Robert owen brief biography of marietta
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In 1796, he served on the Manchester Board of Health, an experience which no doubt put Owen in touch with widespread wretchedness and helped shape his ideas for social reform. Anne Caroline and Mary (together with their mother, Caroline) died in the 1830s, after which Jane, the remaining daughter, joined her brothers in America, where she married Robert Fauntleroy.
Was one of the founders of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union (GNCTU).
A well-known biography is
Frank Podmore, Robert Owen, a Biography, v. The investors in his firm, content with a 5 percent return on their capital, were willing to allow more freedom for Owen’s philanthropy. The New Harmony community was not a success.
In the unions, Owenism stimulated the formation of self-governing workshops.
Like New Harmony in America, Harmony Hall in Hampshire also floundered and he had to abandon it. Then, in 1787 or 1788, he moved to Manchester in the employ of Mr. Satterfield, a wholesale and retail drapery merchant.
Owen now found himself in what would soon become the capital city of the English Industrial Revolution on the eve of that event as factories were built and textile manufacture expanded..
Owen opened a store where the people could buy goods of sound quality at little more than cost, and he placed the sale of alcohol under strict supervision. A memorial commemorates him in the acclaimed Kensal Green Cemetery.
A pattern emerges in Owen’s life, schemes which outstretched their resources, relentless condemnation of the "old ways," and a wish to implement change on an unrealistically large scale.
During these years, his teaching gained such influence among the working classes that the Westminster Review (1839) stated that his principles were the actual creed of a great portion of them. He advocated the elimination of poverty through the establishment of self-sustaining communities, and experimented with such a utopian community himself at New Harmony, Indiana, from 1825 to 1828.
His first public speech, in 1812, was on education, and was elaborated upon in his first published work, The First Essay on the Principle of the Formation of Character (1813).
After 1834 Owen devoted himself to propagating his ideas on education, morality, rationalism, and marriage reform. The children had been well treated by Dale, who safeguarded heir welfare, but the general condition of the people was very unsatisfactory. Owen’s primary innovation at new Lanark was the public buildings which demonstrated his concern for the welfare of his workers: the New Institution for the Formation of Character (1816); the Infant School (1817) which enabled mothers to return to work when their children reached the age of one year; and the Store, which increased the value of the workers’ wages by offering quality goods at prices just slightly higher than cost.
Many of these children worked in the mills and had been well provided for by David Dale, who, in 1796, had written to the Manchester Board of Health that of the 500 children, eighty could read, twenty-four well enough that no further instruction in reading was needed.