DAVID DALE OWEN. 



1807-1860. 



DAVID DALE OWEN was born at Braxfield House, near 

 New Lanark, Scotland, June 24, 1807. He was the fourth son 

 and sixth child in a family of eight children. All but the 

 first born, a son, lived to adult age. His father, Robert 

 Owen, the celebrated philanthropist, was a native of North 

 Wales. 



Robert Owen, after working in the drapery business in 

 London and elsewhere, entered into partnership with a me- 

 chanic, at eighteen years of age, in the manufacture of cotton- 

 spinning machines. A year later he took a position as super- 

 intendent of a mill employing five hundred hands, and at 

 twenty-two years of age he became a partner in an old-estab- 

 lished spinning concern of Manchester. Having become at- 

 tached to Miss Anne Caroline, the eldest daughter of David 

 Dale, proprietor of large mills at New Lanark, near Glasgow, 

 he arranged with his partners to buy the works of the father, 

 and soon after obtained for himself the hand of the daughter. 

 They were married in 1797. Undertaking the management 

 of the works (" government " he called it), he steadily im- 

 proved the condition of the factory hands, which had been 

 there as elsewhere bad to a degree now almost incredible. 

 Some of his measures were opposed by his partners, and led 

 to several dissolutions of partnership through which he re- 

 tained the management, but he was forced to retire in 1829, 

 when fifty-eight years of age. In spite of what he spent for 

 the workers, Owen always made the business pay well. For 

 several years, beginning with 1815, he worked for the passage 

 of acts of Parliament beneficial to factory operatives. Be- 

 coming convinced that social reform could be best secured 

 through communism, he bought from an agent of the Har- 

 mony Society in 1824 a tract of thirty thousand acres, and the 



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