at Robert Owen's Institute for the Formation of Character, New Lanark, 1816-1828

Many classics in the history of education feature descriptions of the early nineteenth-century reformer Robert Owen and the school he built for pauper children at his cotton-spinning factory in New Lanark, Scotland.¹ Often accompanying these treatments is a copy of the only contemporary pictorial representation of the interior of the school, George Hunt's engraving "Mr. Owen's Institution, New Lanark 1825. (Quadrille Dancing)"² (figure 1). The stock elements of Hunt's aquatint match verbal descriptions provided by the many visitors to Owen's school, which was established in 1816 as the Institute for the Formation of Character. As many as two hundred children at a time performed in a ninety-by-forty-foot room specially designed with galleries for spectators. Many if not most of the twenty thousand visitors who came to New Lanark in the period from 1815-1825³ were shown a performance by the children of dancing, singing, and military drills. Hunt's engraving, based on a painting by M. Egerton presumably rendered the same year, illustrates the large, frieze-like posters of wild and domesticated animals that hung in the school; these, as well as "maps of the four quarters of the world upon a large scale" and a timeline of history, all "painted by a lady of great taste and talent,"⁴ were major components of Owen's program of education by "sensible signs."⁵ The students' tartan-trimmed tunics stand in stark contrast to the clothing of the visitors, who are dressed in the finest fashions of the day. Two figures at the bottom right-hand corner of the etching survey the scene, mimicking our own position; the figure with his arms crossed and his back to the map is often supposed to be Owen.

Robert Owen is a standard figure in books treating the history of public education in the West, and his theory of education is often linked to those of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I find this diachronic placement misleading, however, because neither Owen nor his publications rendered his intellectual precedents transparent. I argue instead that a detailed treatment of Owen in his own time better illustrates the historical significance of Owen's educational program. In particular, close attention to the role of dancing and other performances in the New Lanark classroom illustrates how the children at New Lanark were what Roy Porter called "live specimens" of early social science presented to the "laboratory of polite society."⁶ The public display of lessons at New Lanark's Institute demonstrated the results of an education based on close attention to human character and the physical and social circumstances which impressed it. In so doing, it exposed middle-class English travelers to "regenerated" paupers whose bodies and movements defied the expectations of those whose ideas about pauper children had been defined by less gracious experiences. What education could do, Owen demonstrated, was create a unified social body made of "living machines" which could act rationally and perform culturally significant activities on a national stage. The question of the ability of the human character to change—especially the ability of the poor to change—was under scrutiny in the period under consideration.⁷ Owen took advantage of this situation to choreograph a new moral relationship between the rich and the poor, and the players he used for this performance were the children of New Lanark.

Figure 1.

M. Egerton, and G[eorge] Hunt, Mr. Owen's Institution, New Lanark (Quadrille Dancing), aquatint engraving, 1825. In Airy Nothings, or, Scraps and Naughts, and Odd-Cum-Shorts: in a Circumbendibus Hop, Step, and Jump by Olio Rigmaroll (London, 1825). Image courtesy of the Special Collections Department of the University of St Andrews Library, St. Andrews, Scotland, UK.

Context

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was born in Newtown, Wales, but made his career in cotton spinning in Manchester. In 1799 he successfully courted the young Caroline Dale, whose father David Dale owned several cotton-spinning mills...