The problem(s) with the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

When someone says “socialist literature”, you probably think non-fiction, and then you probably think impenetrable and boring. Generalisation as that is, it’s a fair representation of the way material that presents itself as aiming to effect real political change can often cut itself off from its core audience as a result of alienating them by being simply too academic. Or at least, that’s the modern day conundrum, with a Brownite biography weighing in at more than 500 pages and using economic terminology that flummoxed even me, the soon-to-be politics grad, at points. Brown isn’t the only culprit; even the books written by Owen Jones are largely framed for the well-educated middle classes, when their core audience ought to be the working class they aim to actualise. What’s interesting is that this notion of political literature as something academic is actually relatively new. If we think back to Edwardian England, most leftist ideology was spread in small pamphlets and flyers designed specifically for the workers, to be relatively easily digested. This trend continued roughly until the beginning of the post-war period, after which the literature became noticeably more complex. My Granddad's copy of “Why You Should Be a Socialist”, while written in language not unknown to the early Labourite pamphleteers, bears far greater resemblance to a modern-day Fabian policy book.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a book that exists on the edges of this canon; published in 1917, it features many a reference to the former forms of socialist pamphlets, but, uniquely, it is a work of “fiction” – and a mightily long one at that. I use the quotations because the author, one Robert Tressell (a pen name) claims in the preface that all the eventualities covered in the novel were simply reframings and reorderings of events he had seen play out in his day-to-day life, after he abandoned his middle class upbringing to become a workman.

The edition of the book my mother bought me includes a foreword by Tony Benn, where he claims the novel continues to inspire and provoke thinkers across the political spectrum to this day. While Benn doesn’t assert which particular elements of the book back this up, it’s a believable sentiment. The book is chock-full of cases of despair of the working classes in the absence of a welfare state or a society that truly purports to care. As an at times visceral depiction of Edwardian deprivation, the book is a roaring success. However, as a piece of prose, it’s a disappointment. The remainder of this piece will explain why.

First of all, the book is vehemently anti-religion, specifically anti-Christian. In terms of framing, this is actually remarkable from a modern perspective; while many modern political thinkers and theologians now lament the ailing power of the local church as a pillar of the community, Tressell frames atheism as a reasonable response to a church that only organises around the community in order to manipulate and take advantage of it. The problem is that Tressell offers no counter-argument to his knock-down of Christianity; the book features absolutely no airing of any reason why religion might be a positive construction. While this was au fait at the time, the view of religion as a control device rather than any sort of spiritual aid makes the book seem overtly critical; dismissing spirituality out of hand because of how it has become institutionalised by the system.

Until now, the problems I’ve listed have been mostly secondary in nature; cases of how the book interprets a certain idea. However, the structure of the book itself is also heavily flawed. Modern editions point out where the original, heavily edited version finished, before continuing with Tressell’s original manuscript, which is noticeably more hefty but promises a happy ending and a vaguely clearer climax. However, the previously short average chapter length is totally foregone in what is effectively the second half of the chapter, inviting several long chapters that are mostly blind exposition without any narrative clout. The book spends an entire chapter discussing the events of a summer where little happens except increasing precarity of work & therefore income; aside from the metaphorical value of having this chapter be painfully long, little would be lost in simply describing it in the single sentence I just used.

This highlights a greater, more damning problem with the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists; it seriously struggles with the dual objectives of being a political call to action and a succinct narrative piece. It is overly long, repetitive (beyond what is necessary to prove a point about poverty) and has an extraordinarily scatter-gun focus. One particularly effective chapter is Ruth, focusing on a family forced to take in a lodger, who commits adultery with the wife in response to her husband’s drunken absence; but both his drunkenness and the presence of the lodger are only consequences of dire economic straits. It encapsulates perfectly the social harms of economic woes. And yet, the chapter that follows it could just as easily spend ten pages on how to thin paint; Tressell’s pacing leaves much to be desired. Every time the reader might expect a denouement they instead receive banality; and the book continues on like this.

Problems such as these could be excused if the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists purported to being autobiographical, or if it were written by an authentic advocate. But Tressell was born into a comfortable family that he abandoned upon becoming socialist – out of a sense of fairness rather than reason. In this respect, Tressell’s book is almost a sort of failed vanguardism; having forsaken his riches, he went on to assist the cause of emancipation in more subtle ways. His book was largely panned on release and he struggled to find a publisher; he actively hid the second half of the manuscript and tried to burn it.

In this regard, the story of Tressell is almost more poetic than the story he himself penned. And yet, there is no book quite like it; no other fiction that could be so blunt with its arguments. The book is imperfect, even to its title, implying a distinct group of workers united by their contempt for working-class philanthropy. The story features no such unity, for the struggle of the daily grind consistently takes precedent over the struggle for political change. We hold that dichotomy with us to this day.