The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
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PENGUIN BOOKS
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Robert Noonan (Robert Tressell was a pseudonym) was born in Dublin in 1870, but as a young man moved to South Africa, where he worked as a decorator. He came to England at the turn of the century and lived in Hastings, where he worked as a signwriter and interior decorator. Tressell decided to emigrate to Canada in 1910, but died of pneumonia en route in Liverpool in February 1911 and was buried there as a pauper. Tressell was unable to get The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, his only novel, published during his lifetime. It was eventually published in an abridged form in 1914, largely through the persistence of Tressell’s daughter, Kathleen Noonan. The unexpurgated version was not published until 1955.
Tristram Hunt is a lecturer in history at Queen Mary, University of London. Educated at Cambridge and Chicago universities, he is the author of The English Civil War: At First Hand (2002) and Building Jerusalem (2004). He worked at Labour Party headquarters on two general election campaigns and as a ministerial adviser in the Labour government of 1997–2001.
ROBERT TRESSELL
The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists
With an Introduction by
Tristram Hunt
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Great Britain by Grant Richards 1914
Published in Penguin Classics 2004
1
Introduction copyright © Tristram Hunt, 2004
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author of the Introduction has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90784–0
Contents
Introduction
Further Reading
Author’s Preface
1 An Imperial Banquet. A Philosophical Discussion. The Mysterious Stranger. Britons Never shall be Slaves
2 Nimrod: a Mighty Hunter before the Lord
3 The Financiers
4 The Placard
5 The Clock-case
6 It is not My Crime
7 The Exterminating Machines
8 The Cap on the Stairs
9 Who is to Pay?
10 The Long Hill
11 Hands and Brains
12 The Letting of the Room
13 Penal Servitude and Death
14 Three Children. The Wages of Intelligence
15 The Undeserving Persons and the Upper and Nether Millstones
16 True Freedom
17 The Rev. John Starr
18 The Lodger
19 The Filling of the Tank
20 The Forty Thieves. The Battle: Brigands versus Bandits
21 The Reign of Terror. The Great Money Trick
22 The Phrenologist
23 The ‘Open-air’
24 Ruth
25 The Oblong
26 The Slaughter
27 The March of the Imperialists
28 The Week before Christmas
29 The Pandorama
30 The Brigands hold a Council of War
31 The Deserter
32 The Veteran
33 The Soldier’s Children
34 The Beginning of the End
35 Facing the ‘Problem’
36 The OBS
37 A Brilliant Epigram
38 The Brigands’ Cave
39 The Brigands at Work
40 Vive la System!
41 The Easter Offering. The Beano Meeting
42 June
43 The Good Old Summer-time
44 The Beano
45 The Great Oration
46 The ‘Sixty-five’
47 The Ghouls
48 The Wise men of the East
49 The Undesired
50 Sundered
51 The Widow’s Son
52 ‘It’s a Far, Far Better Thing that I do, than I have Ever Done’
53 Barrington Finds a Situation
54 The End
Appendix: Mugsborough
Introduction
At the end of an interview with a leading figure in the New Labour administration of 1997, a journalist asked finally what book had made the greatest impact on the cabinet minister’s political life. Without missing a beat, she replied, ‘Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.’
Why, some hundred years after it was written, did a nominally socialist politician still feel the instinctive, unerring need to pay homage to Tressell’s work? Why does this book, above all other working-class novels, retain such a powerful grip on the reading public and, more especially, the progressive imagination? For one century on, the rambling story of a group of painters and decorators on the south coast of England remains at the fulcrum of British politico-literary culture.
‘Robert Tressell’: The Man and his Times
The story of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is in large part the story of ‘Robert Tressell’. Born in Dublin in 1870, Robert Noonan or Croker (we remain unsure) was the illegitimate son of Samuel Croker, an Inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary, and Mary Noonan. After the death of Croker, Mary Noonan found security in marriage, taking Robert and his three siblings to a new home. But, still mourning the loss of his own father, Robert quarrelled bitterly with his step-father and left home having neither finished his education nor gained any professional apprenticeship.
The following years are hazy, but by the early 1890s Noonan (as I will follow common usage in calling him) had successfully emigrated to South Africa, where he earned a marginal living as a signwriter and jobbing hack for assorted popular newspapers. In 1891 he married Elizabeth Hartel in Cape Town, with whom he had one daughter, Kathleen. However, the marriage was not a happy one and a messy divorce was followed by the death of Elizabeth in 1895. Robert, together with Kathleen, then moved to Johannesburg, where he began to make a reputation for himself as a skilled artisan and political radical. As confrontation between the Boers and the British loomed, Noonan became involved with the Cape’s pro-Boer Irish nationalist brigades as well as with the socialist politics which encircled the nascent trade union movement. He was an active member of Johannesburg’s Trades and Labour Council and a regular at meetings of the international branch of the Independent Labour Party.
Typically, his actual role in the Boer War is unclear (some reports have him as an active combatant; others claim he left South Africa for the duration of the conflict). Either way, by 1901 he was in Engla
nd with Kathleen, suffering from tuberculosis and staying at the house of his sister in the genteel coastal resort of Hastings. Pursuing his old profession of signwriting and house-painting, Noonan embarked on a series of relatively well paid jobs for the town’s numerous building concerns. However, his career was chequered by a spate of rows as he stood up to the bullying foremen and exploitative owners of the major firms. With the depression of the early 1900s biting and trade low, father and daughter found themselves in a sparse, rented flat living hand to mouth on casual jobs, all of which exacerbated his already failing health. It was these miserable, grinding days – combined with his time as a decorator in Johannesburg – which provided the richly detailed material for The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
For even though Noonan was by economic circumstance working class, his writing always benefited from the outsider’s eye. He worked and fraternized with unskilled labourers on a daily basis, but he had been born middle class and remained conscious of the difference. It was a sense of separation further enhanced by his intellectualism. Despite interruptions to his formal schooling, Noonan was a highly educated man: fluent in French while displaying all the autodidact’s passion for reading. Contemporaries remembered him as an active conversationalist and purchaser of books who frequently quoted in conversation the words of Dickens, Swift, Fielding, Shakespeare, Shelley, Byron, Whittier, William Morris and, of course, John Ruskin.1
Perhaps more importantly, Noonan regarded himself not as a labourer but as a skilled artisan in the pre-industrial tradition. His widely admired technical proficiency and artistic flair secured him high rates of pay as well as the workshop nicknames ‘Raphael’ and ‘the professor’. Just as importantly, his vision of the craftsman honouring his skill by carrying out work to the best of his ability powerfully informed his social and political views. One fellow painter described him as,
a brilliant scenic painter and signwriter… He loved Art for Art’s sake. He shared with William Morris and Walter Crane a desire to give to the world the best that was in him, so that the beauty of his work should be an inspiration to all in striving for that which is most beautiful… Nothing distressed him more than the scamping of his work. He, like the rest of us, was not permitted to do his best. Everything was sacrificed to the god of profit.2
Increasingly, Noonan related his own beliefs in craftsmanship and fellowship to the broader political struggle around him. For his socialist sentiments, which first emerged in Johannesburg, enjoyed a ready welcome in 1900s England. After decades of disinterest, the late nineteenth century had witnessed a remarkable revival in socialist thinking. The works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels started to be translated from the German and French into English; municipal socialism was being preached in the town halls of Glasgow and Birmingham; Robert Blatchford’s brand of utopian socialism was commanding a readership of tens of thousands through the pages of Clarion; trade unions were becoming politicized under the banner of ‘New Unionism’; radical land reform was back on the agenda; while a nebulous sense of middle-class guilt nurtured the progressive politics of the Fabian Society. At the same time, the more ethical socialism of the later John Ruskin and the designer William Morris found a voice in the numerous guilds, churches and fellowships of the 1890s.
What marked out this period of socialism was both the ecumenical multiplicity of its thinking, but also its steady transition into practical party politics. From this intellectual and cultural ferment emerged the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), led by the Marxist Henry Hyndman; the breakaway Socialist League of William Morris; and the more mainstream Independent Labour Party, which went on to spawn the Labour Representation Committee and, ultimately, the Labour Party. As an educated, politically engaged artisan, Robert Noonan was highly familiar with these differing ideological currents, but as an activist he chose to align himself with Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation and its successor, the Social Democratic Party (SDP). He became closely involved with the Hastings branch, painting placards and designing manifestos as well as taking part in unemployed marches and political education campaigns.
It was this commitment to explaining the nature and promise of socialism, combined with an ever greater need for new sources of income, that drove Noonan to write The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. His polemical intent is apparent in the Preface, where he laments that ‘not only are the majority of people opposed to Socialism, but a very brief conversation with an average anti-socialist is sufficient to show that he does not know what Socialism means.’ At the same time, Noonan was determined not to produce the kind of stale propagandizing which was (and remains) such a common feature of socialist literature. Instead, his work was to be a novel. ‘My main object was to write a readable story full of human interest and based on the happenings of everyday life, the subject of Socialism being treated incidentally.’ In honour of the tools of his decorating trade, he adopted the pseudonym ‘Tressell’.
Characters, Themes and Setting
The chronicle of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is told through the character of Frank Owen: an easily recognizable Robert Noonan figure whose name invokes Britain’s first modern socialist, Robert Owen. Like Noonan, Frank Owen is a politically conscious, well-read and highly skilled artisan who from the outset is introduced as distinct from his workmates. ‘He was generally regarded as a bit of a crank: for it was felt that there must be something wrong about a man who took no interest in racing or football and was always talking a lot of rot about religion and politics.’ Owen even speaks differently from his peers, employing the standard English of literature rather than his colleagues’ and employers’ free-flowing slang.
The novel follows a year in the life of Owen and the painters and decorators of Rushton & Co. as they labour on various houses in and around Mugsborough (an undisguised Hastings). At the narrative core of the book is work and with it the relations between the classes. Yet what is immediately striking about this ‘working-class classic’ is the total absence of class solidarity amongst its leading protagonists. Its backdrop is not a mill town or mining valley with lock-outs and class struggle looming. Its daily setting does not present a conscious working class employed in a single industry bitterly at odds with a distant bourgeoisie – the traditional setting for ‘condition of England’ novels such as Dickens’ Hard Times. Rather, Tressel gives us the kind of gradated social hierarchy and non-industrial setting which was in fact the more typical experience of the Edwardian working class. The reality for millions was that of a fragmented, localized pattern of employment which actively mediated against the development of any broader class loyalty. The vast majority of British workers were in small-scale, non-unionized jobs, where relations between employer and employee were either direct or mediated by a series of sub-employers all helping to undermine a collective sense of grievance. What Tressell provided in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was a more truthful, far less romantic picture of the proletariat: individuals disorganized, brutally disciplined and at the same time hopelessly isolated.3
The Mugsborough building trade does not foster a politically engaged working class, but instead presents a daily struggle amongst labouring men for work and pay. Influenced by the contemporary vogue for social Darwinism, Tressell described the struggle as the ‘Battle of Life’ and regarded such debilitating competition, turning man against man, as the essential, savage ingredient of capitalism. But even as the workplace descends into a den of informants, thieves and liars, Tressell finds it difficult to blame them:
They [the workmen] all cursed Crass [the charge-hand], but most of them would have been very glad to change places with him: and if any one of them had been in his place they would have been compelled to do the same things, or lose the job… If you, reader, had been one of the hands, would you have slogged? Or would you have preferred to starve and see your family starve? If you had been in Crass’s place, would you have resigned rather than do such dirty work?
The social consequence of an emplo
yment structure based on the survival of the fittest was the ubiquitous, dehumanizing poverty that is such an evocative feature of the novel. As Tressell describes the cold, the hunger, and frequent indignity of the labourers’ lives there is a tangible sense of his bitter, personal knowledge of precisely such circumstances. With equal fury, Tressell also highlights the destruction of craftsmanship, and with it the self-respect of the individual workman, which such a profit-oriented system demanded. Scamping, sloshing and botching are all the employees of Rushton & Co. are allowed to perform. Those foolish enough to take time over their work or show a degree of pride in the product are swiftly dismissed. Only Owen’s superior technical skills allow him to hold fast to the values of craftsmanship he had been taught as an apprentice. When he is given the task of designing and decorating a more elegant section of the house, he approaches the work with almost Ruskinian ardour. For a brief while, Owen experiences the deep satisfaction of worthwhile labour. ‘From one till five seemed a very long time to most of the hands, but to Owen and his mate, who were doing something in which they were able to feel some interest and pleasure, the time passed so rapidly that they both regretted the approach of evening.’
Yet this is an exception. It is the shoddy strictures of capitalism which typically dictate the working day and foster the pervasive unnaturalness of the outwardly wealthy, contented Mugsborough. Tressell depicts a corrupted society where individualism is all-consuming, the natural union of marriage is rent asunder, and convicts are treated better than working men. What is more, this insidious upending of social norms affects rich and poor alike. Though the working class suffer most, no one (not even the foreman Hunter or Rushton the boss) is left untouched by the brutal dictates of what Tressell calls ‘The System’. To hammer home the point, that most unnatural act of all, suicide, stalks the novel’s pages. ‘If he [Owen] could not give them [his wife and child] happiness, he could at least put them out of reach of further suffering. If he could not stay with them, they would have to come with him. It would be kinder and more merciful.’