Robert Tressell

Tressell: The Real Story of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

By Dave Harker

Zed Books, 2003

282 pages, $33.95 (pb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/30710

"It made me cry and made me bitter", recalled a socialist who read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as a working-class teenager in England in the 1930s. "Deeply moved and deeply impressed" was the reaction of a miner who circulated a copy around his colliery during the strikes of 1972 and 1974 "until it wore out". Something about the novel by Robert Tressell hit the mark with these, and millions of other, workers. Dave Harker's "biography of the novel" explores the reasons for its success.

Robert Noonan was born in Ireland in 1870 and worked as a painter and decorator in South Africa, and in the small English seaside town of Hastings. A militant atheist and Irish republican, he was involved in the labour movement and became a socialist.

For Noonan, "class war" was not an empty phrase but a building-site reality that existed daily and hourly. He helped to found a small branch of the "Marxist" Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in Hastings, where, as an artisan skilled in signwriting, he was particularly useful in making posters and banners for protest marches against poverty and unemployment. He also specialised in "close-quarter argument", engaging in discussions with individuals and small groups long after the big demonstrations had packed up.

Noonan also argued the case for socialism with his work colleagues. He would "get exasperated when he could make no impression on the workmen when trying to get them to better their conditions", recalled his daughter. He would often lapse into angry despair, saying that they "deserved to suffer" for being so "stupid" and "apathetic".

Lenin called this attitude "communist arrogance", which was common among members of the SDF, which believed that to make socialist converts it was enough to pound out abstract propaganda and, when mass conversion failed to happen, the working class could be bypassed and socialism ushered in by an enlightened elite being elected to parliament.

Noonan turned to writing (adopting the name Tressell, from the builders' trestle), hoping that his arguments in print would have more effect. He began a series of pamphlets on how capitalism works and why socialism is needed. Using his conversations and experiences from work, he found the project taking the form of a novel, and in three years had produced a hefty 600-page manuscript.

However, in 1911, poverty and tuberculosis ended Noonan's hopes of seeing his novel launched on its mission. As his body lay in a pauper's grave, his book was getting ready to start its extraordinary life.

"A faithful picture of working-class life", Noonan called the novel — and it was this that appealed to its working-class readers. In the fictional Mugsborough, readers identified with the workers and against the bosses and foremen (Sweater, Grinder and Misery), who enforced long hours, dangerous conditions and the cutting of corners to turn a greater profit, resulting in shoddy and unsatisfying work. The commercial newspapers (the Daily Obscurer and the Weekly Chloroform) are familiarly at work hiding the exploitative heart of capitalism.

The hero of the book is Frank Owen, a painter and decorator who lucidly expounds Marxist economic theory but struggles to win over his colleagues. They see Owen as a bit of a crank ("a bit orf 'is onion about socialism"). The pessimism of Owen's lop-sided battle against ruling-class ideas and passivity of his colleagues, the "mugs" of Mugsborough, generates a mood of futility in the novel about the prospects for changing the "System".

Such despondency is the result of Noonan's and SDF's politics of "salvationary socialism", of chasing bourgeois ideas out of workers' heads by rhapsodically sermonising the merits of socialism.

Friedrich Engels summed up the SDF when he said that it saw itself as "the only salvation-bringing church". The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' wishful conclusion for "the Golden Light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism" has more affinities with the Salvation Army than the Marxist view that socialist ideas are best gained through the workers' experience of economic and political struggles.

However, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists transcended the preachiness of its author and hero. It also survived a political mauling at the hands of the editor of the first (1914) edition, which blunted the hard edge of Noonan's scathing criticism of capitalists, the bourgeois press, religious hypocrisy, police harassment and the class-based "justice" system.

A cheaper "shilling edition" for working-class readers was subjected to further political "tidying up", yet the book rapidly found a large circulation through socialist and labour organisations. For every person who bought a copy, five more read it. Left-wing theatre groups toured a stage adaptation, playing to packed houses.

A wartime Penguin Books edition of 50,000 sold out at a rate of one per minute. It was a hit in the armed forces where the leftward shift of a civilian population opposed to a return to the unemployment and poverty of the 1930s was also reflected. The first unexpurgated edition of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, released in 1955 by Lawrence and Wishart, a publisher linked to the Communist Party, gave the book a new lease on life, selling out in three months.

As one of the handful of books by working-class writers about working-class life from a working-class point of view, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, as one reader put it, "won a lasting place in the affections of the ordinary people because it is about us". An apprentice joiner was won over: Tressell was "a fellow traveller who understood me!"

In many unions, the novel was regarded as "the apprentice's bible". With the backing of the trade union movement, its popularity increased during the wave of labour struggles of the 1960s and its influence persuaded the BBC to make a television play of the book in 1967.

Conservative and even some left-wing intellectuals still managed to patronise the book and its readers on literary grounds. It is true that the novel is long and repetitious (Noonan believed you had to say something over and over to get it to stick). The bourgeois characters are stereotyped and women are sidelined. Plot is replaced by a series of sketches of proletarian existence, separated by frank but often laboured socialist propaganda. The structure is poor and the ending contrived. It breaks every rule of the novel and yet it works — it is "wonderful but clumsily written", said George Orwell.

Politically, as most socialist critics acknowledge, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists can act as a conservative affirmation of the subordinate role of the working class and reinforce pessimism about the prospects for socialist change. But despite its own negativism, the novel has spurred many of its readers on to union or political activism, often against the pro-capitalist "labour" party politicians and their loyal union leaders, many of whom used the book as left cover for their anti-working class policies.

Noonan, after all, did not join the British Labour Party but the "Marxist" SDF. The book has always been marked by struggle over the interpretation of its politics.

Most of the (often justified) literary and political criticisms of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists have been repeatedly confounded by the workers who kept, and keep on, reading it because its vivid comedy made them laugh, its pathos made them cry, its outrage against the class injustice of the capitalist "System" made them angry and determined to act.

In these days of supercharged free-market ideology and relentless pursuit of profit, the novel's continued relevance is ensured. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has political life in it yet and the next chapter of the book will be written by its readers — in the anti-corporate globalisation protests, anti-war movements and trade union battles.