In Issue 56 (June 2014) Henry Gibson looked at a book uncovering the Dublin roots of the classic socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
Bryan MacMahon, Robert Tressell, Dubliner: Author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Kilmacud-Stillorgan Local History Society)
This year sees the centenary of a book whose influence on socialist thought in the English-speaking world has been immense. Although it was a severely truncated version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists which was published in 1914—the full text not seeing the light of day for another forty years—the book has sold like hot cakes ever since. Its unashamed condemnation of capitalism and advocacy of an alternative socialist society have caught the imagination of millions.
Its author is celebrated in many of the places where he lived, in particular Hastings in the south of England which, in the guise of ‘Mugsborough’, became the setting of his novel. Although he was born in Ireland’s capital, “Dublin has been slower to recognise his achievement”, writes Bryan MacMahon (p 8). He aims to remedy that, and has made a significant contribution to the subject. It is impressively produced, and as well as bringing together previous research into Tressell, unearths much that is new, fascinating, and valuable in helping us to discover who he was and where he came from.
The original research tells us most about his mother, Mary Noonan. We first come across a record of her in 1858 in Athlone when she gave birth to Mary Jane. The father was Samuel Croker, a retired magistrate and former RIC officer, pushing seventy years of age. He was already married with a family of five, but was wealthy enough to support another family. With acceptable variations in spellings, records show himself and Mary Noonan as the parents of six more children, all of them born in Dublin.
Mary lived in the notorious Monto district of central Dublin, while Croker and his official family resided on the southside in suburbs which were as expensive and sought-after then as they are now. The author’s speculation seems plausible, that Mary Noonan, a single mother living in a red light district, may have worked in the booming prostitution industry of the time, and that, while assuming paternity, Croker may not have actually fathered all her children. She eventually moved to slightly better parts of town, probably due to Croker’s financial support.
Her fifth child Robert was born on 18 April 1870 at 37 Wexford Street (now marked by a plaque) and baptised eight days later. So the man who wrote The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was born and reared in Dublin. It took much time and effort to prove this, much of it on the part of Fred Ball, who brought the manuscript of the novel to light and told most of its author’s story in One of the Damned (1973). His research also revealed that by 1891 at the latest, Robert Noonan was in South Africa. But what did he do in between? If he lived in Ireland through the heyday of the home rule movement and the land war, did this leave its mark on his later political development?
Ironically, this book seems to show that Robert Noonan’s time in Dublin was probably confined to the earliest years of his life. Despite opposition from his first family, Samuel Croker assigned a valuable property and an annual allowance to Mary Noonan in 1873 and 1874, and moved to London in the latter year. His double life may have caught up with him, and Mary and the children could well have moved over with him. Croker died at the start of 1875, and Mary Jane, the eldest of those children, is down as informant on his death certificate. Within months Mary got married to a Swiss cabinet maker in north London, and Mary Jane also married there later in the year. The 1881 census shows Mary, her husband, their two children and Robert living in Islington.
Ten years later, Robert Noonan is in Cape Town, South Africa, marrying Elizabeth Hartel and describing himself as a decorator. So he had taken up the trade which would give him a living, and give the rest of us a masterful novel. A year later a daughter was born, but the marriage was unsuccessful. They divorced after a few years when Elizabeth had an affair, apparently not for the first time, and Robert was given custody of their child.
It is fair to say that Noonan’s family life, both as a son and as a father, was unconventional. He was born outside of wedlock, officially the son of a respectable man with a ‘legitimate’ family two miles out the road. He was uprooted to London as a child, soon to have a new stepfather. He moved all the way to South Africa, where his own marriage would fall far short of the prevailing norms. He would live as a single parent, as his mother had, but without the financial support she had known. Predictable surroundings were not to be the lot of Robert Noonan, nor a secure sense of uncomplicated belonging. Even his surname migrated between Croker and Noonan, becoming Tressell when he took up his pen. He was something of an exile wherever he went, a constant outsider looking in. Of course, this may well have helped to give him the keen sense of observation which every writer needs, and the ability to see through apparent stabilities which every socialist needs.
Did his Irishness help here too, being an heir to a complex legacy of colonialism and resistance? Someone who knew him in South Africa remembered his accent being “very slightly Irish” (p 11). If he had left Ireland as a young child, it could have been so slight as to be almost non-existent, but this memory itself shows that Noonan came across to others as an Irishman. He was active in the Irish community in South Africa, serving on a committee to commemorate the United Irishmen’s centenary there. John MacBride was another member, and Noonan may well have mixed with Arthur Griffith. He was thought to be involved in the plans which led to an Irish Brigade under MacBride fighting in the Boer army against the British, but didn’t fight himself, understandably as he had a young daughter depending on him.
The fact that he called that daughter Kathleen testifies in itself to a continuing attachment to Ireland. She remembered him telling Irish stories, singing Irish songs, and being able to speak Irish (although the author is right to presume that he likely had no more than the cúpla focal). Later in England, Noonan designed an airship, with an “Erin go Bragh” flag at its tail. The fact that it was red as well as green and gold suggests a cocktail of socialism and Irish nationality, although MacMahon (an expert on early Irish aviation) notes that English balloonists had previously flown “Erin go Bragh” as a publicity slogan over Ireland.
Legend has it that Noonan originally intended calling his novel The Ragged-Arsed Philanthropists, which certainly has more of a Dublin air to it. Some note the absence of Irish workers in the novel, stranger still as Noonan was friendly with an Irish priest in the town. This book tracks down that priest, finding that he was indeed noted for his sympathy towards labourers who got short shrift from posher clergy. But Marion Walls is quoted showing that the final sentences of the novel draw heavily on Thomas Moore’s melody ‘’Tis Gone, and For Ever’.
It is refreshing that, as well as the copious tributes, critical commentary on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is quoted here. Mervyn Jones called it a “laborious imitation of the worst and most cliché-ridden prose”. According to Barbara Salter,
neither plot nor character analysis predominate. There is much repetition, poor structuring, tired prose. The arguments are rarely intellectually exciting, nor are they fully wedded to the narrative. The end is contrived.
Roy Hattersley has claimed that “it lacks all distinction” as a novel, and its arguments are “crudely simplistic” (p 56-7).
The book does have plenty of faults, and even admirers of its political thrust are in no way obliged to defend its literary merit. Having said that, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that at least some of this criticism is directed at the politics rather than the writing. For Baron Hattersley of Sparkbrook—the man whose nine years in Neil Kinnock’s sidecar defy the most valiant attempts to discover any distinction whatsoever—a genuinely socialist argument would be simplistic by definition. Dermot Bolger is right to say that “its length, fervently crusading content and deliberate repetition to hammer home its message has meant that, when not being dismissed, it is generally patronised in literary circles” (quoted on p 72). Reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists reveals a fascinating story of humanity, lightened by humour and darkened by despair. “There is no doubt that the novel is a crusading and didactic work,” writes MacMahon (p 50), a recent first-time reader, “but it is not a tract or a treatise.”
He speculates intriguingly on an enigmatic character in the book, Barrington, a socialist from a wealthy background who provides the novel’s hero Frank Owen with political back-up, and some financial help too. Noonan spoke scathingly to his daughter of Samuel Croker, condemning all he stood for, and even telling a fanciful tale of turning down a place in Trinity College because it would be paid for out of his father’s rackrents. In truth, he may have been aware that Croker’s money had saved his mother from an awful fate and kept his own childhood free of abject poverty. The similarity with Barrington which MacMahon notes is appealing.
He legitimately wonders too what might have been if Noonan had come back to Dublin in 1901 rather than settling in Hastings. Would he have associated with Griffith and the beginnings of Sinn Féin, or become an apostle of Larkin’s mission of discontent? James Connolly seems more of a kindred spirit, though, and you could picture Noonan among the band of fervent socialist pioneers he was then trying to build up. Even his interest in airships is mirrored in Connolly’s 1909 argument that the capitalist armies’ possession of Zeppelins made them even less likely to sit back and accept a socialist election victory. Noonan would have been right at home in the revival of the Dublin left taking place by then. Instead, just as Connolly was returning to Ireland, Noonan was moving to Liverpool in the hope of raising the fare for himself and Kathleen to cross the Atlantic in the other direction. But he died of tuberculosis on 3 February 1911 and was buried in a pauper’s grave, an end which proves that real life was no less unjust than his fiction portrayed.
But his remedy for such injustice went further than is recognised here (p 52): “Tressell was making the case for fair trade, a fair wage for a fair day’s work, for equity, for proper safety standards and for a share in profits.” No: he was making the case for a society without wages or profits, where the products of human labour wouldn’t be bought and sold at all but mutually exchanged, where the means of producing them would be owned by all in common, so that no one ever worked in the employ of another, receiving in return only a portion of what they made and leaving a surplus in the hands of a parasitic class. Frank Owen made it clear that a fairer capitalism wouldn’t solve the problem, and he is quoted here (p 45):
There’s so much the matter with the present system that 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. We must get out of it.
MacMahon is spot on, however, in picking up contemporary parallels with The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: “the shenanigans of the businessmen of Mugsborough have a resonance for aggrieved Irish citizens today”. After a riot of corruption, they get the local council to buy out the gas company for top dollar, much as Ireland’s toxic banks were nationalised. Their arrogance and audacity “have uncanny echoes of the exchanges between executives of a prominent bank” recently leaked to the media, and “Irish readers would identify with the scorn and outrage of Robert Tressell” at it all (p 47-8). However long he actually lived among us, Ireland can be proud of being an important part of the mix that made him, and a century after his novel first struggled out, it still has much to tell us. It’s about time that Robert Tressell came back home to us.
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