Bringing Tressell home

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.

Socialist Classics: Robert Tressell, ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’

In Issue 30 (December 2007) Henry Gibson celebrated the most influential novel the socialist movement has ever inspired.

A plaque above a betting shop in Dublin’s Wexford Street testifies to an Irish socialist who has made a powerful mark on left-wing consciousness but is hardly honoured in his own country. This was the birthplace in 1870 of Robert Noonan, who wrote the most widely read and influential novel the socialist movement has ever inspired. Written under a pen name borrowed from one of the tools of his trade as a painter and decorator, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists wasn’t published until 1914, three years after his death, and even then in a severely cut and distorted version, the full text not being published for another forty years. But all along it has been bought by millions, read by even more, and cherished as a book that encap­sulates the socialist vision.

Tressell explains in his preface that

my intention was to present, in the form of an interesting story, a faithful picture of working-class life… to show the conditions resulting from poverty and unemployment: to expose the futility of the measures taken to deal with them and to indicate what I believe to be the only real remedy, namely—Socialism. …not a treatise or essay, but a novel. My main object was to write a readable story full of human interest and based on the happenings of everyday life, the subject of Socialism being treated incidentally.

The novel does present an interesting story, a collection of them, and succeeds from the literary point of view. The narrative is heavily written by today’s standards, more Hugo than Kafka. Dickens’s none-too-subtle approach to naming characters is employed, with capitalists glorifying in names like Sweater, Grinder, and the decorating firm of Smeeriton & Leavit. The political arguments often lead to simple but very funny exchanges—like the painter who rises to a point of order, only to be trumped by another saying: “And I rise to order a pint” (Chapter 25).

The tragic side of working-class existence is also there in abundance. The reality of trying to survive and feed a family when the work dries up is portrayed in unsparing detail. The middle-class prejudice that workers could easily get by if they weren’t so profligate is forensically refuted as a couple go through their debts, expenses and income item by item and conclude that only the pawnshop will see them through to next week. The death of an old worker because the boss wouldn’t employ another man to hold his ladder on a dangerous job hits home, as does the ensuing cover-up.

Many of the incidents will seem remote to us today, if only in their form. But few of us wouldn’t fit the description of workers with no love for their work, in the morning wishing it was dinner time, and at dinner time wishing it was Saturday: “So they went on, day after day, year after year, wishing their time was over” (Chapter 7). The book’s description of the long working day—getting home with only time for a quick meal before going to bed so as to get up early next morning to set out again—became outdated, but the Celtic Tiger has brought it back into fashion.

Friedrich Engels once wrote that “the socialist problem novel in my opinion fully carries out its mission if by a faithful portrayal of the real conditions it dispels the dominant conventional illusions concerning them, shakes the optimism of the bourgeois world, and inevitably instils doubt as to the eternal validity of that which exists” (letter to Minna Kautsky, 26 November 1885). So far, so Tressell (although he would have had no way of reading Engels’s opinion). But, he goes on, a novel should do all this “without itself offering a direct solution of the problem involved”. All things being equal, you would agree: novels that preach at the reader, that never raise a question but to blurt out the answer, tend to be tiresome, ineffectual and just bad literature. But The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists shows that sometimes—just sometimes—it ain’t necessarily so.

It has a lot to do with the fact that the novel wears its socialism on its sleeve, shamelessly proclaims it: this is not an author trying to surreptitiously smuggle a little bit of politics into his hard-hitting Channel 4 drama because he believes that the mass media is the real arena of struggle now. The first chapter introduces us to Frank Owen, “generally regarded as a bit of a crank” because he’s always banging on about the robbery of the workers rather than the weekend sport. The narrator regularly addresses the reader directly with his own views. Whole chapters are actual lectures on socialist politics, and could even be published separately as propaganda pamphlets. But they are situated well within the context of credible political discussions, described and told as episodes of the story. Socialism is a fully integrated character in the plot, you could say, and its appearances seem no less legitimate than any other character.

Some of the socialist lessons Owen gives do get a bit school­masterly. But his “Great Money Trick” (Chapter 21) is a classic. Owen represents the capitalist class, and employs three of his workmates cutting up bread into small pieces. Having produced the required three pieces each, he takes them all, pays the workers one piece each, and even after consuming two himself, is left with a healthy surplus. Having eaten their piece, the workers have to come back and repeat the process. Before long, the capitalist is piling up wealth and the workers are in the same position as ever—until he decides to lay them off, of course. The Great Money Trick gets to the heart of capitalist exploitation in a way many socialist arguments don’t: it isn’t about how many bits of bread we’re allowed, but the fact that any bread is stolen from us at all.

If exposing and ending that trick is socialism, the novel goes out of its way to point out what isn’t socialism. Noonan was active in the English socialist movement in the heyday of ‘gas and water socialism’ which boasted of bringing public services into municipal ownership, but he unmasks it as basically another capitalist dodge. The local businessmen, in their capacity as councillors, sell them­selves land at a knockdown price to set up an electricity company. When it fails, they get the council to buy it back from them at a handsome profit to themselves. “Well, ’ere’s success to Socialism,” toasts one of their number, aware of the likely public reaction when the truth comes out: “they’ll say that if that’s Socialism they don’t want no more of it” (Chapter 30).

A socialist character gives the workers a real solution: “you must fill the House of Commons with Revolutionary Socialists” who would pass legislation to bring the means of production into public ownership (Chapter 45). There is no plan against the likelihood that the former owners would go outside the law to resist this change: perhaps the presumption is that a socialist electoral landslide would convince them that their cause was lost. But even so, the advent of socialism is portrayed as a top-down process—laws transfer owner­ship from the few to the many—rather than a fundamental rev­olution from below in social and economic relations.

That is intimately related to the fact that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is pervaded by a sense of pessimism about the ability of workers to change things. The world is full of philanthropists with no arse in their trousers, working selflessly to keep a class of rich idlers in luxury, because “the majority are mostly fools”, as Owen says (Chapter 15). And he goes further (Chapter 2):

there sprung up within him a feeling of hatred and fury against the majority of his fellow workers.
They were the enemy. Those who not only quietly submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to alter it.
They were the real oppressors… He hated and despised them… They were the people who were really responsible for the contin­uance of the present system.

When a workmate is laid off, he refuses to feel sorry for a man who supports the system that impoverishes him (Chapter 6): “It’s wrong to feel sorry for such people; they deserve to suffer.”

“Were they all hopelessly stupid?” he asks himself (Chapter 1), but another possibility suggests itself: “Or was he mad himself?” Doubts of his own sanity torment Owen from time to time, com­pounded by evidence of what seems to be tuberculosis. He even hatches a well-thought-out plan to kill himself, his wife and their son to spare them the suffering that the system has in store for them.

All this could easily make the book into a prop for left-wing elitism, the idea that the working class is too thick to achieve anything, too absorbed in football and soap operas to comprehend their position, and so wiser, nobler minds have to improve things without or against them. It has rarely been claimed as such a prop, though. This is partly because a traditional enough story of working men in Edwardian England holds little appeal for elitists. But apart from that, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists ultimately transcends the pessimism in it.

To return to Engels, he once criticised a writer in whose novel “the working class figures as a passive mass, unable to help itself” (letter to Margaret Harkness, April 1888). On the other hand, he went on, “how do I know whether you have not had very good reasons for contenting yourself, for once, with a picture of the passive side of working class life, reserving the active side for another work?” Robert Noonan’s early death in a workhouse leaves us no way of knowing how he may have portrayed the working class in other works, and it is unfair to take the one novel he managed to write as his definitive last word on the subject.

And that novel was written at a time that would test the faith of many socialists. Economic depression put a big dent in working-class militancy in England. The pensions and rudimentary social insurance that would soon constitute a proto-welfare state hadn’t kicked in yet, leaving no safety net for workers, and an incentive not to challenge things. Noonan told it as he saw it, and the picture he saw was a fairly gloomy one. While Owen is active in the painters’ union, he sees no connection between trade unionism and socialism. Soon after the book was finished, the ‘great unrest’ unleashed a strike wave across Britain and Ireland, and brought home to many that workplace struggle was an integral part of the fight for socialism. Had Noonan lived to experience that—or better still, the revolutionary possibilities that followed the first world war—The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists could have told a different story.

But there are aspects of Owen’s difficulties that are almost universal. Here is a socialist trying his hardest to convince his fellow workers of the need for socialism but making little headway, one of “a few self-sacrificing enthusiasts, battling against the opposition of those they sought to benefit” (Chapter 40). Who among us has not “listened with contempt and anger” to workers spouting reactionary prejudices (Chapter 34)? All socialists have to bang their heads against “the great barriers and ramparts of invincible ignorance, apathy and self-contempt, which will have to be broken down before the system of society of which they are the defences can be swept away” (Chapter 40).

Usually after one of these arguments Owen would wander off by himself, with his head throbbing and a feeling of unutterable depression and misery at his heart, weighed down by a growing conviction of the hopelessness of everything, of the folly of expecting that his fellow workmen would ever be willing to try to understand for themselves the causes that produced their sufferings. …they did not want to know!

(Chapter 48)

We’ve all been there. Socialists whose faith in the working class is a blind one will dismiss the problem and carry on smiling with the un­convincing compulsory happiness of a holiday camp employee. But anyone who puts their socialism to the test with working-class people will recognise the frustration when something you know yourself to be obvious and simple just doesn’t get through. If you’re any good, you overcome the doubts and depressions, but there’s something wrong with a socialist who never has them. While Owen’s methods sometimes leave a lot to be desired, his stubborn determination against such odds makes him a comrade to us all.

Fiction is the ideal medium for exploring such personal dilemmas that socialists face. Owen’s pessimism more than likely reflects that of the author, but Tressell’s novel has the merit of going beyond that pessimism. Some of his workmates start lending an ear to Owen’s arguments, a socialist propaganda van comes to town, and a couple of the workers become socialists themselves. The firmest of them, Barrington, comes across an ex-socialist who has turned coat and become a paid orator for the Liberal Party, citing the ignorance of the workers as his excuse. Initially Barrington is de­moralised by this, but seeing a group of children staring at Christmas presents they can’t afford renews his socialist faith: “he flushed with shame because he had momentarily faltered in his devotion to the noblest cause that any man could be privileged to fight for” (Chapter 53). The novel concludes that “the glorious fabric of the Co-operative Commonwealth” was coming into view, “the rays of the risen sun of Socialism”. The Ragged Trousered Philan­thropists has awakened, maintained and renewed that hope in generations, and continues to do so in the 21st century.