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.
What relevance has this novel today? Not a difficult question, in that its relevance is simply that of a good book that ought to be read. It is easy to read, like all journeys through hell. It has its own excitement, harmony, pathos. It is spiked, witty, humorous, and instructive. Above all it is deeply bitter, because it is a real hell inhabited by real people, a hell made by one’s fellow men because they were human also and didn’t want to know any better.
The soul of Robert Tressell, in its complete rejection of middle-class values, seems forged in the formative years of the English working-class, during the Industrial Revolution of 1790–1832. Tressell no doubt inherited this feeling from his early days as a more independent workman in South Africa. The working people in his time did not have the same clarity, violent outlook, nor intellectual guidance of those earlier men of the Industrial Revolution. Never before or since were they so spiritless or depressed.
England was stagnating, eddying in a cultural and material back-water of self-satisfaction and callous indifference, in which those who ‘had’ hoped it would go on forever, and those who ‘had not’ were beginning to curse the day they were born. But by the time the first great English novel about the class war was published, the power of those who might act was being cut down on the Western Front. The Great War drained off the surplus blood of unemployment, and definite unrest. It proved once more the maxim that war is the father of a certain kind of progress – in certain societies. I imagine also that Robert Tressell’s destitute workers welcomed it, for a while.
ALAN SILLITOE
December 1964
Life
Although The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is well known, the same cannot be said of its author, Robert Tressell, who was said to be ‘extremely reticent.’1 Fred Ball, Tressell’s biographer, admitted that even after extensive research, he still did not know whether Tressell’s real name was Noonan or Croker. I shall refer to him as Tressell, that being the pen name he chose in honour of the trestle table, part of the basic equipment of house painters and signwriters.
Fred Ball wrote two lives of Tressell, the first in 19512 and the second after it was discovered in 1967 that Tressell’s daughter, Kathleen, who had been presumed killed in a car crash in Canada, was alive and living in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. The story was topical because BBC2 had recently screened a dramatisation of Tressell’s novel which Kathleen had been unable to see because she could not afford a television set. The second biography, however, does little more than correct some minor errors in the first, for example the claim that Tressell wrote his book in response to what he considered to be the shortcomings of fellow socialist George Meek’s book, George Meek, Bathchairman, when in fact Meek’s book was not published until 1910, the year that Tressell finished The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
Tressell was probably born in Dublin in 1870, the illegitimate son of Samuel Croker, an Inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary, and Mary Noonan who had three other children in addition to Tressell: Adelaide, Ellie and Mary Jane. One source says that Tressell’s father, to whom he was deeply attached, died when he was six. It is not clear whether this was Croker or another man whom Mary had married in the meantime. Either way she remarried and Tressell was later to leave home, partly because of financial difficulties and partly because he did not get on with his stepfather. The move prevented this promising scholar – he could speak several languages – from finishing his education with the result, as his biographer, Fred Ball, explains, that ‘[h]e was now a working man without having been nurtured as one.’3
Tressell next appeared in Cape Town, South Africa, where he worked as a signwriter and also wrote sketches for various
