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International audience; This introduction examines the intellectual, political, economic, and social context to the reception of Robert Owen's ideas, and Owenism more generally, in Continental Europe. The introduction describes how Owen's ideas attracted significant interest in the years following the Napoleonic Wars, particularly in France, and discusses how the French reception of his ideas served as a filter and medium through which his ideas were disseminated throughout Continental Europe. The article describes the individual contributions to this special issue and traces the story of how Owen's ideas never attracted in Continental Europe the widespread interest they enjoyed in Britain, Ireland, or America.

International audience; "This article examines the impact of Robert Owen’s educational ideas in France. It traces how his ideas attracted the attention of French liberals, particularly Charles de Lasteyrie, Alexandre de Laborde and Joseph-Marie de Gérando, and republicans associated with Marc-Antoine Jullien’s Revue Encyclopédique. The article focuses in particular on the work of one of Owen’s early French followers, the leading radical egalitarian political and social theorist Joseph Rey (1779–1855). The article examines how Owen’s reflections on education served as the foundation for Rey’s own theoretical and practical contributions to educational philosophy and pedagogical reform. Drawing extensively from unpublished archive material, the article describes and analyses Rey’s detailed egalitarian critique of the work of educational theorist Joseph Jacotot, and explores how Rey advanced a far more ambitious philosophy of education that, when translated into practice, eliminated the traditional divide between manual skills and intellectual ability, resulting in a genuinely inclusive and comprehensive educational system."

This article describes the culture of print and polemic associated with the Cromwellian invasion of Scotland and the resistance of the Church of Scotland. It argues that print solidified Parliamentary ideas during the invasion but that it did not continue to do so after English dominance had been established. These texts illustrate the divisions between the mentalité of the Cromwellian rank-and-file and that of the rather small and probably unrepresentative body of opinion formers who sought to control and represent it.

Darwin’s extensive reading of literature was a crucial starting point for Gillian Beer’s insights into the interchange between science and culture which have shaped scholarship in the field for the last three decades. However, while the impact of Darwin’s reading on the imaginative development of his theories has continued to be an extremely productive area of study, there has been hardly any consideration of the broader context of nineteenth-century scientists’ reading practices in relation to literature, giving the impression that Darwin’s thought was especially, perhaps uniquely, amenable to the impact of his immersion in fiction and poetry. This paper examines the extensive but relatively little-known literary reading of the comparative anatomist Richard Owen, suggesting that important aspects of other, and even explicitly non-Darwinian, areas of Victorian science were just as likely to be influenced by their practitioners’ enthusiasm for fiction and poetry. That Darwin and Owen frequently read the same literary works, and often in the same or similar locations (whether in metropolitan clubs or out in the field), also permits direct comparisons of their reading practices, which, intriguingly, suggest that, far from being uniquely amenable to it, Darwin’s scientific thought might in fact have been shaped much less by his literary reading than that of contemporaneous naturalists like Owen. In particular, the paper focuses on Owen’s reading of serial fiction, and considers the close parallels between his practices of reading serial novels and his use of comparative anatomy in his renowned reconstructions of the skeletons of prehistoric creatures.