ABSTRACT
Robert Dale Owen (1801–77) was born in Glasgow and later became a social reformer and politician in the United States. He sympathised with and sought to publicise the views of his father, the Welsh educational and social reformer Robert Owen (1771–1858), who established a model manufacturing community at New Lanark, and who in later life transferred his reformist activities from Scotland to America. The elder Owen met Godwin in early 1813, and the two men saw each other frequently while Owen was writing A New View of Society (1813), in which he set out his proposals for national reform of the educational and penal systems. This chapter presents an extract from Dale Owen’s autobiography describing his first visit to Godwin’s house in 1826. The passage provides the evidence of the seventy-year-old Godwin’s contact with a new generation of social reformers, rather than for any insight into his character.
