MikePadgett.com

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

— The earliest masterpiece on the British working class and still strongly relevant today.”

• Robert Tressell
• Penguin Modern Classics (2004)

Exploding unemployment. Reckless state mismanagement. The obscene profits banks derive from debt. The yawning gap between rich and poor.

These are some of the facts of our time. They were also prevalent in Robert Tressell’s time, at the turn of the twentieth century. Since then, with two world wars and the fall of empires, a whole, tumultuous century has passed by, the majority of which Tressell never witnessed, dying while still fairly young from tuberculosis.

Tressell was the nom de plume of an Irish painter and decorator named Robert Noonan (viz. the trestle table of his profession) who signed his work thus to protect himself from the inevitable controversy of his radical political novel about class struggle and the troubles of a few ordinary men.

Sadly, he needn’t have worried. The novel was rejected by a succession of publishers and did not appear until some years after his death.

Radical

Robert Noonan left home when he was sixteen years old. Growing up in Ireland in 1870s, he became politically radicalised and left for South Africa. While there he married and carved out a career in the construction industry.

However the Boer wars interrupted his steady course to maturity and eventually he found himself in England and in somewhat reduced circumstances.

His frustration at the deep-rooted inequalities in British society led to his writing of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists but the finished manuscript was unanimously rejected.

Though he will have noted the widespread protests and marches that signified a tide turning towards his viewpoint, Tressell never lived to see the advent of the Russian Revolution, which brought about the total restructuring the sort of which he dared to dream.

Legacy

The resultant Soviet society echoed in many ways the central thesis of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in the form of Barrington’s lunchtime lecture, yet that same Soviet society was both corrupt and flawed in a way that Tressell’s Socialist workmen could not have expected.

Even if Communism is now a failed experiment, Tressell’s contemporaries have left behind an enduring legacy in less absolute societies. The end of the Second World War saw the implementation across Europe of systems intended to provide basic healthcare, education and social welfare. These were the foundations that rebuilt modern Europe and their decline and gradual dissolution in recent decades is a cause of great concern.

Perhaps this is a good moment to take another look at The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and think again about our priorities for the future.