WI: Parallelograms of Paupers a success

I am currently reading through The Origins of Socialism by George Lichtheim, and his section on Robert Owen had an interesting little titbit.

During the late 1810s and early 1820s Robert Owen became increasingly worried about the rising problem of pauperism that was plaguing the country, and sought to offer a solution. According to Lichtheim pp117-118:

Owen in his Report to the County of Lanark (1821) proposed a form of unemployment relief which was also a project for what a century later would have been called collective farming. Instead of being maintained in idleness, the unemployed were to be settled on the land and made to grow their own food. Later versions of the plan allowed for industrial production as well, but at first the emphasis was on farming, specifically on spade cultivation. (Owen disapproved of the plow.) In addition to raising crops, the settlers would also improve their physiques and acquire an education. Their bodily and mental powers would thus be developed and placed in the service of the community. All these advantages could be secured by establishing Villages of Unity and Cooperation, which consisted of 500 to 1,500 persons settled on 1,000 to 1,500 acres of land, with blocks of houses built around large squares. Within the squares, public buildings would be erected so as to divide the squares into quadrangles: hence the derisive label "Mr. Owen's parallelograms of paupers," which attached itself to the project after Cobbett had denounced it in his usual robust fashion. Parliament and government did not respond, although Owen was invited to London to lay his scheme before them.

In a later footnote he also notes that pp263-264:

That Owen's concern with pauperism was shared in high places is evident from the fact that in 1819 a committee was formed by the Duke of Kent, Sir Robert Peel, David Ricardo, and others, to inquire into the practicability of Owen's schemes for combating unemployment, and to raise funds for an experimental "parallelogram." Subscriptions failed to come in, and the committee dissolved after a few months. Southey blamed this upon Owen's tactless remarks about religion, holding that if he "had not alarmed the better part of the nation by proclaiming, upon the most momentous of all subjects, opinions which are alike fatal to individual happiness and the general good," he hight have obtained more support...In short, since Owen was an atheist, the Church could not be expected to take an interest in the plight of the workless.

What would have been the effect of these proposals going through and received sufficient support? Would it be possible that Britain develops a system of unemployment relief based on agrarian communism? Furthermore, with such agrarian reforms now set as a precedent, might similar measured be brought to bear in Ireland in the aftermath of the famine?

Of course, there are also many ways that such a system could go horribly wrong, with landed interests using the recipients of such relief as a cheap labour force of pseudo-serfs.
 
Well, to be honest its implementation was always going to be very unlikely. I've not read Lichtheim's book but my academic expertise is in the history of poverty and reform, so I can offer some insight.

I don't know the ins and outs of the parallelogram programme but I doubt Owen's atheism was the only issue. For one thing, the Church of England was actually quite interested in the plight of the workless. Or at least some of the clergy were. But, more specifically, many of those wanting to fight poverty already have a system in mind, one that isn't anywhere near as radical - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system

What you've got to remember about poverty in nineteenth-century Britain are these things:

1. The poor are entitled, legally, to assistance from the state. For many interventionists, who grow in number during the Victorian era, the best efforts in helping the poor lie in reforming this system of the Poor Law. Not embarking on socially radical schemes.

2. The Poor Law is supported through the rate taxation system and administered at the local level. Even after the reform of the New Poor Law in 1834 the system remains rooted in the hands of local taxpayers. This isn't everyone, but actually only those who hold property above a certain value. Thus the well-off both pay for the system and administer it through the Boards of Guardians. This is not a situation that is conducive to reform. It also means that the poor are effectively tied to local areas if they want relief - parishes had the right, and used it, to send ''alien'' paupers back to where they could be relieved. Or demand payment be made from their home parish.

3. Although the poverty and unemployment in the countryside was intense, nineteenth-century Britain is a place where both of those things, like everything else, is concentrating in the towns. Your POD is in 1819/1820 - the first railways will be dramatically increasing the urban revolution within a decade. By 1851, as OTL, the majority of Britons will live in a town or city. This means that Owen's system, even if adopted, will be completely out-dated and defunct within a couple of decades. People continued to talk about ''farm colonies'' and such like well into the 1890s, but nothing ever really came of them on a national sense.

4. Many people believed, earnestly, that the unemployed [that word wasn't even widely used at the time] and poor were in such states because of moral failings on their parts. That they hadn't tried hard enough, applied themselves diligently, or saved and scrimped, and were thus paying the price. Owen's scheme offers little moral correction that the majority of people at the time would have approved of. Or at least though with the money to make it happen.

When you add these things up it offers, I hope, some insight into why Owen's scheme wouldn't have worked or been applied. I mean, there was a reason the man himself shifted to a mill and town-based system of relieving poverty in New Lanark.
 
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