The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

by Robert Tressell

  Ideology, Marx and Morris

  Despite Owen’s command of the book’s drama, the novel’s most forceful character is not a person but a house. ‘The Cave’, the sprawling, Edwardian residence which the labourers spend their days doing up, provides an overarching metaphor for the novel’s critique of the capitalist system.

  Suppose some people were living in a house… and suppose they were always ill, and suppose that the house was badly built, the walls so constructed that they drew and retained moisture, the roof broken and leaky… If you were asked to name, in a word, the cause of the ill-health of the people who lived there you would say – the house. All the tinkering in the world would not make that house fit to live in; the only thing to do with it would be to pull it down and build another.

  But the terrible irony is that, rather than pulling down the rotten edifice, the working class spend their days underpinning and repairing it. As they carry out their albeit botched jobs on ‘The Cave’ so they are securing the house’s foundations and by implication the shoddy capitalist system. Hence their moniker. ‘All through the summer the crowd of ragged-trousered philanthropists continued to toil and sweat at their noble and unselfish task of making money for Mr Rushton.’ It is this unthinking, unceasing process of self-harm, with workers actively buttressing an openly exploitative system, which drives the hard fury of the book. For Mugsborough’s philanthropists seem to have no interest in challenging the system. ‘“Wot the ’ell’s the use of the likes of us troublin’ our ’eads about politics?”’ Moreover, they are even devoid of aspiration for the next generation. ‘It seemed as if they regarded their own children with a kind of contempt, as being only fit to grow up to be servants of the children of such people as Rushton and Sweater [a garment maker].’

  Robert Noonan’s daughter, Kathleen, once recalled how this culture of resignation both saddened and infuriated her father. ‘He would get exasperated when he could make no impression on the workmen when trying to get them to better their conditions. He would say they deserved to suffer, but that it was their children who would suffer, which was so terribly frustrating to him.’4 That bubbling anger is clearly apparent in the violent hostility which Frank Owen regularly displays towards his colleagues. ‘As Owen thought of his child’s future there sprung up within him a feeling of hatred and fury against the majority of his fellow workmen. 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 it.’ Indeed, these numerous outbursts of contempt towards the dull, stupid, bestial working class does make The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists a rather masochistic ‘working-class classic’.

  In a forlorn attempt to enlighten his workmates, Owen embarks on a series of lunchtime lectures (where, like Noonan, he is referred to as ‘the professor’), which provide the ideological backbone of the book. And here at work can be seen the intellectual maelstrom of the socialist revival as Owen draws on a catholic range of thinking to bolster his denunciation of capitalism. He begins his critique with a traditional, radical cry against 1066 and the ‘Norman Yoke’, which transferred public property into private hands. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries only further entrenched the inequalities of ‘landlordism’, before the Industrial Revolution ushered in the modern proletariat. Following a historical approach developed first by Friedrich Engels (in The Condition of the Working Class in England) and then popularized by Arnold Toynbee in his Lectures on the Industrial Revolution, Owen recounts how industrialization killed off skilled artisan communities who were replaced with ‘a class of mere wage earners, having no property in the machines they used, and no property in the things they made. They sold their labour for so much per hour, and when they could not find any employer to buy it from them, they were reduced to destitution.’

  It was this degradation, as John Ruskin put it, ‘of the operative into a machine’, this alienation of the individual from his labour thanks partly to his separation from the means of production, which destroyed work as a creative enterprise. Craftsmen were transformed into ‘hands’ suitable only for what William Morris termed ‘slave’s work – mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil’. Nowhere was this more the case, according to Morris, than in the realm of ‘Popular Art’ which ‘no longer exists now, having been killed by commercialism’. Traditionally, the craftsman had naturally fashioned his work so much so that it was ‘often difficult to distinguish where the mere utilitarian part of his work ended and the ornamental began’.5 But the eclipsing of a pre-industrial system of guilds and apprenticeships for the modern labour market snuffed out individual creativity as surely as Hunter clamped down on any hint of professionalism. This emphasis on the hypocrisy of modern liberty for the English workman (what Thomas Carlyle once called ‘the liberty to die by starvation’) is a recurring theme through the book.

  They were for the most part tame, broken-spirited, poor wretches who contentedly resigned themselves to a life of miserable toil and poverty, and with callous indifference abandoned their offspring to the same fate. Compared with such as these, the savages of New Guinea or the Red Indians are immensely higher in the scale of manhood. They are free! They call no man master; and if they do not enjoy the benefits of science and civilization, neither do they toil to create those things for the benefit of others.

  What kept these inequalities in place was ‘The Great Money Trick’. In essence, a bastardized form of Marx’s theory of surplus value (‘Therefore what remains in the possession of their masters represents the difference between the value of the work done and the wages paid for doing it’), Owen’s analysis also appealed to the traditional radical belief in a workman’s right to the ‘whole produce’ of his labour. Capitalism robbed the worker of the full fruits of his labour and then, backed up by the force of the state, demanded he pay for what was rightfully his. The comprehensiveness of the money trick, combined with the state’s monopoly of violence, meant all that was left to the dispossessed worker was the kind of futile act of resistance – drinking and smoking on the job – which Joe Philpot surreptitiously practises. ‘This is where we get some of our own back.’ Equally futile, Tressell implied, are the traditional forms of party politics. Among the more witty passages in the book are his accounts of the ‘Forty Thieves’ who run Mugsborough Municipal Council, amongst whom sit Messrs Didlum, Grinder, Sweater and Rushton himself. Liberal or Tory, the conventional political process offered nothing for the working man – and this at a time when municipal politics was regarded as one of the more promising avenues for socialism. Meanwhile, national party politics was little more than a smokescreen for the exploitation of the working class, as Parliament battled it out between free trade and Imperial tariffs. Neither of which, Owen believes, would address the fundamental causes of social inequality.

  In conventional Marxist style, Tressell suggested that little could change until the working class realized the true nature of their position and developed an understanding of class consciousness. It was the philanthropists’ wilful failure to realize their historic mandate which drives Owen to so much greater fury against his workmates (‘He hated and despised them because they calmly saw their children condemned to hard labour and poverty for life’) than his bourgeois bosses. Only Owen is able to appreciate the temporality of the existing state of class relations, rather than the almost divinely sanctioned legitimacy with which his colleagues seem to regard it. Partly he blames this on their stupidity but, as many historians have done since, the supremely ascetic Owen also implicates working-class culture. The Edwardian politician C. F. G. Masterman once described how the English working man is ‘much more allied in temperament and disposition to some of the occupants of the Conservative back-benches, whose life, in its bodily exercises, enjoyment of eating and drinking, and excitement of “sport”, he would undoubtedly pursue with extreme relish if similar opportunities were offered him.’6 Frank Owen feels the same. The depoliticized world o
f the pub, organized sport, horror novels and the yellow press (Daily Obscurer, Weekly Ananias, Daily Chloroform) was slowly, surreptitiously deadening any nascent class sentiments. In fact, there appeared only one hope. ‘It was possible that the monopolists, encouraged by the extraordinary stupidity and apathy of the people, would proceed to lay upon them ever greater burdens, until at last, goaded by suffering, and not having sufficient intelligence to understand any other remedy, these miserable wretches would turn upon their oppressors and drown both them and their System in a sea of blood.’

  The Cooperative Commonwealth

  And what would happen when the sea of blood subsided? Leaving aside the strong undercurrent of violence which suffuses the politics of this novel, what would the revolutionary aftermath resemble? Here, again, Owen draws on competing traditions within the socialist canon to fuse both ethical and economic schools of thought. Echoing many on the more Puritan wing of the socialist movement, Owen draws attention to the needless, egregious waste generated by capitalism. The commercial system created an unnatural demand market for futile, luxury goods while millions went without the basic necessities. ‘“If you go down town, you will see half a dozen draper’s shops within a stone’s-throw of each other – often even next door to each other – all selling the same things. You can’t possibly think that all those shops are really necessary?”’

  This unedifying diversion of labour and energy would be instantly curtailed in a cooperative commonwealth where full employment and abundance could be secured for all. The solution was, as the Social Democratic Federation had it on its membership card, ‘The Socialization of Production, Distribution and Exchange’. The nationalization of the means of production, the forcible return to public ownership of the wealth and property of the people illegally seized over the centuries, would necessarily result in an equitable distribution of all the necessaries of life. Here is the raw equality of the socialist dream. Yet Owen’s vision of a socialist society is not the kind of rural, Arcadian throw-back which Robert Blatchford in his utopian bestseller, Merrie England, had outlined. While Blatchford wondered whether ‘any carpet [is] so beautiful or so pleasant as a carpet of grass or daisies’, and lamented the ugliness of ‘Widnes and Sheffield’, Owen accepts that the Industrial Revolution, the modern era of science and machinery, are an established fact.7 The question is who controls the technology and to what uses it is put, rather than industrial progress per se. Indeed, with the help of ‘science and machinery’, Owen foresees a contented future where abundance could be generated for all ‘as was never known or deemed possible before’.

  However, Owen is also drawn to the ethical socialism of William Morris, who was deeply contemptuous of some of the mechanistic, economic socialism of his fellow ideologues. He once dismissed the utopian work of the American socialist Edward Bellamy as ‘State Communism, worked by the very extreme of national centralisation’ which promised nothing but ‘a machine-life’. Owen follows suit and outlines a socialist vision which is not simply a question of steady labour, state machinery and increased wages. What socialists want, Owen suggests, is not more work, ‘but more grub, more clothes, more leisure, more pleasure and better homes. They wanted to be able to go for country walks or bicycle rides, to go out fishing or to go to the seaside and bathe and lie on the beach and so forth.’ Unfortunately, the lumpen majority ‘often said that such things as leisure, culture, pleasure and the benefits of civilization were never intended for “the likes of us.”’ The cooperative commonwealth of the future would show that they were by generating a deeper sense of spiritual development and human fulfilment. What that relied upon above all was the return of a sense of attachment to the labour process and with it the reconstitution of the hand and the brain. The operative would be transformed back into a craftsman who struggled intellectually as well as manually.

  This conception of a new civilization, premised upon economic cooperation and abundant prosperity, has always been instrumental to the utopian socialist tradition – from Saint-Simon and Fourier to Bellamy and Blatchford – and Owen embraces it fully, if rather provincially. Indeed, the institutional architecture which Owen outlines seems remarkably similar to some of the garden city plans which were being developed at Letchworth and Welwyn at the time. ‘In the centre of every district a large Institute or pleasure house could be erected, containing a magnificently appointed and decorated theatre; Concert Hall, Lecture Hall, Gymnasium, Billiard Rooms, Reading Rooms… A detachment of the Industrial Army would be employed as actors, artistes, musicians, singers and entertainers. In fact everyone that could be spared from the most important work of all – that of producing the necessaries of life – would be employed in creating pleasure, culture and education.’ This was the ethical socialist dream of equality, craftsmanship and creativity. There would be no precarious struggle for the daily necessities of life as all were given the opportunity, after their willing contribution to the common weal, to pursue their individual creative talents. ‘There is no Wealth but Life’, declared Ruskin, and the cooperative commonwealth of Owen’s imagining promised to be wealthy beyond any riches Edwardian England had to offer.

  The Religion of Humanity

  If such a society seemed to resemble heaven on earth, it was meant to. For although one of the recurring themes of the novel is the nefarious influence of the Christian church and its markedly unchristian ministers, the socialism which Frank Owen preaches displays a profound religiosity. As such it was a representative reflection of much late nineteenth-century socialist thinking. From its first emergence in the credal vacuum of the French Revolution, socialism had proffered itself as a new religion, a new Christianity to fill the void left by the Roman Catholic Church. The utopian socialists – Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen – as well as the Young Hegelians (amongst whom Marx and Engels once counted themselves) – turned socialism into a religion of humanity: an ethical philosophy determined to implement harmony and fellowship on earth.

  While Marx and Engels later regrouped under the banner of ‘scientific socialism’, the spiritual tradition within socialism continued through the nineteenth century. And when socialist politics came alive again in 1880s Britain it did so as an almost religious revival. Many were drawn to socialism from Nonconformity and the currents of moral Protestantism, which were powerfully at work in Britain’s urban centres. The historian Raphael Samuel once noted the extraordinary affinity between the Salvation Army and the socialist missions of the 1890s. It was impossible to overestimate, he suggested, both the closeness of socialism’s relation to Christianity and also the way in which socialists conceptualized themselves very much, as late Victorians did, as making war against an evil, contaminating world.8

  Others were drawn to the religion of socialism from the currents of secularism, spiritualism and even mesmerism that were at work in late Victorian society. Having lost their faith in organized religion as well as their belief in the equity of existing social relations, numerous middle-class intellectuals converted to socialism (with all the sense of grace which that entailed) as a solution to their political and psychological difficulties. But it was more a case of joining a sect than a church, complete with the circulation of sacred texts, witness to truth, a fellowship of ideologues, a sense of persecution, and an unashamed contempt for the ignorant unknowing.

  It is this religious context which goes some way to explain the unrelenting zeal of Frank Owen. For not only is he, in sharp contrast to the official ministers of the church, a true Christian in his charity, forgiveness and ascetic holiness, he is also best understood as a missionary operating in the darkest, most heathen terrains. Owen is placed amongst the sensuous, childish working class to bring enlightenment, to promise them the wonders of a socialist ‘civilization’. There is no sense of this configuration of socialism arising organically from the working class. Rather, it is the product of leadership, middle-class leadership, which is able to bring the philanthropists out of the darkness and into the lig
ht, a situation which becomes all the more apparent with the emergence of the supremely middle-class Barrington as a fellow socialist apostle in the second half of the book. For a ‘working-class classic’, the proletariat is cast as condescendingly inert and only able to be aroused politically when the middle-class vanguard descends upon them.

  Needless to say, the work of conversion is a lonely, thankless business – a veritable Pilgrim’s Progress – but Owen regards it as his calling. It also seems a fairly Old Testament style of induction, for when the sheep stray from the path Owen’s fury becomes as consuming as his own accelerating illness. And it is the sense of weakness within the working class, their moral laxity and failure to appreciate the truth of socialism, which accounts for the pessimism which pervades the work. Like most men of the cloth, Owen is deeply troubled by the fallen state of the world around him.

  Reading the Novel

  None of these themes – the labour theory of value, utopian socialism, class consciousness – naturally lend themselves to the stylistic demands of popular fiction. But the lasting achievement of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is that such complex themes are developed through a narrative structure that manages to hold the reader’s interest. This is primarily the product of Tressell’s superb command of dialogue. The banter, the ceaseless repartee between the workmen brings us straight into cold mornings in drafty houses as the ‘hands’ ready themselves for the day’s sloshing and scamping. ‘There is no finer representation, anywhere in English writing,’ Raymond Williams rightly declared, ‘of a certain rough-edged, mocking, give-and-take conversation between workmen and mates. This humour, this edge, is one of the most remarkable achievements.’9 It is the pace and ease of the group scenes which allows for the exploration of socialist philosophy within a surprisingly amenable format.