The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

by Robert Tressell

  The humour of the book is another vital element of its success. Tressell uses the speech of Mugsborough’s commerical elite to satirize their vulgar, self-satisfied stupidity with almost Dickensian aplomb – ‘“And then they say Hawstralia is on the other side of the globe, underneath our feet. In my opinion it’s ridiculous, because if it was true, wot’s to prevent the people droppin’ orf?” ’ Indeed, much of the book’s bawdy humour, characterization and crashing puns (the borough MP is called Sir Graball D’Enclosedland; competing decorating firms have titles such as Pushem & Sloggem, Bluffum & Doemdown) is highly reminiscent of the Dickens of Nicholas Nickleby or The Pickwick Papers. Meanwhile, the novel’s dark humour at the expense of the ministry displays a literary lineage going back to Chaucer’s anti-clericalism.

  More significantly, Tressell’s achievement was to bring to literary life the full humanity of the working man. Unlike Victorian predecessors such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Benjamin Disraeli, or many of his Edwardian peers including George Gissing, Tressell provided a more nuanced picture of the working class as neither a dumb, insurgent mob nor a class destined to a hopeless abyss. Tressell portrayed individual characters with their own motives, backgrounds, weaknesses and strengths. True, the philanthropists, as well as the bosses, do not significantly develop as characters during the course of the novel, and much of what we do learn of them as individuals is off-putting, but there is none the less a rich sense of life to the working class which is almost unique for novels of the period. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the female characters. Since so much of the book is concentrated around work and class relationships oriented by work, the novel’s women appear as passive bystanders. This is more so the case as Tressell takes little account of domestic or familial chores as something to be understood in the same context as waged work. Placed outside the official workplace, women figure as subjects all too easily exploited by ‘The System’ or more nefarious events closer to home. Waiting for the next awful turn of the wheel, rarely do the women of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists instigate plot developments. Only Frank Owen’s wife, Nora, strikes a more combative figure with her similarly stringent socialist commitment. But even she is a marginal figure: ill, home-bound, and utterly dependent upon her husband.

  Despite these drawbacks, as well as the novel’s occasional tendency for repetition which results from its great length, what sustains the work and accounts for its success is the haunting sense of injustice which underpins the passion of Tressell’s cause. Any limitations in character and plot can be overlooked as Tressell’s overriding conviction that the exploited working classes should have the means to live a fuller, richer life shines through his words. The cold fury, the call to arms is what draws in reader after reader down the generations.

  Most of Tressell’s earliest readers shared this socialist vision. Yet how they came to read the novel is as interesting a story as the world of Musgborough. Indeed, part of the draw of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is bound up with its publishing history and the very nature of its reading. Robert Noonan finished the novel in late 1909 as his health began to deteriorate sharply. Widely regarded with suspicion as a socialist agitator and physically unable to keep up jobs, his relations with Hastings’ various builders and decorators were increasingly fraught. The book seemed his only hope of financial salvation – but time and again the manuscript was rejected by London publishers, not least as it was written in long hand. Seeing no future in Hastings, Noonan decided to emigrate with Kathleen to Canada. He headed off alone to Liverpool to make arrangements for travel and seek some casual work to fund the crossing. There is evidence of him undertaking odd jobs around the city while living a fairly bleak existence in rented lodgings. But in November 1910 his tuberculosis became more aggressive and he was confined to the Liverpool Royal Infirmary. There, in February 1911, Robert Noonan died alone: his body suffering the final indignity of a pauper’s burial in an unmarked grave.

  With her father dead, Kathleen left Hastings for London to seek work as a nanny-cum-servant. She carried with her the manuscript of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, and when a literary friend of her employer, Ms Jessie Pope, came to hear of the work she agreed to read it before then passing it on to a London publisher. After a savage range of cuts to the novel, which unnecessarily distorted the novel’s socialist argument, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was finally published in April 1914 to generally favourable reviews. The coming of World War I blunted the book’s immediate impact, but during the 1920s and 30s it began to assume the status of an underground classic, revered all the more in plebeian and radical circles for the fact that it was written by a house-painter and signwriter. In The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose describes how in the sweatshops of the Jewish East End it became part of a canon of radical texts popular among socialist autodidacts. Meanwhile, in the mining village of Markham, Tressell’s book was the most frequently borrowed item from the local library between 1937 and 1940.10

  As new but still incomplete editions began to be issued, with a particularly successful print run in the wake of the 1926 General Strike, the ‘Painter’s Bible’ (as it started to be known in another intriguing echo of the book’s religiosity) became a firm favourite with a working-class and, especially, socialist readership. The novel had an almost mystical, subaltern quality as it was passed from believer to believer. Eric Blair (George Orwell) was alerted to it by a conspiratorially friendly Leeds branch-librarian. And the anecdotes are legion of working men brought into the labour movement after a reading of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. ‘Go into any meeting room of the working-class movement in Britain,’ wrote a contributor to the Marxist Quarterly in 1955, ‘and you will probably find at least one man present, who could say: “That book brought me into the movement. That book made me a convinced socialist. That book altered the whole course and direction of my life.”’11

  One such witness to the truth was the future Trade Union baron and socialist combatant in the Spanish civil war, Jack Jones, who came across the book as ‘a young apprentice in Liverpool, the city in which Robert Noonan died… it had a profound impression on me. It also had a profound impression on many, many workmen in my time when I was an apprentice and since.’12 John Nettleton, a shop steward for the Transport and General Workers Union in 1980s Liverpool, was similarly overawed when he initially encountered Tressell’s prose. ‘I first heard it when I was on a ship. These few pages [the chapter explaining the Great Money Trick] are still done at branch meetings and they still are done in what they call the “hut” at building sites whenever they’re rained off, because it is as relevant today as the day he wrote it. I know lads who have got that off by heart. And every new apprentice who ever comes on the building site on the Liverpool Cathedral, that’s his first lesson. And he learns that before he learns about the trade; he learns that and that’s the way it should be.’13

  What Nettleton also points to is the way in which the book was read: it was not a novel by the likes of E. M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, to be individually experienced in the privacy of one’s drawing room. As Frank Owen reads aloud from socialist tracts, as he himself lends books and pamphlets to draw people towards socialism, so The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was designed as a consciously public text. Nettleton described how amongst the painters of Merseyside it was universally read and ‘used extensively on on-site meetings and in study groups’. There is in this scene a reflexive sense of the fictional Mugsborough meetings to discuss Owen’s own ideas. Indeed, it has been suggested that the book promotes the activity of persuasion itself, presents it as a feasible activity in which the reader can engage and in which it may be redeployed by that active reader.14 And this accounts for the anecdotally high levels of lending and borrowing which the novel enjoyed. Copies were not to be hidden away in personal libraries, but actively pressed upon colleagues and circulated among friends to help to bring them into the light. In A Very British Coup, Chris Mull
in’s bitter satire on the Establishment’s reaction to a red Labour government, the Sheffield socialist and future Prime Minister Harold Perkins gives his young girlfriend Molly a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. ‘In the front he had written with a red felt pen, “To a slightly Tory lady in the hope that she will see the light.”’ Molly was not overwhelmed by the gift. ‘She struggled through the first 50 pages and then gave up.’15 Others more committed to the ragged-trousered gospel found new audiences through the Workers’ Theatre Movement, so beginning a strong tradition of dramatization which continued right through the twentieth century – and eventually transferred to television.

  By the late 1930s, the underground success of Tressell’s novel inspired Penguin to bring out a more accessible edition which proved highly popular amongst troops and civilians during World War II. Readers were encouraged to leave it in the Post Office after finishing it, while in the jungles of Burma British troops were said to pass it dog-eared from regiment to regiment. The young Allan Sillitoe received his copy while serving with the Air Force in Malaya just after the war. ‘It was given to me by a wireless operator from Glasgow, who said: “You ought to read this. Among other things it is the book that won the ’45 election for Labour”… it has haunted me ever since.’ And in the nationalizations embarked upon by the Attlee administration, and in their fight against the indignity of poverty with the introduction of the National Health Service and the founding of the welfare state, one can clearly see an attempt to challenge the injustices condemned by Tressell. The socialists of the ’45 generation understood themselves, like Tressell, as involved in an almost Manichean struggle to build a New Jerusalem free as much from the heartless capitalism of Edwardian and inter-war England as the depredations of war.

  But why today does our Labour cabinet minister still feel the need to invoke this sacred text? Arguably, there are some elements of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists which could appeal to the modernized social democracy of New Labour. In Tressell’s work there exists a sense of the multifariousness of socialism: a different lineage of socialist thinking which was prevalent before the emergence of a reductive statism and the passing of the Labour Party’s Clause IV in 1918. The recent retreat from a belief in the sanctity of the state by Labour modernizers has encouraged a revival of such alternative traditions of radicalism and mutualism within the Labour movement. Similarly, the novel’s emphasis on the civilization of socialism, its commitment to a higher quality of life beyond the old trade union mantra of wages and jobs, has a very modern tinge. In an electorally pleasing fashion, Tressell also stresses the universality of the socialist message: its principles and programme were just as applicable to the casual labourers and petit-bourgeoise of affluent coastal towns as the industrial proletariat of the northern cities. Above all, the book portrays socialism as an aspirational political philosophy; an attempt to improve (in the modern politician’s mantra) the lives of your family and ‘to help bring about a better state of things’ for the next generation.

  Yet the novel’s audience has never been limited to the Left. Its sustained popularity amongst a general readership must partly be linked to the theme of a Pilgrim’s Progress and with it our continuing cultural attraction to narratives of personal struggle and redemption. And then there is the sheer English bloody-mindedness of the ragged-trousered world. The work manages to touch upon a deeply pessimistic strain in the English people’s opinion of each other while at the same time providing a welcome form of literary solace.

  But ultimately it is the passion of the book which still commands a reception from builder’s apprentice to cabinet minister. For while the political landscape has changed, the polemical energy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has not dimmed: a rumbling, volcanic anger at the embedded structures of inequality along with their willing collaborators. One hundred years on, the novel continues to speak to ever-prescient political issues: the nature of work and its capacity for personal fulfilment; class relations and the abuse of authority; the historic, inequitable allocation of wealth and power; the capacity for political action; worker solidarity and trade unionism; working-class aspiration and its political configurement. At the heart of it all remains the question of social injustice and an inexplicable fury at those who connive in its political retention.

  Notes

  1. See F. C. Ball, One of the Damned (London, 1973).

  2. Quoted in ibid., p. 63.

  3. See Ross McKibben, ‘Why was there no Marxism in Britain?’, in The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, 1994).

  4. Quoted in Ball, One of the Damned, p. 120.

  5. William Morris, Useful Work versus Useless Toil (1885), p. 33.

  6. Quoted in McKibben, Ideologies of Class, p. 40.

  7. Robert Blatchford, Merrie England (London, 1895)

  8. Raphael Samuel, ‘The Spiritual Elect? Robert Tressell and the Early Socialists’, in David Alfred (ed.), The Robert Tressell Lectures 1981–88 (Kent, 1988).

  9. Raymond Williams, ‘The Ragged-Arsed Philanthropists’, in Alfred (ed.), Tressell Lectures, p. 32.

  10. See Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (London, 2001), pp. 83, 252.

  11. Quoted in Jack Mitchell, Robert Tressell and the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Surrey, 1969), p. 1.

  12. Jack Jones, ‘Robert Tressell’s Message for Today’, in Alfred (ed.), Tressell Lectures, p. 43.

  13. John Nettleton, ‘Robert Tressell and the Liverpool Connection’, in Alfred (ed.), Tressell Lectures, p. 9.

  14. See Peter Miles, ‘The Painter’s Bible and the British Workman: Robert Tressell’s Literary Activism’, in Jeremy Hawthorn (ed.), The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century (London, 1984).

  15. Chris Mullin, A Very British Coup (London, 1982), p. 39.

  Further Reading

  Alfred, D. (ed.), The Robert Tressell Lectures 1981–88 (Kent, 1988)

  Ball, F. C., One of the Damned (London, 1973)

  Day, G., and Sillitoe, A., ‘Introduction’, in Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (London, 1993)

  Fox, P., Class Fictions (London, 1994)

  Hawthorn, J. (ed.), The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century (London, 1984)

  Hyslop, J., ‘A Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and the Empire: Robert Tressell in South Africa’, History Workshop Journal (51), 2001

  McKibben, R., The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, 1994)

  Mitchell, J., Robert Tressell and the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Surrey, 1969)

  Smith, D., Socialist Propaganda in the Twentieth-Century British Novel (London, 1978)

  Swingewood, A., The Myth of Mass Culture (London, 1977)

  Author’s Preface

  In writing this book my intention was to present, in the form of an interesting story, a faithful picture of working-class life – more especially of those engaged in the Building trades – in a small town in the south of England.

  I wished to describe the relations existing between the workmen and their employers, the attitude and feelings of these two classes towards each other; the condition of the workers during the different seasons of the year, their circumstances when at work and when out of employment: their pleasures, their intellectual outlook, their religious and political opinions and ideals.

  The action of the story covers a period of only a little over twelve months, but in order that the picture might be complete it was necessary to describe how the workers are circumstanced at all periods of their lives, from the cradle to the grave. Therefore the characters include women and children, a young boy – the apprentice – some improvers, journeymen in the prime of life, and worn-out old men.

  I designed to show the conditions resulting from poverty and unemployment: to expose the futility of the measures taken to deal with them and to indicate what I believe to be the only real remedy, namely – Socialism. I intended to explain what Socialists understand by the word ‘Poverty’: to define the Socialist theor
y of the causes of poverty, and to explain how Socialists propose to abolish poverty.

  It may be objected that, considering the number of books dealing with these subjects already existing, such a work as this was uncalled for. The answer is 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. The same is true of all the anti-socialist writers and the ‘great statesmen’ who make anti-socialist speeches: unless we believe that they are all deliberate liars and imposters, who to serve their own interests labour to mislead other people, we must conclude that they do not understand Socialism. There is no other possible explanation of the extraordinary things they write and say. The thing they cry out against is not Socialism but a phantom of their own imagining.

  Another answer is that ‘The Philanthropists’ is not a treatise or essay, but 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.

  This was the task I set myself. To what extent I have succeeded is for others to say; but whatever their verdict, the work possesses at least one merit – that of being true. I have invented nothing. There are no scenes or incidents in the story that I have not either witnessed myself or had conclusive evidence of. As far as I dared I let the characters express themselves in their own sort of language and consequently some passages may be considered objectionable. At the same time I believe that – because it is true – the book is not without its humorous side.

  The scenes and characters are typical of every town in the South of England and they will be readily recognized by those concerned. If the book is published I think it will appeal to a very large number of readers. Because it is true it will probably be denounced as a libel on the working classes and their employers, and upon the religious-professing section of the community. But I believe it will be acknowledged as true by most of those who are compelled to spend their lives amid the surroundings it describes, and it will be evident that no attack is made upon sincere religion.