ROBERT OWEN, AUGUST 21, 1817.
The occupants were both to farm and manufacture, and, consequently, to employ the faculties of each description of poor. Besides comfortable lodging rooms, the buildings were intended to contain a public kitchen, mess rooms, and all requisite accommodation attached to comfortable cookery and eating; a chapel, infant schools, schools for adults, grounds for exercise and recreation, planted and beautified with trees. The lodgings for the married poor, each to be sufficient to accommodate two children with their father and mother: dormitories for children above three years of age; manufactories and gardens; a complete farming establishment; malting, and brewing-houses, corn-mill, dairy, and, in short, all the constituents for self-support. To the men were assigned the labours of agriculture, and the heaviest part of the manufactures. To the women the care of their children and houses, the cultivation of vegetables, the making of clothes, and an attendance, in rotation, on the kitchen, mess-room, and dormitories. The children were to be trained in the lighter occupations until fit for manly or womanly employment, &c. The expense of such an establishment for twelve hundred people, Owen estimated at £96,000.
In the latter part of this year, a great deal was heard of "The Fortunate Youth." The story told about whom was, that a young gentleman met with a very rich old one, who took a violent fancy to the youth, used often to have him at his house, without the knowledge of his parents, and finally, dying, left "The Fortunate Youth" an immense fortune. This lad succeeded in humbugging people to an unlimited extent, and in obtaining money from them, until, in a Newspaper of the 6th of December, appeared: "Soi-disant Fortunate Youth.—We lament to wound the feelings of the friends of this young man, but we are bound by a painful duty to caution the public against an impostor, whose detected falsehoods, and disingenuous acts, authorize the assertion, that there is not one word of truth in his whole story."
This was pretty plain speaking, and brought forth a disclaimer from "The Solicitor and Confidential Friend of 'The Fortunate Youth' and his family," in which he says, "I will venture to assert that this Youth has never defrauded, nor attempted to defraud, any one; and that if any person has any just pecuniary claim upon him, the liquidation of it will be immediately provided for, on such claim being made known to me." Once again he wrote defending his client; but alack, and well-a-day, a little time afterwards, in a letter to the same Newspaper, he writes (giving his own name, Weatherby): "I feel it now a duty I owe to the public to declare, that circumstances have since occurred, which induce me to think that I have been grossly deceived in my opinion of him, and that his pretensions to a large property are without foundation."
The editor then gives the impostor's real story.
"This young man's name is Abraham W. Cawston. His father is a farmer at Chippenham, near Newmarket. The early promise of shining talents induced his father to send him to school, under the tuition of the eminent Dr. Butler, of Shrewsbury, and there his attainments and abilities gained him universal admiration. He was not seventeen years of age when he paid his addresses to a young lady of fortune in that place, and from that time the strange artifice or imagination of this enormous fortune that had dropped to him, as it were, from the clouds, had birth. He first opened his wonderful secret to his father; and the story which he told was, that an aged gentleman had, at one of his journeys from home to school, fallen in with him in a stage coach going to Birmingham, and that he afterwards made him a deed of gift of his whole fortune! It did not, in the first disclosure, swell to the magnitude which it afterwards attained; but the first feeling that he manifested was to settle a part of his wealth on his parents and brother. For this purpose he was introduced to Mr. Weatherby, to whom he gave instructions to make a will; and, as his fortune was stated to be all personal, Mr. Weatherby saw no objection to the deed. His distribution of wealth, though uncommon, did not strike Mr. Weatherby as improbable, so clear and consistent were the boy's statements in their different interviews, and so filial, and brotherly, were the bequests.
"From this time, nothing could equal the romance of his story, the unblushing effrontery with which he maintained it, and the ingenious stratagems he devised to keep up the delusion. It would fill a volume to recount the history of the youth for the last two months; and we are possessed of so many curious anecdotes, that we shall entertain our readers with the relation of a few of them, since the affair has afforded a striking example of the courtesy which is shown to appearance, and the eagerness with which a meteor is contemplated in the hemisphere of rank and fashion. That tradesmen of all descriptions should crowd round his doors for the advantage of his orders, was natural; but that Bankers should contend for his account—Duchesses for the honour of his acquaintance—and Ministers for his Parliamentary support—prove how much all conditions of Society are on the alert for gold and power.
"He prevailed on his father to enter his elder brother, who is twenty-four years of age, and had been brought up in the line of farming, as a fellow commoner of Emanuel College, Cambridge.
"He instructed one solicitor to enter into a negociation for the purchase of several estates, and surveys had actually been made.