Robert Owen Museum. Photograph courtesy of Robert Owen Museum

The Robert Owen Memorial Museum is the only museum specifically devoted to social reformer Robert Owen.

It is located on the ground floor of the Town Council building in the centre of Newtown, Wales. The Grade 2 listed building, of Arts and Crafts design was erected in 1902, in order to provide a Free Library and a meeting room. The Co-operative Union subscribed part of the cost, in memory of Owen.

The bulk of the collection was acquired in the 1920s, some seventy years after his death. Most of the items are from Robert Owen’s time and have a direct association with him.

Much of the collection consists of books and other printed material, most of which is not on display, but can be viewed by prior appointment. The Museum has 55 of Robert Owen’s letters, one of which is on display together with a transcript (his writing is almost illegible). This and other transcripts can be viewed on this web site.

Visiting

The Museum is open throughout the year, except Christmas Week and Bank Holidays and admission is free. See the Museum’s website for more details.

The Museum is easily found, being on the ground floor of the Town Council building in the centre of Newtown, opposite the Town Clock.

There are two car parks within easy walking distance. It is ten minutes walk to the railway station. There is a two-hourly train service from Birmingham.
Other things to see in Newtown include Robert Owen’s Tomb and Statue, and the Textile Museum.

Groups are welcome, preferably with a few days notice. Groups of more than 30 people are advised to split to avoid congestion.

The Curator will gladly arrange to be on hand, or to give a short talk. They will allow researchers access to items not on display by prior appointment.

A Simple Quiz and a more difficult Quiz Sheet are available for school visits. Teachers are welcome to download them and make copies before their visit.

Also see…

• Robert Owen Museum

The Bath Royal and Literary and Scientific Institute

The Bath Royal and Literary and Scientific Institute (BRLSI) is an educational charity founded in 1824.

Rev. Leonard Jenyns – friend and close correspondent of Charles Darwin bequeathed the BRLSI his library of over 2,000 books, correspondence of over 700 letters, scrapbooks and his Herbarium.

Jenyns was orginially supposed to be the naturalist accompanying the H.M.S. Beagle but was not able on account of his clerical duties.  In his stead, he recommended the young Darwin to take his place.

Visiting

The BRSLI is located in Queen Square, Bath and today hosts public talks, exhibitions on science, the arts and current affairs but also maintains an extensive collection of books and fossils.

The BRSLI museum and archives have various sections:  Library, Geology, Natural History and Humanities.

The library includes volumes from Erasmus, Darwin, Lamarck and Linnaeus. Part of the Geology archive is made of the collection of Charles Moore purchased after his death in 1881.

See also…

• Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute

Chrysippos

Chrysippus of Soli was a Greek Stoic philosopher.

Although Chrysippus believed in fate, divination and gods, he believed reason, sympathy and knowledge were the tools human beings should use when addressing ethical problems.

The British Museum, London contains a bust of Chrysippus.

See also…

• Wikipedia biograpy of Chrysippus

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools.

Sometime during his adolescence, Matthew Arnold abandoned Christianity, apparently on ethical grounds and turned to agnosticism. He thereafter spent a good bit of his life trying to tell others about it in a gentle, gentlemanly way that would not upset them too much.

Arnold was an alumni of Balliol College, Oxford and his work inspired Thomas Hardy who went on to reject the idea that Christianity could be adapted to modern thought.

Scholars of Arnold’s works disagree on the nature of Arnold’s personal religious beliefs. He rejected the superstitious elements in religion, even while retaining a fascination for church rituals. Arnold seems to belong to a pragmatic middle ground that is more concerned with the poetry of religion and its virtues and values for society than with the existence of God.

He wrote in the preface of God and the Bible in 1875

Two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.

He also wrote in Literature and Dogma:

The word ‘God’ is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker’s consciousness — a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.

A blue plaque commemorates Arnold at 2 Chester Square, London where he lived and his portrait is on display in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Also see…

• Victorian Webs entry on Arnold
• Portraits of Arnold at National Portrait Gallery
• Selected Poems
• Wikipedia biography on Arnold

Chapman Cohen was a leading English atheist and secularist writer and lecturer. He was the elder son of Enoch Cohen, a Jewish confectioner, and his wife, Deborah, and in his own words had “little religion at home and none at school”

Cohen moved to London in 1889, and soon became involved in the secularist movement. That year he accepted an invitation to speak against a Christian lecturer and shortly afterwards he was invited to speak the local branch of the National Secular Society (NSS).

After a year of lecturing for the freethought cause, he joined the NSS, becoming a popular and prolific lecturer for the Society. In 1893 Cohen spoke at the Leicester Secular Society. He was elected a vice-president of the NSS in 1895.

In 1897 Cohen began contributing weekly articles to G. W. Foote‘s Freethinker, in 1898 he became assistant editor, and after Foote’s death in 1915 he was appointed editor. Cohen also succeeded Foote as President of the NSS until 1949.

Cohen had written for other freethought journals before joining The Freethinker, and had edited The Truthseeker, owned by J.W. Gott.

Cohen remained editor of The Freethinker until 1951, when he retired and was replaced by Francis Ridley.

On his death, The Times printed a short obituary of Cohen, which said:

He was the author of many books setting forth the freethought philosophy of life, which had a large sale, and he was outstanding as a forthright, witty and courteous debater and lecturer.

Also see…

• Wikipedia article on Cohen

National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery is an art gallery primarily located in London but with various satellite outstations located elsewhere in the UK. It houses portraits of historically important and famous British people, selected on the basis of the significance of the sitter.

Around 1,400 portraits are on display at the Gallery in London throughout the year, a number of  whom are part of Humanist heritage.

• Matthew Arnold
• Clement Attlee
• Charles Darwin
• Sir Richard Doll
• E.M. Forster
• William Godwin
• T.H. Huxley
• John Stuart Mill
• William Morris
• Thomas Paine
• Bertrand Russell
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Algernon Charles Swinburne
• Mary Wollstonecraft

Others are included in the full collection:

• John Baskerville
• Jeremy Bentham
• Charles Bradlaugh
• Joseph Conrad
• George Eliot
• Thomas Hardy
• George Holyoake
• David Hume
• Julian Huxley
• Jawaharlal Nehru
• Robert Owen
• J.M. Robertson
• Herbert Spencer

Visiting

The gallery is open daily 10am – 6pm (9pm Thursday and Friday).There is no charge for admission.

Visitors can buy prints of over 25,000 images online and in person via the Portrait Printer service.

Also see…

• National Portrait Gallery

Jacob Bronowski

Jacob Bronowski was a humanist, polymath and all round Renaissance man.

He was born in Poland in 1908 to Jewish parents who moved to Germany during the first World War and then on to England in 1920.

Bronowski won a scholarship to study Mathematics at Cambridge but was also involved with editing a literary periodical called Experiment. This was an early sign that he would be one of the extraordinary few thinkers to straddle the divide between science and humanities – the ‘two cultures’ famously discussed by C.P. Snow in his 1959 lecture and paving the way to the ‘third culture (scientists who are directly communicating their new, sometimes provocative, ideas to the general public).

Bronowski’s interests ranged widely, from biology to poetry and from chess to Humanism, his commitment to which is evidenced in the following excerpt written in October 1968:

The notion that a man shall judge for himself what he is told, sifting the evidence and weighing the conclusions, is of course implicit in the outlook of science. But it begins before that as a positive and active constituent of humanism. For evidently the notion implies not only that man is free to judge, but that he is able to judge. This is an assertion of confidence which goes back to a contemporary of Socrates, and claims (as Plato quotes him) that “man is the measure of all things”. In humanism, man is all things: he is both the expression and the master of the creation.

The Ascent of Man

Jacob Bronowski is best remembered for The Ascent of Man, a thirteen part TV series produced by the BBC in 1973, in which he explored the history of science and technology. It is said that it was this seminal TV series which inspired the late great American astronomer Carl Sagan to make his own documentary series, Cosmos, which also inspired a generation of humanists.

Contrary to David Hume, Bronowski championed the idea that the ethical ‘ought’ could be derived from the scientific exploration of what ‘is’ . A particularly poignant and moving part of the series was filmed at the Auschwitz concentration camp and begins with the following:

It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Bronowski taught mathematics at the University College Hull from 1934 to 1942. The economist Eric Roll who worked with Bronowski in Hull said of him:

He was … a warm and vibrant human being. Every encounter with him was a powerful tonic which left one feeling intellectually and emotionally stimulated and enhanced. He did not, however, suffer fools gladly and could be bitingly sardonic about human folly or about the glaring discrepancies so often to be found between public acclaim and true worth. But to his friends he was kind and affectionate, a companion whose gaiety and wit counterbalanced his serious approach to life.

Bronowski died in New York in 1974, a year after the completion of The Ascent of Man. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London.

See also…

• Wikipedia biography of Bronowski
• Jacob Bronowski Humanist Heritage Campaign

This small group of working- class atheists started the Oracle in response to the perceived failure of working-class movements to address the rising tide of working-class poverty; and disgust at the apparent appeasement of the authorities by the version of Owenite socialism then prevalent.

The publication promised to be radically democratic, atheistic and secular in its criticism and recommendations.

Charles Southwell

The first editor of the Oracle was Charles Southwell. The fourth issue included an antisemitic article “The Jew Book”, which described the Bible as “This revoltingly odious Jew production…” As a consequence, Charles Southwell was arrested for blasphemy on 27 November 1841 and imprisoned for twelve months in January 1842.

George Jacob Holyoake

George Jacob Holyoake, the Owenite lecturer for Sheffield, defended Southwell in December 1841, in a lecture and took over the editorship of the Oracle.

Holyoake’s approach was more moderate than Southwell’s. However, on 24 May 1842, he delivered a lecture in Cheltenham, during which he answered a question from a local preacher in the the audience about God’s place in a socialist community. He said ’for my part I don’t believe there is such a thing as a God’….’If I could have my way I would place the Deity on half-pay as the Government of this Country did the subaltern officers’

Holyoake was arrested for blasphemy on 2 June and eventually sentenced to six months imprisonment in Gloucester gaol.

Thomas Paterson

Thomas Paterson took over as editor and was himself imprisoned for one month in January 1843 for “displaying obscene and blasphemous literature in the window of the Oracle office in Holywell Street; and for fifteen months in November 1843 for selling blasphemous publications in Edinburgh.”

The last edition was published in 1843.

Southwell was released from prison in February 1843, but refused to resume the editorship of the Oracle mainly because he had changed his mind about the value of the tone which he had originally given to the paper and which Paterson had maintained.

On the closure of the Oracle, Holyoake founded the moderate Movement, and anti-persecution gazette, to which Chilton was a contributor. It lasted until 1845.

Also see…

• Wikipedia article on the Oracle
• Darwin’s Ancestors: The Evolution of Evolution

Ethical Societies – disentangling moral ideals from religious doctrines

Ethical Societies grew out of the development of an ethical movement established by Felix Adler in America in 1876.  The aim of the ethical societies was to ‘disentangle moral ideals from religious doctrines, metaphysical systems and ethical theories’. The societies were also involved with moral education, penal reform and neighbourhood community work, along with assisting the women’s movement and drawing attention to racial, colonial and international problems by initiating and supporting effective action.

Stanton Coit. Photograph courtesy of Bishopsgate Library

The movement was brought to Britain in 1886 by Stanton Coit who formed the London Ethical Society. Coit was very keen on the idea of an Ethical Church and even held the fanciful idea that the Church of England could be turned into an ethical church.

There were twenty-six Societies in 1905-6, and seventy by 1915. The West London Ethical Church held Sunday services with up to 400 members and ethical hymns, readings and highly regarded music.

The Ethical Union

The Ethical Union was founded in 1896 bringing together four ethical societies, rising to 15 affiliates in 1915/16. The strength of the Union continued to decline during and after the war and by the early 1930’s, only ten Ethical centres were affiliated to the Ethical Union.

The Union of Ethical Societies was incorporated in 1928 as the Ethical Union.

Source: G. Spiller (1934) The Ethical Movement in Great Britain: A Documentary History, London

Social reform

Apart from the reflection on high ideals of “the good and the beautiful”, the Union also campaigned for social reform.

It joined a coalition for the Repeal of the Blasphemy Laws in 1912 and also worked for secular education, with an additional emphasis on the development of Moral Education.

Ethical members joined the Peace Society set up by freethinkers in the period before the Great War, which called for no conscription and opposition to military training in schools.

More women were involved in the Ethical Union than in the Secular movement and there was support for the suffragettes.

Harold Blackham

Harold Blackham

Coit fell out with the South Place Ethical Society, but remained a leader within the Union until beyond 1930s. He was joined by Harold J. Blackham as a ‘minister’ at the West London Ethical Church. Harold Blackham shifted the movement away from worship and the final vestiges of the movement’s religious past.

Attempts at a merger- Humanist Association and Humanist Council

In the 1950s, with ethical worship having lost its popularity, there was a move towards merging the Union of Ethical societies with the Rationalist Press Association (RPA) and South Place Ethical Society. In this, Harold Blackham played a leading role.

The Humanist Council was set up and a meeting in 1957 led to the launch of the Humanist Association to investigate amalgamation. Members agreed on action to support unilateral disarmament for nuclear tests, opposition to racial discrimination and support for work for underdeveloped countries.

Unfortunately, there were technical obstacles to merger, including difficulties surrounding charitable status, and the Humanist Association was replaced in 1959 by a co-ordinating Humanist Council.

‘British Humanist Association’ – an umbrella group

In 1963 the RPA and Ethical Union decided to sponsor an ‘umbrella’ British Humanist Association and its inaugural meeting took place in 1963 in the House of Commons with Sir Julian Huxley, A. J. Ayer, and Baroness Wootton among those present.

Although both organisations retained their individual identities: the Ethical Union in West London was concerned with public relations, and the RPA, in Drury Lane, with publishing, both also promoted the British Humanist Association.

There was an immediate rise in membership, local group activity and university humanist groups were brought together and instituted the Humanist University Federation. Shortly after A J Ayer took over the presidency from Huxley, Baroness Wootton took over the Vice-Presidency and Blackham bacame Director, a position he remained in for many years.

British Humanist Association as we know it

In 1965 charity law meant that the Ethical Union was removed from the charities register on a technical point and this necessitated the RPA, because of its own charitable staus, pulling out of the joint running of the BHA.

The Ethical Union then changed its name to British Humanist Association, the old umbrella BHA being wound up. The battle for charitable status continued and was eventually won in 1983.

Also see…

• British Humanist Association - our history

165 Railton Road. Photograph by sarflondondunc

C.L.R James, the journalist, socialist theorist and writer, lived the final years of his life and died in this building in South London.

Visiting

The building is a private residence but is marked with a Blue Plaque.

Also see…

• Open Plaques
• The Brixton £10 note features James on the reverse