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

Abstract

M any 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 accom- panying these treatments is a copy of the only contemporary pictorial repre- sentation 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 1815-1825 3 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 edu- cation 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,