ABSTRACT
234
235 In the previous chapters Owenism has been presented as a practical and theoretical response to various personal and social needs. After 1846 the organised Owenite movement disintegrated and it would be tempting to conclude that this was because Owenism was no longer felt to be adequate for its tasks and was accordingly discarded. In Britain the ending of Queenwood and the central Owenite organisation was soon followed by the severe economic crisis of 1846–47; in America the second period of communitarian enthusiasm, Fourierist and Owenite, was over by the same date; and it would be convenient for historians if they could assume that the whole business was tidily finished by 1848. In fact, Owenism did not die out, any more than Chartism suddenly disappeared after 10 April 1848. Old Owenite works were republished 1 and new ones written in the 1850s and later. The vision of the new moral world continued to inspire men, though fresh ideas on how to bring it about had to be found. A transformed Owenism, or perhaps more accurately a legacy of Owenism, is a recognisable element in the philosophy of liberal reform in the 1860s and 1870s.
If this at first seems surprising it is only because of the fixed categories into which the social history of the nineteenth century has been forced. It has already been shown that Owenism was not the ideology of a particular class, either rising or falling economically in the Marxist sense, but rather a generalised response to the experience of social change. And the problems 236 with which Owenites were preoccupied did not come to an end in 1848. Again, the segments of history into which historians chop their periods (such as 1837–48) do not coincide with the physical or intellectual lives of their characters. Men who were in their forties in the 1850s had acquired their Owenism twenty years earlier, and a few who were older had been followers since the 1820s. The mental climate of an age has to be analysed in terms of generations, since men carry forward into their maturity the ideas which they acquired in their formative years. There is a generational lag between the founder of a movement and many of his disciples. The gap is greatest after his death, but it is no less real and hard to bridge during his lifetime, especially if, like Owen, he lives to a great age. Such was the experience of the later Owenites in the 1850s and 1860s.
