ABSTRACT

‘There has been some writing, and much preaching, and the world requires much more of both, to create a powerful influential public opinion in favour of united exertions, and means of enjoyment of health and happiness; but one successful and well conducted agricultural experiment would be more serviceable than either’. 219 This ‘one serviceable experiment’ was now to be made by William Hodson, a farmer of Brimstone Hill, Upwell, near Wisbech. He had heard Robert Owen speak. Having spent six years afloat, he had few qualms about the unchartered seas of community founding. His natural vivacity of temperament prevented him from becoming, as he told his friends, ‘a sober saint or a formal anchorite’. 220 He had been a Methodist lay preacher, but ran into trouble because he married his deceased wife's sister; a heinous moral offence to those who were aware of the civil and canon law as it then stood. The United Advancement Societies at Wisbech were behind him. He claimed that his experimental community would solve not shelve the problem of class: ‘The present distinctions in society are the cause of more envy and strife than anything which has ever been produced in the world. In order to avoid this calamity, there will be no distinction, no individual property, the motto will be “Each for all”.’ In his community food was to be cooked by a special scientific apparatus. There was to be a common dining-room, a large schoolroom. Machinery ‘hitherto (been) for the benefit of the rich’ would be ‘adapted in the colony for lessening labour’. A steam engine would be erected for thrashing and grinding corn. Land would be let at a moderate rent, and before anyone could be dispossessed, a common vote (in which women would participate) would be taken. Fifty houses for members were to be erected as quickly as possible ‘so that fifty families may form a community. These houses will be constructed with flues so as to heat them to any required temperature, thus avoiding the labour of making fifty fires, to consume an immense fuel besides dirtying the room you live in and also removing the possibility of your children being burnt to death.’