Based on a 2013 doctoral thesis, Ophélie Siméon’s volume in a series edited by Gregory Claeys represents an attempt to write a different kind of study of Robert Owen—“an intellectual biography through a sense of place” (9)—that connects New Lanark more umbilically to his later endeavors. Her avowed intent is to approach this history (where possible) “from below,” utilizing newly (post-2013) available material from the New Lanark Trust archives as well as New Lanark records held at Glasgow University. That said, much of the material captured in Siméon’s book is not new but has already been brought out in scholarship going back fifty or more years. What is valuable here is that it is brought together in a concise format and Siméon’s critical appraisal of many aspects of New Lanark’s (and Owen’s) history.The result generates insights of significance into the social relations of the New Lanark community in Owen’s time, partially challenging the dominant “Owen-centric” accounts. Siméon emphasizes Owen’s status not so much as a protosocialist but as a paternalistic entrepreneur, whose interest in the welfare of his workers was governed by a “top-down” understanding of social relations. She suggests that many perceptions of New Lanark have been apolitical and even teleological, borrowing too heavily from Owen’s own writings (“self-hagiography”) or from other sympathetic sources. This celebratory narrative has significantly underplayed the contribution of David Dale to the success of the community of New Lanark, has been largely silent about resistance to Owen’s reforms from the workers themselves, and has skated over the collapse of Owen’s business relationship with his partners at New Lanark in 1825.Rather than see Owen’s career and thought as split into two distinct halves, with the 1817 meetings at the City of London tavern as the watershed, Siméon argues that most of the later features of “Owenism” can be traced back to measures initially trialed in the factory village, which was intended as a prototype for universal regeneration. She argues, on this basis, that the contrast drawn between the Owen of New Lanark (enlightened, rational employer, reformer) and the Owen of New Harmony (idealistic, misled visionary) is false. On the contrary, Owen used New Lanark as a social laboratory, and the results of his experiments on the Clyde impelled him toward embracing socialism. At the same time New Lanark encapsulated in embryo many of the ambiguities and failures that would destabilize later Owenite communities. As Siméon concludes, “The paternalism which lay at the heart of Owen’s socialism also carried the seeds of its own destruction” (161).In her history Siméon attempts to restore some agency to New Lanark’s workers and their families. She argues that, contrary to dominant narratives, they refused to see themselves merely as employees and factory community dwellers. Instead they saw themselves, and should be seen, as individuals and as independent citizens.In what is in general a subtle and carefully qualified assessment, Siméon notes the lack of organized workers’ resistance to Owen, there being no strikes in New Lanark while he was in charge. Nor was there any episode of machine-breaking, and a picture of relative harmony is strengthened by the almost complete absence of crime in the village. Employees appreciated the more humane discipline that Owen brought to the workplace, and Siméon also refers to the positive testimony offered to the Factory Inquiry Commission of 1833 with respect to working conditions in New Lanark mills. Just as significant may be the fact that between 1818 and 1825, twenty-two out of seventy-three children baptized in New Lanark were named either Robert Owen or Anne Caroline (after Owen’s wife). And in 1818, 556 male inhabitants of New Lanark submitted a petition supporting Owen’s endeavors to protect child workers.However, Siméon notes the paucity of firsthand accounts of life in New Lanark from Owen’s employees, which makes it difficult to know exactly how employees regarded Owen, and she traces the growth of explicit opposition to some of Owen’s progressive and radical policies. That which emanated from some of Owen’s business partners is well known, as is the suspicion that Owen’s reforms initially encountered from his workforce. But Siméon also explains that some inhabitants of the New Lanark community were expressing serious discontent with Owen’s views on religion by the early 1820s in ways that undermined his authority. According to an 1823 letter from New Lanark resident Jean Kay Sutherland to her sister: I think it would be needless to give you the news of the place as we are become a common proverb among the nations, you will see from the public papers a variety of news that most of the members in the neighbourhood are up in arms against Mr Owen and we cannot to our sad experience deny what they say not only in the public papers but books in abundance are circulating. The Reverend Mr Thomson in Edinburgh … blamed his partners for giving him the superintendence of so many hundred children who is a declared infidel. (130)Siméon also stresses that there were limits to Owen’s reforms, particularly insofar as they impacted on the private sphere. Workers doggedly resisted attempts to intrude on their domestic arrangements, withdrawing from orchestrated communal activities, even resisting the attempt to bring gas lighting to workers’ homes (“so that we will never have the pleasure of lighting a candle in our own houses,” the clearly curmudgeonly Jean Kay Sutherland complained [133]).Owen’s plans to train the women of New Lanark in the principles of home economics (setting up an inspection committee colloquially known as the “bug hunters”) provoked marked resentment. There was a sustained attempt on the part of some members of the New Lanark community to protect their private spaces for at least part of each day. They welcomed social opportunities such as dances and concerts, but Owen’s attempt to extend the principles of the Institution for the Formation of Character to adults through evening lectures met with relatively little enthusiasm.Overall, according to Siméon, “resistance at New Lanark … gradually led to a rejection of the close-knit, personal relationship between master and worker that Owen had worked so hard to produce, thus threatening the very foundation of his community experiments” (126). By early 1824 Owen’s position at New Lanark was less and less tenable, and the difficulties he was encountering there may have prompted his next series of ambitious ventures, including New Harmony.Siméon is more blunt than many have been in her assessment of Owen’s somewhat perplexing personality. She argues that Owen did not hesitate to resort to “dishonest practices” (52) in order to pursue his admittedly altruistic objectives. The key example is Owen’s rerouting of £20,000 he had been lent in 1806 by Archibald Campbell with the purpose of investing in the mills. Owen chose instead to use the money to renovate workers’ housing and plan the Institution for the Formation of Character. When this later became clear (1812) he was dismissed as manager and was only reinstated when his sisters-in-law paid off his debts. Siméon also cites to telling effect Robert Southey’s unpublished journal notes following Southey’s visit to New Lanark in 1819: Owen in reality deceives himself. [He is part-owner and sole Director of a large establishment, differing more in accidents than in essence from a plantation: the persons under him happen to be white, and are at liberty by law to quit his service, but while they remain in it they are as much under his absolute management as so many negro-slaves.] His humour, his vanity, his kindliness of nature … lead him to make these human machines as he calls them (and too literally believes them to be) as happy as he can, and to make a display of their happiness. And he jumps to the monstrous conclusion that because he can do this with 2,210 persons, who are totally dependent upon him—all mankind might be governed with the same facility. (119)Interestingly, Siméon omits Southey’s italicized sentence making the comparison with a slave plantation.Siméon draws particular attention to the hostility expressed by workers toward Owen’s offer to step in to take over the management of the New Lanark friendly society when it appeared on the verge of bankruptcy in 1823. The language used in protest at this initiative declared that the workers should be seen as “free-born sons of highly-favoured Britain” rather than be “compelled by Mr Owen to adopt what measures soever he may please to suggest on matters that belong entirely to us” (134). The authoritarian leadership style preferred by Owen was clearly regarded as leaving little room for bottom-up alternative decision-making practices that enabled rather than directed workers.A related matter explored is that of Owen’s increasingly difficult relationship with his wife. Anne Caroline Owen was much troubled by her husband’s rejection of religious orthodoxy, and a significant gap opened between her and Robert from 1817 onward. Siméon cites from Charles Cowan’s published account of dining at the Owen household in the early 1820s, where Anne expressed explicit disagreement (in her husband’s absence) with some of his ideas. The gulf between husband and wife impacted their children, with the sons and daughter Anne following their father and the younger daughters aligning themselves initially with their mother. It seems likely that Owen and his wife had no contact from 1824 until her death in 1832.All of this is fascinating and certainly offers a significant corrective to more rose-tinted accounts of New Lanark written from within the Owenite tradition. Yet the evidence for many of Siméon’s arguments is relatively slight, mainly because of the limited survival of firsthand accounts of life in New Lanark. Not entirely satisfactorily, she attempts to circumvent such objections by presenting her research as “micro-history, the aim of which is to find significant historical ‘traces’ on a limited scale to reveal ‘the network of social relations in which individuals are entangled’” (10). There is something to this, although the claim for “micro-history” is not really pursued further, nor is the debt to it much in evidence elsewhere. In fact the approach taken is sustainedly and conventionally empirical, informed by a keen awareness of the historical and ideological contexts that informed earlier investigations of New Lanark.Thus, in search of “conflict in the ‘Happy Valley,’” Siméon refers to Jean-Pierre Frey’s tripartite definition of French ironworkers’ resistance to employer paternalism in his 1986 study La ville industrielle et ses urbanités. La distinction ourvriers/employés: Le Creusot 1870–1930. Frey’s typology begins with “compensation”—workers seeking refuge in the privacy of their own homes after the completion of the working day; it moves to workers expressing a desire to improve their prospects by seeking higher wages or the acquisition of property; and it ends in “escape strategies” whereby workers look to change occupations (including obtaining internal promotions). This is an interesting model, but its relevance is limited in this instance by the fact that there is only clear evidence of the first strategy at New Lanark. The absence of evidence does not prove a negative, but given such absence from any archival material, the failure to present a more balanced assessment strikes me as lacking in discrimination.There are other occasions on which one feels that Siméon is building an interpretation on insecure foundations. This is particularly the case with the claim that New Lanark as a “happy valley,” “as a historical reality … simply does not exist” (160), as it is difficult to know what historical reality might be expected to meet Siméon’s impossibly (?) high standards. No community is completely free from conflict, however idyllic, and to imagine that possible in an early nineteenth-century industrializing society where life was precarious and political and religious freedoms were marginal seems ahistorical. To suggest as she does that “New Lanark’s mythical status verges on the common sense understanding of that term: as a delusion” also, for me, goes too far in attempting to debunk accepted orthodoxy on the basis of only a smattering of “traces,” especially given the earlier admission that “the fragmentary nature of my primary sources means that the book is in no way a definitive account” (10).Siméon’s final chapter—“Rethinking New Lanark”—reviews the settlement’s afterlife and legacy. This teases out how influential the New Lanark model was in informing subsequent Owenite communitarian experiments and how pliable Owen’s achievement could be according to the ideological predispositions of later interpreters. As Siméon notes wryly, “Fabian writers, Labour politicians, educational reformers and co-operators have lauded the Clydesdale industrial village as a precursor of everything from the New Towns Act, modern health and safety legislation to infant schools” (155). She notes how New Lanark, notwithstanding the more contested and complex history she has brought to the surface, remained a continuous source of inspiration for Owenite communities founded on both sides of the Atlantic. Whatever its, and Owen’s, flaws and follies, it posited the quest for a better life as a condition of individual and collective progress.Siméon also traces the revival and resurrection of New Lanark after its near collapse in the early 1970s. Left-wing journalist Paul Foot (then working for the Daily Telegraph Magazine) visited it in April 1968 as the mills closed, writing that “as cotton spinning comes to an end in New Lanark for ever, and as the mills come up for sale there is little of Owen’s grand idea left in the lovely Lanark valley.” Demolition was avoided by the work of the New Lanark Conservation Trust, led by its Director Jim Arnold. Eventually this led to UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 2001 and the creation of a vastly successful visitor attraction, rehabilitation efforts, notes Siméon, that “have deservedly garnered ample recognition”: “The factory village has come full circle: as a thriving business with a conscience, as a tourist destination, and as a continuous source of inspiration for social experiments” (158).Some minor gripes. First, at £74.99 in both paperback (!) and hardback, this is a vastly overpriced volume that is effectively out of the reach of anyone other than institutional libraries. Second, rather than a full bibliography for the entire volume, there is a select bibliography at the end of the book, with each chapter having its own list of references. Inevitably this means that there is much duplication of said references from one chapter to the next, and the preference for the Harvard referencing system with endnotes is not aesthetically attractive or helpful to the reader interested in the evidential basis for the claims made. The illustrations carried are not optimally displayed and are only occasionally discussed in the text, which is something of a missed opportunity. Nonetheless, and notwithstanding some tendency to overclaim on the part of the author, this is a very important piece of groundbreaking scholarship on Owen and New Lanark and is much to be welcomed.