21. Secularism and Salvage

Saull, always a stabilizing force, helped the rump Owenites salvage what they could. And every year he would faithfully chair Robert Owen’s birthday celebrations in John Street. But in practical terms he gravitated to George Jacob Holyoake’s new “Utilitarian Society”, which met in the Mechanics’ Hall of Science. It touted a new “secularism”, and effectively took over the old Owenite branches and widened participation to embrace the liberal intelligentsia. Saull was now moving among this new constituency: men and women fascinated by the new dissolvent literature and anonymous pot-boiler Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Here he met the young firebrand Robert Cooper, the Birmingham pen manufacturer Josiah Mason, that literary young blade G. H. Lewes, and “outside-of-out” preacher George Dawson.