The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Wordsworth Classics)

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Hastings and St Leonards was a formerly genteel town with no industry, a growing problem of poverty and unemployment. This to Robert was made worse by the election in 1906 of a Conservative MP in what had been a Liberal constituency. The decline in the standard of living for the working class that followed, some have argued, provided the catalyst for Robert to start writing what would become the RTP. But before we go any further,’ said Owen, interrupting himself, ‘it is most important that you remember that I am not supposed to be merely “a” capitalist. I represent the whole Capitalist Class. You are not supposed to be just three workers – you represent the whole Working Class.’

Money is the cause of poverty because it is the device by which those who are too lazy to work are enabled to rob the workers of the fruits of their labour.’ What Tressell has demonstrated so entertainingly is nothing less than Karl Marx's labour theory of value, a cornerstone of socialist thinking. Thinking of his fate, I am reminded of Stephen Jay Gould’s quote about Einstein, that his existence was not so remarkable as ‘the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.’ Robert Tressell is proof of this, a truly great writer whose class meant that he died without knowing the appreciation of his work. How many more never even have their novels and their names salvaged by history? If we take one injunction from Tressell’s life, it should be our responsibility to abolish the conditions that made his writing so compelling. It is very funny book, very sad book and very Union book. The sadness part of this book is that it was published in April 1914 to show paint trade was been treat and by end of year it didn't matter because WWI started and the paint was drying in the poppy fields in blood.

A new edition of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, with an introduction by Tristram Hunt, is published this week by Penguin Classics He completed the manuscript in 1910, with the title The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Being the Story of 12 months in hell, told by one of the damned, and written down by Robert Tressell. Robert sent it to three publishers but with no success and at some point he threw it on the fire, from which Kathleen rescued it. His TB was getting worse, and he was finding it harder to get work. And so he decided to emigrate to Canada for health and economic benefits. Robert Tressell was the pen name of Robert Noonan, a house painter. The illegitimate son of Mary Ann Noonan and Samuel Croker (a retired magistrate), he was born in Dublin in 1870 and settled in England in 1901 after a short spell living and working in South Africa. [5] He chose the pen name Tressell in reference to the trestle table, an important part of his kit as a painter and decorator. [6] Tressell was the pen name of an Irishman, Robert Noonan; he took it in honour of his trade, painting and decorating. Last year I adapted his masterpiece as a play which was performed at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre then at the Chichester theatre festival. The idea to do the adaptation came from its director, Christopher Morahan. He says of the novel: "It's the antidote to the double dip, what it's like to be working or not as the case may be, funny, true, angry and timeless. It changed my dad's life as it did mine." Set in the still shabby seaside town of Hastings, and dealing with a bunch of painters and decorators trying to earn a living working for a penny-pinching firm, it reads like the bastard son of Hard Times. There are some great character names of the Bodgit and Scarper type, while most of the characters labour under a pernicious philosophy that keeps people down. The use of pieces of bread to demonstrate why the hero's co-workers are, and will remain, the eponymous ragged trousered philanthropists is alone worth the cover price of the book so you are really in for a bargain if you've borrowed this from your library instead.

The correspondence he received set him on many paths at once — sometimes appearing contradictory, other times actually so. He discovered an article written in the Daily Worker in the 1930s identifying Robert Tressell by another name, ‘Robert Newland’. This first introduced the idea that the book had been written under a pen name. A 1920s article in the Painters’ Journal also confirmed that, just as the book’s protagonist Frank Owen, Tressell had been a painter himself. But it didn’t provide a full account of his life either. Tressell’s Irish upbringing was the source of considerable confusion for Ball. He had lived two rather different lives, and even within those there were contradictions. Tressell was born the son of Samuel Croker (whose name he first used) and Mary Noonan at 37 Wexford Street in Dublin, where a plaque today hangs in his honour. Croker, an inspector with the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and later a magistrate, was a man of considerable means. ‘What happened to my working-class writer?’, Ball wondered in his works. Robert Tressell’s plaque on Wexford Street, Dublin, where he was born. (Credit: The Tressell Memorial) Perhaps that is the book's secret strength. It is not a picture of extreme hardship but it's working class characters are boxed in a trap from which there will only be one escape (or two if you include socialism so only one escape then - one involving a wooden box just to be clear). In addition to writing two biographies which described his search for the real Robert Tressell — Tressell of Mugsborough (1951) and One of the Damned (1979) — Fred Ball also managed to get the original version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists published by Lawrence and Wishart. By which time he had established that Tressell was not, in fact, originally from England but was born in Dublin in 1870, and correctly identified the name under which he lived most of his life: Robert Noonan. Irish Roots

The enigma of capital and the crises of capitalism - David Harvey

Drawn heavily from, and perhaps because of, his own life experience; Tressle's fictional novel is about a group of 'working' men and their families, fighting for survival in a relentless and mortal struggle, to avoid poverty, and starvation. But it is in this criticism of misguided philanthropy that the book's status as a "working-class classic" runs into trouble. Noonan's approach is a product of the late-Victorian socialist revival when hopes of political transformation swept Britain with religious fervour. Socialists started to display the same kind of moral certainty as the Salvation Army; activists likened themselves to missionaries. Noonan himself found a niche in the Social Democratic Federation run by his fellow middle-class Marxist, Henry Hyndman. And this elevated approach, of a secular priesthood bringing salvation to the fallen, is exactly the tone Owen adopts with his fellow philanthropists. The present system - competition – capitalism … it’s no good tinkering at it. Everything about it is wrong and there’s nothing about it that’s right. There’s only one thing to be done with it and that is to smash it up and have a different system altogether. It has often been said that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was the first working-class novel. This may be wide of the mark in global terms, but it is not far wrong for England. As Fred Ball wrote, ‘it was the first English novel I’d ever seen in which men at work was the basic setting, and the working class the central characters, and treated as real people, the kind of people I had been brought up among, and not as “comic” relief.’ Yet when the foreman cuts the less skilled workers’ wages by from seven pence an hour to sixpence halfpenny downstairs, Owen carries on doing skilled work upstairs at eight pence an hour.