Robert Tressell’s original MS was ‘edited’ and ‘re-edited’ at various times. This complete edition presents the work in almost its original form (it has been necessary to retain some editorial paraphrases where the original text is lost beyond trace: such paraphrases are enclosed within square brackets). Tressell’s idiosyncratic grammar, spelling and punctuation (his way of conveying the spoken idiom of his characters), as well as his somewhat inconsistent use of capital letters, has been restored.

Introduction

This novel is about a group of painters and decorators, and their families, in Hastings (Mugsborough), around 1906. It describes the workman’s life of that time, the subjection, deception, and destitution of the people whose labour helped to create the luxury and glitter of the Edwardian age. It is the age which those who didn’t have to live in still like to refer to as the good old days of pomp and circumstance, the apex of England’s greatness, the time before 1914 when everyone knew his place and because of it was supposed to be contented.

I read an abridged edition of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists when I was nineteen and with the Air Force in Malaya. 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 had been cut to half the length of the present full version, made to end on a note of despair suggesting that cranks who believed in Socialism could do nothing better than think of suicide. The present edition ends the way the author intended.

It isn’t easy to say precisely the effect this book had on me when I first read it. It certainly had a great one, because it has haunted me ever since. Those whose life has touched the misery recounted by Robert Tressell can get out of it many things: a bolstering of class feeling; pure rage; reinforcement for their own self-pity; a call to action; maybe a good and beneficial dose of all these things.

Owen, the main character, tries with marvellous patience and tenacity to enlighten his workmates, to tell them how Socialism could level out riches and give them not only a little more to live on, but also real hope of alleviating their inequalities for good. They won’t listen, so he calls them philanthropists, benefactors in ragged trousers who willingly hand over the results of their labour to the employers and the rich. They think it the natural order of things that the rich should exploit them, that ‘gentlemen’ are the only people with a right to govern. This theme is the soul of the novel, yet a mass of personal detail keeps it a novel and not a tract.

Robert Tressell (born Robert Noonan) was himself one of the workmen he describes, wrote his book in his spare time, and knew exactly what he was talking about. He died of tuberculosis in 1911, when he was forty, and his book was not published until 1914. It has gone through many varied editions since then, and has sold tens of thousands of copies all over the world. But this is the first time that the full edition has been published in paperback form.

Strange to say, one of my first thoughts after finishing the abridged edition was: ‘This book hasn’t been written by a working man’ – thereby displaying those symptoms of faithlessness that so outraged Owen. Fifteen years later, reading Tressell of Mugsborough, by F.C. Ball, I found the following sentence from a letter writen by a relation of Tressell’s: ‘I have told you quite truthfully that Robert was not born into the working class. He would have had a very much happier life, no doubt, had he been.’

It is useless to argue about what ‘class’ a man was born into, but it is interesting to know that Tressell was a person grafted on to working-class life through family misfortune. Little is known about his early years, but one account says that his father was an Inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary.

Of great talent and outstanding passion, Tressell grieved for the people around him, for their poverty as well as his own. Add to that his Irish descent and a justifiable detestation of the English middle and upper classes; and also the fact that he was a sick man most of his life, and you have the author of what has become an English classic.

This was the first good novel of English working-class life. A generation before it, appeared those of Arthur Morrison, who wrote A Child of the Jago, and Tales of Mean Streets. Morrison’s writing, however, was as slick as the Sunday newspapers, and his pompous and passionless style either lulls you to sleep or makes you distrust it. He wrote from too far above his characters: they lived in a zoo, and were to be regarded with fear, hostility, and derision. His working man was the stereotype (add a dose of dirt for realism) that still plagues English fiction. Robert Tressell, on the other hand, put his ordinary people into correct perspective by relating them to society as a whole.

Many working people familiar with Tressell’s book talk about its characters as if they knew them, recount incidents from it as if they had happened to themselves only the other day. It is hard to forget such people as Crass the chargehand, Misery the foreman, Rushton the firm’s director, and Owen the firebrand socialist workman, as well as the women, who suffer the most. What makes Tressell’s work unique are the author’s sense of humour and sense of honour. You can laugh at the way tragic things are told, while being led through the fire, only to weep when cold blasts greet you at the other end. He is utterly unsentimental.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has as its theme the class war. This perhaps reduces it to a great simplicity, yet this also is what elevates it to a tragedy. I have heard it said that working people are not worth writing about because they have few refinements of perception, that lack of intelligence denies them expression, and people who can’t express themselves are not good material for the novelist. This may be so if the novelist has neither sympathy nor imagination. Self-expression denied to participants in Greek drama gave rise to tragedy of mythic dimensions.

On its simplest level, a failure to get bread means death, and this conflict goes back even beyond the emergence of tragedy and myth. The attempt to get more than bread – that is, the self-respect and dignity of spiritual bread – is a theme that can emulate myth while still containing the seeds of tragedy or failure. There is more tragic material in the failure to get bread than in the temporary lapse of morality that shapes the climaxes of most modern novels. There is a greater meaning in the attempt to get a more equitable share of bread than there is in the attempt to get more out of a kind of life already at the end of its spiritual tether.

I feel that those class-conscious middle-class critics who coined the phrase ‘the working-class novelist’ must wish now that they hadn’t, since the issue of class has become more of a reality than the fiction they first thought it. It only becomes a reality when there are signs and possibilities of it breaking up. Robert Tressell’s workmen either had no class feeling, or they regarded themselves as totally inferior. Because they saw no way of getting out of their predicament, they could only say ‘It’s not for the likes of us’. If they thought of improving their lives it was only in ways laid down by their ‘betters’. Owen realized that this would solve nothing. The ‘not for the likes of us’ attitude (still widespread though not nearly so universal) engendered the poisonous inaction of self-pity, sloth, and stupidity. He saw that they must find the solution from their own hearts – which he feared would not happen until their own hearts had been taken from them. By then it would be too late, because in exchange for more bread they would have relinquished the right to demand anything else. They lived in a jungle. The middle-class wouldn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, help them. Only what the workers take is helpful. What they are given is useless.

In some ways Owen’s workmates did want to get out of this jungle, but they needed help, more help than they were willing to accept. A tragedy cannot be written about creatures of the jungle, only about those who try to get out of it – or those who succumb to it knowing that it is possible to transform it. Therefore Owen is the most tragic figure in the book.

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