Robert Owen is best known as the founder of British socialism, as an ardent critic of inhumane industrialization, as a pioneering feminist, and as the proponent of just and fulfilling systems of economic organization. He was born in Newtown, Wales, on 14 May 1771, the son of Robert Owen, a saddler, ironmonger, and postmaster. Little is known of the son's early youth, except that he was soon devoted to reading, and devoured all the books a town of a thousand inhabitants could furnish. Religiously inclined, Owen was surprised to find great controversy among the Christian sects, and by the age of ten he had concluded (if we can take his memory seventy years later at face value) that there was something erroneous in all religions as they had been hitherto understood. It was a sentiment which would prove crucial to his later career.

When Owen was ten, his parents consented...