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“The Only Man of Nature That Ever Appeared in the World”: “Walking” John Stewart and the Trajectories of Social Radicalism, 1790–1822

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2014

Gregory Claeys
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Abstract

This article explores the ideas of “Walking” John Stewart (1747–1822), a little-known adventurer and philosopher active in debates over social reformation during the French Revolutionary period. Renowned as a peripatetic who walked from India to Britain, Stewart befriended Thomas Paine and others during the early years of the Revolution. His main aim was to persuade them of the value of his philosophy, which was derived from French materialism as well as Hindu and Buddhist sources. But Stewart also came under the influence of the Shakers, Dunkers, Moravians, and other North American sectarian communities. As early as 1791 he commended small-scale “cohabitations” of no more than 100 men and 100 women as the ideal form of association. Here, and in his radical approaches to marriage and sexual relationships, he strikingly anticipated the ideas of Robert Owen and the early socialists.

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Articles
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 636 - 659
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2014 

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References

1 The more political aspects of these developments are addressed in my The French Revolution Debate in Britain (London, 2007)Google Scholar.

2 On this theme generally in this period, see, e.g., my “The French Revolution and Utopianism in Britain,” in Utopianism and the Millennium, ed. Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann (London, 1993), 46–62Google Scholar. Some of the issues explored here are taken up in Tinker, Chauncey Brewster, Nature's Simple Plan: A Phase of Radical Thought in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1922)Google Scholar.

3 Notably in book 8, chap. 3.

4 Newton's chief work was The Return to Nature; or, a Defence of the Vegetable Regimen (London, 1811)Google Scholar. He allowed his children to run nude through their home. The group believed that the world was in the third Orphic phase of four stages of development, that of Sagittarius, the hunter, the next being the age of Aquarius, the Waterman, and that abstinence from human food was required in order to ensure human progression into a community of nature. Armytage, W. H. G., Yesterday's Tomorrows: A Historical Survey of Future Societies (London, 1968), 42Google Scholar. Thomas Love Peacock was another member of this circle, which also influenced Blake and Shelley, among others. The latter not only became a vegetarian but also renounced wearing anything made from animal skin. For Taylor, see Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings, ed. Raine, Kathleen and Harper, George Mills (Princeton, 1969)Google Scholar. Mary Wollstonecraft lodged with him for a time. On vegetarianism in this period, see Spencer, Colin, The Heretic's Feast: A History of Vegetarianism (London, 1993), 223–51Google Scholar.

5 See Thomas Bentley, The Rights of the Poor (1791) and The History of the Extraordinary Dirty Warehouse (1803).

6 Most notably as expressed in William Wilberforce's A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country Contrasted with Real Christianity (1797), a key contribution to the reformation of manners campaign. On libertinism in this period, see Cryle, Peter and O'Connell, Lisa, eds., Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2004)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 10; Jon Mee, “Libertines and Radicals in the 1790s: The Strange Case of Charles Pigott,” 183–203.

7 Lawrence (1773–1840) advocated a free love ideal termed “Nairism,” which was explored in his The Empire of the Nairs (1811), 4 vols.; reprinted in Modern British Utopias, ed. Claeys, G., 8 vols. (London, 1997), 5:1–327Google Scholar. The work was composed between 1793 and 1800.

8 In book 8, chap. 5 of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin treated existing marriage relations as a branch of the system of property and urged their abolition. Some of his circle are treated in Chernock, Arianne, Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism (Stanford, 2010)Google Scholar, esp. 82–105. There are also useful discussions of this group in Robert Maniquis, M. and Myers, Victoria, eds., Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism (Toronto, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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10 He does appear briefly in the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 52 (Oxford, 2004), 721–22Google Scholar. Even the British Library holds fewer than half of his published titles, and I have quoted at somewhat greater length here as a consequence. A brief review of his life and works was published in 1861 under the title Materialism: A Sketch of the Life and Writings of John Stewart, by “J.W.C.” (James W. Carrington). There is a chapter on Stewart in Bronson, Bertrand Harris, Facets of the Enlightenment (Berkeley, 1968), 266–97Google Scholar, which gives a good biographical account. One of the few recent commentaries on Stewart is Ron Heisler, “Walking Stewart: A Forgotten Great Freethinker,” Ethical Record (June 2003). His social and political thought has attracted virtually no attention at all.

11 John Stewart, The Harp of Apollo (1812), 284; title page of John Stewart, The Moral and Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 2 vols. (1810), also proclaimed in The Scripture of Reason and Nature (1813) and elsewhere.

12 Stewart, The Scripture of Reason and Nature, iv–v.

13 John Stewart, An Account of the Kingdom of Thibet (1777).

14 John Stewart, The Tocsin of Britannia (1794), 34.

15 He continued to dress this way until the costume was “worn out.” Taylor, John, Records of My Life, 2 vols. (1832), 1:287Google Scholar. The Dissenter William Taylor also appeared in Armenian dress. Sellers, Ian, “Unitarians and Social Change,” Hibbert Journal 61 (1962): 20Google Scholar.

16 John Stewart, The Book of Nature (1812), 56.

17 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:259.

18 Koch, G. A., Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason (New York, 1933)Google Scholar, 151.

19 John Stewart, Good Sense: Addressed to the British Nation (1794), 72.

20 Stewart, The Scripture of Reason and Nature, xxi; Stewart, Second Part of the Secret of Victory, 6; Stewart, The Book of Nature, 49. There is some discussion of Stewart's relations with Wordsworth in Grovier, Kelly, “‘Shades of the Prison House’: ‘Walking’ Stewart, Michel Foucault and the Making of Wordsworth's ‘Two Consciousnesses,’” Studies in Romanticism 44 (2005): 341–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 344–47.

21 See Bloch, Ruth, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge, 1985), 196–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. His works were cited in American Owenite circles considerably later; there is an excerpt from one in the Free Enquirer, series 2, vol. 4 (1831–32): 28Google Scholar. Palmer's wife thought that Stewart's doctrine that matter alone existed may well have been correct, but her husband apparently insisted that its “time is not yet come,” according to the unreliable James Cheetham, The Life of Thomas Paine (1817), 98.

22 University of Edinburgh MS. De. 7.90.

23 Ritson, Joseph, Letters of Joseph Ritson, 2 vols. (1833), 2:194Google Scholar.

24 Taylor was in the 1790s associated with the millenarian prophet Richard Brothers and was a vehement critic of the vices of the rich and powerful. See Harrison, J. F. C., The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (London, 1979)Google Scholar, 67, 82. Satirized in D'Israeli's Melincourt, he was also the author of an early defence of animal rights, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792), described as extending the theories of Paine and Wollstonecraft. This tract is sometimes described as specifically emanating from Wollstonecraft's views on improved sex education. See, e.g., Nixon, Edna, Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Life and Times (London, 1971), 93–94Google Scholar.

25 John Stewart, Opus Maximum; or, the Great Essay to Reduce the Moral World from Contingency to System (1803), xix; John Timbs, English Eccentrics and Eccentricities, 2:17–22; Timbs, Reminiscences of Michael Kelly, 2 vols. (1826), 1:251–52; De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 3:599–600; Monthly Repository 17 (1822): 248–49Google Scholar; The Sun, 21 February 1822, 3; Taylor, Records of My Life, 1:291; The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Walking Stewart (1822), 12–13.

26 Stewart, The Scripture of Reason and Nature, x–xi; Stewart, Good Sense, 95. The writer of The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Walking Stewart (1822) is nonetheless described as “a relative” on intimate terms with its subject. His view that women might one day reject childbirth through abstinence was applauded by the leading neo-Malthusian of the next generation, Richard Carlile (Every Woman's Book; or, What is Love?, 4th ed. [1826], 24), who described him as the originator of the “preventive check” of artificial birth control (Peter Fryer, The Birth Controllers, London, 1967, 75), a fact disputed by Fryer. Stewart saw nothing wrong with either prostitution or promiscuous sexual intercourse, though he warned that the “controul of the sexual passions” was the key to “mental sensibility” and urged that prostitutes be housed adequately for their own health and safety. Stewart, Opus Maximum, 195–96. It has been claimed that Carlile's atheism was encouraged by Stewart. Wiener, Joel H., Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (London, 1983), 110–11Google Scholar.

27 Stewart, The Scripture of Reason and Nature, x–xii; Stewart, Second Part of the Secret of Victory, 59–60.

28 Stewart, The Scripture of Reason and Nature, xv.

29 Stewart, The Tocsin of Britannia, 46; Thomas Clio Rickman, The Life of Thomas Paine (1819), 101. Their relations are discussed in Collins, Paul, The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine (London, 2005), 9–11Google Scholar, 242–43.

30 Ritson, Joseph, Letters of Joseph Ritson, 2 vols. (1833), 2:24Google Scholar.

31 He met Godwin as early as 12 February 1792, and saw him at least three times in 1794. Stewart also solicited his help in distributing his own works in 1799. Godwin Diary, Abinger Collection, Bodleian Library, De E. 201; De B. 214/6. (Godwin's Diary is now available online.) These meetings are noted in Philp, Mark's Godwin's Political Justice (London, 1986), 240–43Google Scholar. Godwin told James Hogg that Stewart was worth knowing for only then would a man know what a bore really was. Stewart in turn considered Godwin's Political Justice to be a good introduction to his own ideas, which he however regarded as far more ambitious. St. Clair, William, The Godwins and the Shelleys (London, 1989), 262Google Scholar, 544n21. Stewart's copy of the first edition of Political Justice survives in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC,. Stewart was doubtless aware of the pantisocracy scheme planned by Southey and Coleridge in 1794, which involved a community framed on Godwinian principles. See MacGillivray, J. R., “The Pantisocracy Scheme and Its Immediate Background,” in Studies in English by Members of University College, ed. Wallace, M. W. (Toronto, 1931), 131–69Google Scholar. The explicitly Orientalist dimensions of the plan, with its overtones of sexual libertinism, are explored in McKusick, James C., “Coleridge and the Politics of Pantisocracy,” in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge, 1998), 107–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. No major study of Wollstonecraft mentions Stewart.

32 On Oswald and Stewart, see Erdman, David V., Commerce des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in Paris, 1790–1793 (Columbia, 1986)Google Scholar, especially 118–19.

33 Palmer, Elihu, Posthumous Pieces (London, 1824)Google Scholar, 19.

34 The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 3:599; National Library of Scotland, MS. 5585, f. 33 (7 April 1798). Oswald was the author of The Cry of Nature, or An Appeal to Mercy and Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals (London, 1791)Google Scholar.

35 Taylor, Records of My Life, 1:289. Stewart's The Harp of Apollo reputedly lies seven feet under De Quincey's former orchard in Grasmere at the foot of Mount Fairfield, and The Apocalypse of Nature in “one of the coves of Helvellyn.” Salt, H. S., “Walking Stewart,” Temple Bar 93 (1891): 578Google Scholar.

36 Stewart, Second Peal of the Tocsin of Britannia, 29.

37 Redding, Cyrus, Fifty Years' Recollections, 3 vols. (1858), 2:109–10Google Scholar.

38 Salt, “Walking Stewart,” 573–78.

39 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:101.

40 Obituary in The Sun, 21 February 1822, 3; Stewart, Good Sense (1794), 63; Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:1; Stewart, Opus Maximum (1803), xxxii; Stewart, Travels Over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe (1790), 105. For a philosophic approach to these developments, see Yolton, John W., Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar. Stewart was however coy about his intellectual sources. He had an “aversion to books” (The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Walking Stewart, 4), and even a “hatred of reading,” according to De Quincey, reading “little or nothing but what he wrote himself” (The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 3:599), and even advertising on his frontispieces that his “studies were pursued, not in Libraries or Colleges, but in the great Volume of Life” (The Harp of Apollo). But Locke, Hume, Bacon, Voltaire, and Montesquieu appear in his pages, as well as many classical authors, such as Horace, usually cited in the original.

41 Stewart, The Book of Nature, 112; University of Edinburgh MS. De.7.90.

42 Stewart, The Philosophy of Human Society, 5–6.

43 Stewart, The Apocalypse of Nature, 73; Stewart, Travels Over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe, xxxiv.

44 University of Edinburgh MS. De.7.90.

45 University of Edinburgh MS. De.7.90 (note in cover of Opus Maximum).

46 Stewart, Second Part of the Secret of Victory, 77.

47 John Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:1–15; Stewart, The Book of Nature, i; Stewart, The Scripture of Reason and Nature, 74–75.

48 Stewart, The Harp of Apollo, 255.

49 Stewart, Travels Over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe, 1:14–31.

50 Stewart, Opus Maximum, 128.

51 So assumes Koch, for instance (Republican Religion, 161). On the reception of Indian ideas in Europe in this period, see Schwab, Raymond, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York, 1984)Google Scholar, esp. 131–352, and for a selection of contemporary primary sources, see Marshall, P. J., ed., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar. For Buddhism, see in particular Almond, Philip C., The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Allen, Charles, The Buddha and the Sahib: The Men Who Discovered India's Lost Religions (London, 2002)Google Scholar. For this period there are also useful discussions in Richardson, Alan and Hofkosh, Sonia, eds., Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834 (Bloomington, 1996)Google Scholar. Buddhism was linked to atheism in Britain in the later Victorian period, e.g., by Blackie, John Stuart in The Natural History of Atheism (London., 1877), 108–76Google Scholar.

52 Stewart, The Book of Nature (1812), 84. Koch argues that this ideal was however described by Stewart as an attribute of matter, not of spirit, thus an ideal of “immaterial karma.” Republican Religion, 161.

53 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:162–63.

54 Stewart, Good Sense: Addressed to the British Nation, 6.

55 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:421; Stewart, The Harp of Apollo, 183, 322.

56 Koch, Republican Religion, 162. See Helvétius, C. A., De L'Esprit or Essays on the Mind (London, 1759)Google Scholar.

57 On British utilitarianism generally in this period, see Albee, Ernest, A History of English Utilitarianism (London, 1902), 91–165Google Scholar, and Stephen, Leslie, The English Utilitarians, 3 vols. (London, 1900)Google Scholar, esp. vol. 1.

58 Stewart, The Philosophy of Human Society, 28.

59 Taylor, Records of My Life, 1:291.

60 De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 3:99–101. On atheism in this period, see Berman, David, A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (London, 1988), 110–33Google Scholar.

61 Stewart, The Tocsin of Social Life, 77–78.

62 Analytical Review 9 (1791): 24Google Scholar.

63 Stewart, The Book of Intellectual Life; or, The Sun of the Moral World, 5.

64 Stewart, Second Peal of the Tocsin of Britannia, 28; Analytical Review 18 (1794): 59–61Google Scholar. At this moment such a label could be seen as applying most prominently to Godwin.

65 Stewart, Travels Over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe, 1, xxi–xxii.

66 Stewart, Good Sense: Addressed to the British Nation, 110; Stewart, The Tocsin of Britannia, iii, 5, 9, 36; Second Peal of the Tocsin of Britannia, 6. Godwin, of course, was similarly wary of the revolutionary aspects of the London Corresponding Society.

67 Jordan, John E., De Quincey to Wordsworth: The Biography of a Relationship (Berkeley, 1962)Google Scholar, 176; Stewart, The Tocsin of Britannia, 10; Analytical Review 18 (1794): 442–44Google Scholar; Stewart, Second Peal of the Tocsin of Britannia, 9.

68 British Critic 3 (1794): 304–05Google Scholar.

69 Stewart, Good Sense, summarized in the Analytical Review 20 (1794): 317–19Google Scholar.

70 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:1.

71 Ibid., 1:67. He also condemned unreservedly those “foulest traitors” like Colonel Despard, who sought revolution by coup d'état. Stewart, The Harp of Apollo, 265.

72 Stewart, The Book of Nature, 95.

73 Stewart, The Scripture of Reason and Nature, xliii, 37–38.

74 Anti-Jacobin Review 21 (1807): 322Google Scholar.

75 Stewart, The Book of Intellectual Life; or, The Sun of the Moral World, 73–74, 94.

76 Stewart, The Book of Nature, 54–55.

77 Stewart, Travels Over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe, 180–81.

78 Stewart, An Important and Infallible Secret Discovered and Developed (1807), 4; Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 24.

79 Monthly Review 14 (1794): 328–32Google Scholar; Stewart, Good Sense: Addressed to the British Nation, 88–90.

80 Stewart, The Tocsin of Britannia, 13–14, 20.

81 Ibid., 39, 50–51.

82 Stewart, Good Sense, 9–11, 50, 55.

83 Ibid., 74–75; Travels Over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe, 1:159–62.

84 Stewart, Second Peal of the Tocsin of Britannia, 5, 11, 14.

85 Stewart, An Important and Infallible Secret Discovered and Developed, 25–26.

86 Ibid., 32, 47–49, 53; Stewart, The Harp of Apollo, 319.

87 Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar.

88 Stewart, The Tocsin of Social Life, 18–20.

89 Ibid., 32.

90 Stewart, Opus Maximum, vii, 1, 91, 152, 160.

91 Ibid., 197; Stewart, The Philosophy of Human Society , 103; Stewart, The Book of Nature, 83.

92 Stewart, The Scripture of Reason and Nature, 117; Stewart, The Harp of Apollo, 259.

93 “Utopian” is used here in a narrow historical sense to describe a commitment to schemes involving community of goods and the communal regulation of behavior through enhanced sociability. See my Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea (London, 2011)Google Scholar for further explanation, and “News from Somewhere: Enhanced Sociability and the Composite Definition of Utopia and Dystopia,” History 98 (2013): 145–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a more detailed argument.

94 On Spencean approaches to property in this period, see Chase, Malcolm, The People's Farm: English Agrarian Radicalism, 1775–1840 (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar. Spenceanism and religion are treated in McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar. The Spenceans also appreciated the achievements of the North American Christian communities, as evidenced by Thomas Evans's pamphlet, Christian Policy in full Practice among the People of Harmony, a Town in the State of Pennsylvania (1818). A variety of literary utopias also explored ideas of community of property at this time, notably An Essay on Civil Government (1793) and [Thomas Northmore], Memoirs of Planetes; or, a Sketch of the Laws and Manners of Makar (1795).

95 This in turn had featured in various Christian heresies through the ages, including the twelth-century Cathars or Albigensians and the fifteenth-century Adamite Hussites. It would feature prominently in various nineteenth-century American communitarian movements, notably John Humphrey Noyes's Bible Communism and Mormonism.

96 This scheme projected a utopian community based upon explicitly republican principles, cast in fictional guise. It is reprinted in Claeys, G., ed., Utopias of the British Enlightenment (Cambridge: 1994), 71–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the recurrent appeal of Sparta in this period, see Rawson, Elizabeth, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1960)Google Scholar.

97 This was published as the second volume of Stewart's Travels Over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe. The Library of Congress catalog indicates publication in early 1791, while COPAC tentatively assigns 1792. On millenarianism in this period, see especially J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850, and Garrett, Clarke, Respectable Folly: Millenarians & the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore, 1975)Google Scholar.

98 Stewart, The Apocalypse of Nature, 223. Stewart's distance here from the radical individualism of Godwin's Political Justice should perhaps be stressed.

99 Stewart, The Tocsin of Social Life, 22.

100 Owen published the Philadelphia Quaker W. S. Warder's “A brief Sketch of the Religious Society of People called Shakers” in 1817 (reprinted in his Life, vol. 1A [1858], 143–54Google Scholar). He described it as showing how, “by a very inferior community life, wealth could be so easily created for all, that after a comparatively short period all the members obtained abundance without money and without price, and were removed from the fear of want, knowing by experience that they could and would be supplied with all things necessary for health and comfort with the regularity of the seasons.” Life, 1:242–43. He would later acquire the Rappite community of Harmony in Indiana, renaming it New Harmony. He called the Moravian, Shaker, and Harmony communities “very imperfect” but thought they offered “sure proof of the gigantic superiority of union over division, for the creation of wealth” in 1825. Claeys, G, ed., Selected Works of Robert Owen (1993), 2:12–13Google Scholar. On the British background to many of these colonial experiments, see Armytage, W. H. G., Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England, 1660–1960 (London, 1961)Google Scholar. On the development of these communities in the American colonies and early United States, see in particular Lockwood, George B., The New Harmony Movement (New York, 1905)Google Scholar, and Bestor, A. E., Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarianism in America, 1663–1829 (Philadelphia, 1950)Google Scholar.

101 The pietist Moravian Brethren had emigrated to America in 1736 from Saxony. Their chief community in this period was Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, seventy miles north of Philadelphia, which was begun in 1741 and was much more egalitarian than the original Herrnhut community, though community of goods was practiced here only briefly, between 1740 and 1760, and then on practical rather than ideological grounds. The Moravians, however, often labored for the community in return for food, clothing, shelter, and the education of their children. Gollin, Gillian Lindt, Moravians in Two Worlds (New York 1967Google Scholar), 142. “Love feasts,” or festivals that linked work to religion, were a common practice binding the community. The first Moravian community in Britain had been founded in 1746, and an early member of the sect was John Wesley. See Towlson, Clifford W., Moravian and Methodist: Relationships and Influences in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1957)Google Scholar. Stringent regulation of both economic and moral life defined these experiments, but their “feasts” brought charges of debauchery and worse. Another writer to link Thomas More to both Owen and the Moravians in this period was Southey, Robert. See Sir Thomas More; Or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 2 vols. (1829), 1:143Google Scholar. Southey was well aware, ca. 1813, of Owen's movement in this direction. See my “A Tale of Two Cities: Robert Owen and the Search for Utopia, 1815–17,” in Utopian Moments, ed. Colin Davis and Miguel Angel Ramiro Avilés (London, 2012), 99–105Google Scholar. The Shakers or Shaking Quakers had originated in England in the 1740s and, led by “Mother” Ann Lee, left for the American colonies in 1774, where their close-knit groups held their goods in common and upheld industry, simplicity, and an unblemished spiritual life. The main Shaker settlements, at New Lebanon and Niskeyuna, New York, also included the holding of goods in common and the fomenting of strong communal bonds. A good introduction to the sect is Andrews, Edward Deming, The People Called Shakers: A Search for the Perfect Society (Oxford, 1953)Google Scholar. On trends in American communitarianism in this period, see, e.g., Oved, Yaacov, Two Hundred Years of American Communities (New Brunswick, 1993), 19–108Google Scholar.

102 Stewart, The Tocsin of Social Life, 89.

103 University of Edinburgh MS. De.7.90.

104 Stewart, Opus Maximum, 79; Stewart, The Roll of a Tennis Ball, Through the Moral World (Dublin, 1812), 289–92Google Scholar. The Dunkers or Dunkards were best known for the Ephrata community in southern Pennsylvania, which was founded by Conrad Beissel in 1732. Its members, who never numbered more than three hundred, initially often practiced celibacy, though marriage was still permitted. They lived in common and shared their property until 1786. Their diet mostly consisted of fruits and vegetables, and they generally embraced austerity. It still had seventeen members in 1900. See Holloway, Mark, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680–1880, 2nd ed. (New York, 1966), 43–51Google Scholar.

105 He would have been aware that both the Shakers and the Rappites abstained from sexual intercourse. Most of his discussion of these groups is in The Roll of a Tennis Ball, Through the Moral World, where Thomas Clarkson is given as a key source on Quakerism.

106 Stewart, The Roll of a Tennis Ball, Through the Moral World, 106, 268, 289–92; Stewart, Opus Maximum, 128.

107 On the experience of women in American communitarianism in this period, see Muncy, Raymond Lee, Sex and Marriage in Utopian Communities: Nineteenth Century America (Baltimore, 1973)Google Scholar; Foster, Lawrence, Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons (Syracuse, 1991)Google Scholar, esp. 17–56; and Chmielewski, Wendy E., Kern, Louis J., and Klee-Hartzell, Marlyn, eds., Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States (Syracuse, 1993)Google Scholar, esp. 21–37.

108 At some earlier points Moravians had occasionally drawn lots to determine their spouses. “Bee Bee,” Moravian Schools and Customs (London, 1889)Google Scholar, 12. The same method had been used to choose elders and bishops. Thanks to Elizabeth Elbourne for pointing this out to me.

109 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 24.

110 Stewart, Opus Maximum, 153.

111 Ibid., 191–92; Steewart, The Sophiometer, 9.

112 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 248–49.

113 Owen's Observations on the Cotton Trade (1803) was his first published discussion of the industrial system, though hardly yet a critique thereof.

114 Stewart, Opus Maximum, 191. Adam Smith's well-known comments on the “mental mutilation” resulting from an extreme division of labor may well have been an inspiration here. See Rogers, James E. Thorold, ed., An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1869)Google Scholar, 2:371.

115 Stewart, The Apocalypse of Human Perfectibility, 11–12.

116 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:164–66. Godwin had suggested that marriage should be abolished in Political Justice, and Owen would be associated with similar ideas from the 1820s onward.

117 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:36, 116–17.

118 Ibid., 66.

119 Hall did not, however, promote small-scale communities, but mooted equal division of property using three precedents: the ancient Jewish constitution, Sparta, and the Jesuit government of Paraguay. The Effects of Civilisation on the People in European States (1805), 216–24.

120 Stewart, The Revelation, 87–88.

121 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:71–72. Koch thus errs in contrasting Stewart to Elihu Palmer in asserting that Stewart thought of perfectibility only on the individual, not the social, level. Koch, Republican Religion, 152.

122 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:73.

123 Stewart, The Sophiometer, 206–07.

124 Stewart, The Scripture of Reason and Nature, 114.

125 It is not improbable that this missing link here in this period is the indomitable Westminster radical tailor and atheist Francis Place, who knew Carlile, helped Owen draft the New View, and probably knew Stewart as well. But this remains unproven.

126 General studies of the origins and development of Owen's ideas include Podmore, Frank, Robert Owen: A Biography (London, 1923)Google Scholar, and Harrison, John F. C., Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen & the Owenites in Britain and America (New York, 1969)Google Scholar.

127 Whitney, Lois, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1934)Google Scholar, 292, describes Owen as a friend of Stewart's, but provides no reference to substantiate the claim. Thanks to Lorna Davidson at the New Lanark Trust and to Ian Donnachie for responding to queries about Stewart and Owen. The New Lanark Visitors Book from this period is unfortunately missing.

128 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:50–51; Stewart, Book of Intellectual Life; or, The Sun of the Moral World, 131–33.

129 From ca. 1830. See in particular Lectures on the Marriages of the Priesthood of the Old Immoral World (1835), reprinted in Selected Works of Robert Owen, 2:259–324. On the development of the women's movement within Owenism see Taylor, Barbara, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1983)Google Scholar, esp. 183–216.

130 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:136–37. Owen would attack competition as such only in the Report to the County of Lanark (1820).

131 Stewart, The Apocalypse of Human Perfectibility, 17, 152; Stewart, The Harp of Apollo, 263.

132 Stewart, The Book of Intellectual Life, 152, 174–75, 195.

133 Owen's scheme involved organizing communities around eight groupings defined by age, and progressing from education through employment to the supervision of others and maintenance of relations with other communities. Some of the other sources of Owen's proposals here are discussed in my Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar.

134 Southey stated that if anyone had glimpsed utopia, Stewart had, in Sir Thomas More or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 2:380–81. Here Stewart was described as “afflicted with a tympany of mind produced by metaphysics, which was at that time a common complaint, though attended in him with unusual symptoms: but his heart was healthy and strong, and might in former ages have enabled him to acquire a distinguished place among the Saints of the Thebais or the Philosophers of Greece.” Southey had spoken with Owen at length in 1816, and visited New Lanark in 1819. While he was critical of aspects of the New Lanark establishment, he nonetheless wrote that it “might as well be encouraged as Quakerism and Moravianism.” Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819 (London, 1929)Google Scholar, 265.

135 British Critic 21 (1793): 93Google Scholar.

136 Stewart, The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, 1:256.

137 Rights and Remedies; or the Theory and Practice of True Politics (1795), part 2, 47.

138 Literary Journal: A Review of Literature, Science, Manners, Politics 2 (1803): 539–43Google Scholar.

139 Monthly Mirror, ns 8 (December 1810): 442.

140 [Isaac Disraeli]. Flim-Flams! or the Life and Errors of My Uncle and His Friends, 2nd. ed., 3 vols. (1806), 2:237–45.

141 Bertrand Harris Bronson, Facets of the Enlightenment, 290.

142 De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 3:115.