The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Robert Tressell
to ‘thirty years’ hard labour’ (p. 130). They are under constant surveillance ‘as if says Philpot to Harlow, ‘we was a couple of bloody convicts’ (p. 157). This remark recalls the design of Victorian prisons whereby inmates, confined to separate cells, were kept under permanent observation by officers stationed on a tower, the panoptican, in the middle of the building.
The system means that ‘[o]ne must either trample on others or be trampled upon oneself (p.204). This is why Tressell refers to it as the ‘Battle of Life’. He claims that this is a Christian description (ibid.) but the same phrase is also deployed by Darwin who talked about the ‘great and complex battle of life.’9 Tressell’s use of Darwinian ideas and idioms, while it is another instance of unity in the novel, nevertheless complicates its vision of socialism. Owen, for example, believes that the existing order is ‘bound to fall to pieces because of its own rottenness’ (p.369). That rottenness lies in the way everybody has to compete with everybody else but it is precisely this struggle, according to Darwin, which ensures stability and balance; in short the continuation of the present system. A further point is that while socialism is regarded as ‘inevitable’ (p. 545), the culmination of the historical process, evolution is ongoing and without any predetermined end. Finally, evolution proposes that nothing could have happened any differently to the way it did, and this view finds expression in the novel through the frequent repetition of the word ‘compel’. The meaning of this term, however, is severely at odds with the educational aim of the book which is to teach people that things could be ordered otherwise. In short, the socialism of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is skewed by its evolutionary imagery and diction.
The novel also shows great unity of plot. Incidents are anticipated and situations paralleled. Ruth’s baby calls out ‘Dad! Dad! Dad!’ (p.181) to Slyme, an incident which looks ahead to her giving birth to his child. Similarly, the accidents that Harlow and Easton narrowly avoid while up a ladder (pp.400-1) prefigure Philpot’s death in Chapter 46. An example of situations paralleling one another would be the respective meetings of the philanthropists and the brigands. The former gather to organise their annual ‘Beano’ (Chapter 41) while the latter manipulate a council meeting for their own ends (Chapter 39). The philanthropists are shown to have an exaggerated respect for procedure while the brigands have a cynical disregard of it. The purpose of juxtaposing these scenes in the novel is to underline the point that the philanthropists, in contrast to the brigands, are incapable of taking charge of their own destiny. There is also the further suggestion that democracy is a bankrupt system since its apparatus appears as either farcical or corrupt; a suggestion which reinforces the latent revolutionary socialism of the novel.
The unity of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists can be read in three ways. First, as a metaphor for the socialist society of the future where everything is connected and interdependent. Second, the intricate architecture of the work represents the values of craftsmanship against the ‘scamping’ that the men are forced to practice by their employers. The third way of reading the unity of the novel is altogether less positive. This way perceives the tightly interlocking structure as an analogy for the capitalist system itself. The parallels and repetitions are symptomatic of the way capitalism seems able to reproduce itself, and this problematises Tressell’s repeated claim that the existing state of things can be changed.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and the English Novel Tradition
Jack Mitchell has situated The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists within the English novel tradition.10 One characteristic of that tradition is to see society as a whole, as a community, and another is to resolve whatever prevents that community from being realised. Both these inform the ‘condition of England’ novels of the nineteenth century of which Tressell’s is perhaps the last.
Mitchell traces Tressell’s line of descent from John Bunyan through, among others, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens. Tressell himself said that he read Fielding and Dickens while he was writing The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists but it is the influence of Dickens which is most evident in the book, particularly in the way the reader’s attention is directed to the sufferings of children: how their bodies are deformed, how their minds are stultified and their sensibilities brutalised. But the children in the novel are not just victims, they also represent hope for the future: they disregard the class distinctions (pp. 77-8) and, in contrast to the selfishness which the system demands, they show themselves willing to share (p. 136).
In addition to signifying the contradictory qualities of pathos and optimism the term ‘children’ is frequently used of the philanthropists. This brings into relief the latent paternalism in the novel, present in such gestures as Barrington’s gift of £10 to the Owens. Here again Tressell shows his indebtedness to Dickens whose kind hearted capitalists, such as the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby, implied that the system did not need to be fundamentally changed.
Tressell’s novel can also be seen as belonging to the tradition of working class writing. The standard working class novel of the nineteenth century such as Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadows (1849) or H. J. Bramsbury’s A Working Class Tragedy (1895), was highly partisan but ‘failed to get inside working class life’ because it relied on the formula of the romance, mystery or adventure novel.11 Tressell was able to overcome this limitation by recourse to the techniques of the realistic novel, those techniques themselves being modified by the commitment to socialism. Hence, unlike the bourgeois novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is more interested in the fate of the community than just the individual.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Modernism
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was finished in 1910 – the year, according to Virginia Woolf, that Modernism began.12 Hence it is not surprising that the novel has certain modernist characteristics, specifically an interest in the unifying power of symbol and a self-consciousness about the problems of artistic representation. The first is apparent in Tressell’s symbol of the house which gives a formal unity to a text riddled by contradictions, for example the conflicting notion that people are compelled to behave in certain ways while simultaneously being free to change that behaviour. In this respect Tressell’s symbolism operates like that of T. S. Eliot’s or James Joyce’s; it draws the fragments of modern experience into an ordered whole.
The novel’s self-consciousness about art, another modernist feature, is more problematic. One of the basic ideas of modernist art was that ‘the principle of reality [had become] peculiarly difficult to grasp.’13 This is registered in Tressell’s novel by Owen’s constant struggle to express reality in such a way that the philanthropists will recognise it (p. 267). At the same time, however, Owen is in no doubt about the nature of that reality; it is completely knowable.
The Modernists were concerned with the process of fiction making, and the political aspect of this is explored in the critique of newspapers, The Obscurer and the Daily Chloroform. Their fictions, or false pictures of reality, distract the reader’s attention from what is actually going on around them. Hence they are like those stories in which readers become so absorbed that they bump into things on the street (p.400). The irony is that the criticism of these fictions takes place within a text that is itself a fiction. Tressell may claim that he has ‘invented nothing’ (p.14) but this elides his huge debt to the tradition which posits the theory that the novel is a set of techniques for representing reality. Fictions, it seems, can only be exposed by other fictions and this complicates Owen’s claim to ‘know’ reality. At this point, the novel ceases to be a corrective of false consciousness and instead approximates to the modernist preoccupation with the nature of consciousness itself. Indeed it could be argued that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists supplies the answer to its own question of why the philanthropists cannot see the truth – because there is none to see.
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