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.
With an Introduction by
Tristram Hunt
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Great Britain by Grant Richards 1914
Published in Penguin Classics 2004
1
Introduction copyright © Tristram Hunt, 2004
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90784–0
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
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.
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 England 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’.
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 employment 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.’
Despite Owen’s command of the book’s drama, the novel’s most forceful character is not a person but a house. ‘The Cave’, the sprawling, Edwardian residence which the labourers spend their days doing up, provides an overarching metaphor for the novel’s critique of the capitalist system.
Suppose some people were living in a house… and suppose they were always ill, and suppose that the house was badly built, the walls so constructed that they drew and retained moisture, the roof broken and leaky… If you were asked to name, in a word, the cause of the ill-health of the people who lived there you would say – the house. All the tinkering in the world would not make that house fit to live in; the only thing to do with it would be to pull it down and build another.
But the terrible irony is that, rather than pulling down the rotten edifice, the working class spend their days underpinning and repairing it. As they carry out their albeit botched jobs on ‘The Cave’ so they are securing the house’s foundations and by implication the shoddy capitalist system. Hence their moniker. ‘All through the summer the crowd of ragged-trousered philanthropists continued to toil and sweat at their noble and unselfish task of making money for Mr Rushton.’ It is this unthinking, unceasing process of self-harm, with workers actively buttressing an openly exploitative system, which drives the hard fury of the book. For Mugsborough’s philanthropists seem to have no interest in challenging the system. ‘“Wot the ’ell’s the use of the likes of us troublin’ our ’eads about politics?”’ Moreover, they are even devoid of aspiration for the next generation. ‘It seemed as if they regarded their own children with a kind of contempt, as being only fit to grow up to be servants of the children of such people as Rushton and Sweater [a garment maker].’
Robert Noonan’s daughter, Kathleen, once recalled how this culture of resignation both saddened and infuriated her father. ‘He would get exasperated when he could make no impression on the workmen when trying to get them to better their conditions. He would say they deserved to suffer, but that it was their children who would suffer, which was so terribly frustrating to him.’4 That bubbling anger is clearly apparent in the violent hostility which Frank Owen regularly displays towards his colleagues. ‘As Owen thought of his child’s future there sprung up within him a feeling of hatred and fury against the majority of his fellow workmen. They were the enemy. Those who not only quietly submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to it.’ Indeed, these numerous outbursts of contempt towards the dull, stupid, bestial working class does make The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists a rather masochistic ‘working-class classic’.
In a forlorn attempt to enlighten his workmates, Owen embarks on a series of lunchtime lectures (where, like Noonan, he is referred to as ‘the professor’), which provide the ideological backbone of the book. And here at work can be seen the intellectual maelstrom of the socialist revival as Owen draws on a catholic range of thinking to bolster his denunciation of capitalism. He begins his critique with a traditional, radical cry against 1066 and the ‘Norman Yoke’, which transferred public property into private hands. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries only further entrenched the inequalities of ‘landlordism’, before the Industrial Revolution ushered in the modern proletariat. Following a historical approach developed first by Friedrich Engels (in The Condition of the Working Class in England) and then popularized by Arnold Toynbee in his Lectures on the Industrial Revolution, Owen recounts how industrialization killed off skilled artisan communities who were replaced with ‘a class of mere wage earners, having no property in the machines they used, and no property in the things they made. They sold their labour for so much per hour, and when they could not find any employer to buy it from them, they were reduced to destitution.’
It was this degradation, as John Ruskin put it, ‘of the operative into a machine’, this alienation of the individual from his labour thanks partly to his separation from the means of production, which destroyed work as a creative enterprise. Craftsmen were transformed into ‘hands’ suitable only for what William Morris termed ‘slave’s work – mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil’. Nowhere was this more the case, according to Morris, than in the realm of ‘Popular Art’ which ‘no longer exists now, having been killed by commercialism’. Traditionally, the craftsman had naturally fashioned his work so much so that it was ‘often difficult to distinguish where the mere utilitarian part of his work ended and the ornamental began’.5 But the eclipsing of a pre-industrial system of guilds and apprenticeships for the modern labour market snuffed out individual creativity as surely as Hunter clamped down on any hint of professionalism. This emphasis on the hypocrisy of modern liberty for the English workman (what Thomas Carlyle once called ‘the liberty to die by starvation’) is a recurring theme through the book.
They were for the most part tame, broken-spirited, poor wretches who contentedly resigned themselves to a life of miserable toil and poverty, and with callous indifference abandoned their offspring to the same fate. Compared with such as these, the savages of New Guinea or the Red Indians are immensely higher in the scale of manhood. They are free! They call no man master; and if they do not enjoy the benefits of science and civilization, neither do they toil to create those things for the benefit of others.
What kept these inequalities in place was ‘The Great Money Trick’. In essence, a bastardized form of Marx’s theory of surplus value (‘Therefore what remains in the possession of their masters represents the difference between the value of the work done and the wages paid for doing it’), Owen’s analysis also appealed to the traditional radical belief in a workman’s right to the ‘whole produce’ of his labour. Capitalism robbed the worker of the full fruits of his labour and then, backed up by the force of the state, demanded he pay for what was rightfully his. The comprehensiveness of the money trick, combined with the state’s monopoly of violence, meant all that was left to the dispossessed worker was the kind of futile act of resistance – drinking and smoking on the job – which Joe Philpot surreptitiously practises. ‘This is where we get some of our own back.’ Equally futile, Tressell implied, are the traditional forms of party politics. Among the more witty passages in the book are his accounts of the ‘Forty Thieves’ who run Mugsborough Municipal Council, amongst whom sit Messrs Didlum, Grinder, Sweater and Rushton himself. Liberal or Tory, the conventional political process offered nothing for the working man – and this at a time when municipal politics was regarded as one of the more promising avenues for socialism. Meanwhile, national party politics was little more than a smokescreen for the exploitation of the working class, as Parliament battled it out between free trade and Imperial tariffs. Neither of which, Owen believes, would address the fundamental causes of social inequality.
In conventional Marxist style, Tressell suggested that little could change until the working class realized the true nature of their position and developed an understanding of class consciousness. It was the philanthropists’ wilful failure to realize their historic mandate which drives Owen to so much greater fury against his workmates (‘He hated and despised them because they calmly saw their children condemned to hard labour and poverty for life’) than his bourgeois bosses. Only Owen is able to appreciate the temporality of the existing state of class relations, rather than the almost divinely sanctioned legitimacy with which his colleagues seem to regard it. Partly he blames this on their stupidity but, as many historians have done since, the supremely ascetic Owen also implicates working-class culture. The Edwardian politician C. F. G. Masterman once described how the English working man is ‘much more allied in temperament and disposition to some of the occupants of the Conservative back-benches, whose life, in its bodily exercises, enjoyment of eating and drinking, and excitement of “sport”, he would undoubtedly pursue with extreme relish if similar opportunities were offered him.’6 Frank Owen feels the same. The depoliticized world of the pub, organized sport, horror novels and the yellow press (Daily Obscurer, Weekly Ananias, Daily Chloroform) was slowly, surreptitiously deadening any nascent class sentiments. In fact, there appeared only one hope. ‘It was possible that the monopolists, encouraged by the extraordinary stupidity and apathy of the people, would proceed to lay upon them ever greater burdens, until at last, goaded by suffering, and not having sufficient intelligence to understand any other remedy, these miserable wretches would turn upon their oppressors and drown both them and their System in a sea of blood.’
And what would happen when the sea of blood subsided? Leaving aside the strong undercurrent of violence which suffuses the politics of this novel, what would the revolutionary aftermath resemble? Here, again, Owen draws on competing traditions within the socialist canon to fuse both ethical and economic schools of thought. Echoing many on the more Puritan wing of the socialist movement, Owen draws attention to the needless, egregious waste generated by capitalism. The commercial system created an unnatural demand market for futile, luxury goods while millions went without the basic necessities. ‘“If you go down town, you will see half a dozen draper’s shops within a stone’s-throw of each other – often even next door to each other – all selling the same things. You can’t possibly think that all those shops are really necessary?”’
This unedifying diversion of labour and energy would be instantly curtailed in a cooperative commonwealth where full employment and abundance could be secured for all. The solution was, as the Social Democratic Federation had it on its membership card, ‘The Socialization of Production, Distribution and Exchange’. The nationalization of the means of production, the forcible return to public ownership of the wealth and property of the people illegally seized over the centuries, would necessarily result in an equitable distribution of all the necessaries of life. Here is the raw equality of the socialist dream. Yet Owen’s vision of a socialist society is not the kind of rural, Arcadian throw-back which Robert Blatchford in his utopian bestseller, Merrie England, had outlined. While Blatchford wondered whether ‘any carpet [is] so beautiful or so pleasant as a carpet of grass or daisies’, and lamented the ugliness of ‘Widnes and Sheffield’, Owen accepts that the Industrial Revolution, the modern era of science and machinery, are an established fact.7 The question is who controls the technology and to what uses it is put, rather than industrial progress per se. Indeed, with the help of ‘science and machinery’, Owen foresees a contented future where abundance could be generated for all ‘as was never known or deemed possible before’.
However, Owen is also drawn to the ethical socialism of William Morris, who was deeply contemptuous of some of the mechanistic, economic socialism of his fellow ideologues. He once dismissed the utopian work of the American socialist Edward Bellamy as ‘State Communism, worked by the very extreme of national centralisation’ which promised nothing but ‘a machine-life’. Owen follows suit and outlines a socialist vision which is not simply a question of steady labour, state machinery and increased wages. What socialists want, Owen suggests, is not more work, ‘but more grub, more clothes, more leisure, more pleasure and better homes. They wanted to be able to go for country walks or bicycle rides, to go out fishing or to go to the seaside and bathe and lie on the beach and so forth.’ Unfortunately, the lumpen majority ‘often said that such things as leisure, culture, pleasure and the benefits of civilization were never intended for “the likes of us.”’ The cooperative commonwealth of the future would show that they were by generating a deeper sense of spiritual development and human fulfilment. What that relied upon above all was the return of a sense of attachment to the labour process and with it the reconstitution of the hand and the brain. The operative would be transformed back into a craftsman who struggled intellectually as well as manually.
This conception of a new civilization, premised upon economic cooperation and abundant prosperity, has always been instrumental to the utopian socialist tradition – from Saint-Simon and Fourier to Bellamy and Blatchford – and Owen embraces it fully, if rather provincially. Indeed, the institutional architecture which Owen outlines seems remarkably similar to some of the garden city plans which were being developed at Letchworth and Welwyn at the time. ‘In the centre of every district a large Institute or pleasure house could be erected, containing a magnificently appointed and decorated theatre; Concert Hall, Lecture Hall, Gymnasium, Billiard Rooms, Reading Rooms… A detachment of the Industrial Army would be employed as actors, artistes, musicians, singers and entertainers. In fact everyone that could be spared from the most important work of all – that of producing the necessaries of life – would be employed in creating pleasure, culture and education.’ This was the ethical socialist dream of equality, craftsmanship and creativity. There would be no precarious struggle for the daily necessities of life as all were given the opportunity, after their willing contribution to the common weal, to pursue their individual creative talents. ‘There is no Wealth but Life’, declared Ruskin, and the cooperative commonwealth of Owen’s imagining promised to be wealthy beyond any riches Edwardian England had to offer.
If such a society seemed to resemble heaven on earth, it was meant to. For although one of the recurring themes of the novel is the nefarious influence of the Christian church and its markedly unchristian ministers, the socialism which Frank Owen preaches displays a profound religiosity. As such it was a representative reflection of much late nineteenth-century socialist thinking. From its first emergence in the credal vacuum of the French Revolution, socialism had proffered itself as a new religion, a new Christianity to fill the void left by the Roman Catholic Church. The utopian socialists – Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen – as well as the Young Hegelians (amongst whom Marx and Engels once counted themselves) – turned socialism into a religion of humanity: an ethical philosophy determined to implement harmony and fellowship on earth.
While Marx and Engels later regrouped under the banner of ‘scientific socialism’, the spiritual tradition within socialism continued through the nineteenth century. And when socialist politics came alive again in 1880s Britain it did so as an almost religious revival. Many were drawn to socialism from Nonconformity and the currents of moral Protestantism, which were powerfully at work in Britain’s urban centres. The historian Raphael Samuel once noted the extraordinary affinity between the Salvation Army and the socialist missions of the 1890s. It was impossible to overestimate, he suggested, both the closeness of socialism’s relation to Christianity and also the way in which socialists conceptualized themselves very much, as late Victorians did, as making war against an evil, contaminating world.8
Others were drawn to the religion of socialism from the currents of secularism, spiritualism and even mesmerism that were at work in late Victorian society. Having lost their faith in organized religion as well as their belief in the equity of existing social relations, numerous middle-class intellectuals converted to socialism (with all the sense of grace which that entailed) as a solution to their political and psychological difficulties. But it was more a case of joining a sect than a church, complete with the circulation of sacred texts, witness to truth, a fellowship of ideologues, a sense of persecution, and an unashamed contempt for the ignorant unknowing.
It is this religious context which goes some way to explain the unrelenting zeal of Frank Owen. For not only is he, in sharp contrast to the official ministers of the church, a true Christian in his charity, forgiveness and ascetic holiness, he is also best understood as a missionary operating in the darkest, most heathen terrains. Owen is placed amongst the sensuous, childish working class to bring enlightenment, to promise them the wonders of a socialist ‘civilization’. There is no sense of this configuration of socialism arising organically from the working class. Rather, it is the product of leadership, middle-class leadership, which is able to bring the philanthropists out of the darkness and into the light, a situation which becomes all the more apparent with the emergence of the supremely middle-class Barrington as a fellow socialist apostle in the second half of the book. For a ‘working-class classic’, the proletariat is cast as condescendingly inert and only able to be aroused politically when the middle-class vanguard descends upon them.
Needless to say, the work of conversion is a lonely, thankless business – a veritable Pilgrim’s Progress – but Owen regards it as his calling. It also seems a fairly Old Testament style of induction, for when the sheep stray from the path Owen’s fury becomes as consuming as his own accelerating illness. And it is the sense of weakness within the working class, their moral laxity and failure to appreciate the truth of socialism, which accounts for the pessimism which pervades the work. Like most men of the cloth, Owen is deeply troubled by the fallen state of the world around him.
None of these themes – the labour theory of value, utopian socialism, class consciousness – naturally lend themselves to the stylistic demands of popular fiction. But the lasting achievement of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is that such complex themes are developed through a narrative structure that manages to hold the reader’s interest. This is primarily the product of Tressell’s superb command of dialogue. The banter, the ceaseless repartee between the workmen brings us straight into cold mornings in drafty houses as the ‘hands’ ready themselves for the day’s sloshing and scamping. ‘There is no finer representation, anywhere in English writing,’ Raymond Williams rightly declared, ‘of a certain rough-edged, mocking, give-and-take conversation between workmen and mates. This humour, this edge, is one of the most remarkable achievements.’9 It is the pace and ease of the group scenes which allows for the exploration of socialist philosophy within a surprisingly amenable format.
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 Mullin’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.