THE RAGGED TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS

Robert Tressell

Oxford World's Classics £4.99

ISBN-13: 978-0199537471

THE RAGGED TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS?

Who are the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists? This question tantalized me for years whenever I considered the bizarre possible answers to it. I was aware that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was the title of a book, but that was all I knew; the question remained: who are they? It was only very recently that I discovered that the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - far from being, as I’d speculated they might be, a band of altruistic tramps or a society for hard-up humanitarians - far from being any of these things, were well known to me. So well known in fact that in a very real sense, I'm one of them!

Robert Tressel coins his novel's title "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" to describe the working class who "sweat and toil at their noble and unselfish task of making money for their employers." More particularly though he is talking about the workers of his day (at the beginning of the century) and especially those employed in the building trade.

The story is set in the town of Mugsborough (another sly, ironic dig at the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists) and centres on the lives of a group of painters and decorators, property repairers and their families. Also taken into account in the story are the notorious "sweat shops", corruption in local Councils and the rottenness generally in the structure of the town. Mugsborough can and should be taken as a microcosm of the whole of Britain at that time.

I don't intend here going into detail about the unscrupulously mercenary and merciless employers that live in the book and doubtless existed in real life. Let the names Tressell gave to them suffice: Rushton, Grinder, Sweater, Makehaste and Sloggit, Bluffem and Doem-down, Snatcher and Graball, Smeeriton end Leovit, Pushem and Sloggem, Doger end Scampit, and so on. Nor am I going to use much of his description of the neat-starvation which existed among their employees as a consequence of their ruthlessness, for there will be plenty of my readers who have experienced conditions as horrifying as those that Tressell describes (I use the word "describes" rather than "writes of" because Tressell says in his preface that he "invented nothing"; everything he speaks of - he witnessed.) For my own part, I can corroborate much of what he says about near-starvation from my own experience in the thirties. I remember for example, the "shopping" expeditions I went on with my grandmother to Smithfield market, where, instead of purchasing, we picked up from the gutter where they'd been tossed to await the refuse collector, bruised and faded fruit and scabby-looking vegetables. Memories, such as that of our school teacher dividing her lunch sandwiches among the half-starved children in the class - a practical example of the loaves and fishes feeding the multitude, but without the miracle of multiplication. Memories of the joy we felt on pay days after father had managed to get temporary work as a labourer on a council building site. Apart from the penny chocolate bars he always brought home on these occasions, it also meant that we'd have something more substantial, for the weekend, at least, than the bread and dripping or the bread and diluted milk pottage. For those readers too young to have such beautiful memories, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is essential reading and I urge them to read it at once.

Rather than mull over these atrocities I would prefer here to examine the causes of this heinous poverty, causes which are pin-pointed and scathingly analysed in this novel. It is important to say right away that although Tressell expresses hatred for the employers and all those instrumental in upholding such a brutal society, he did not blame them: "They (his employees) all hated and blamed Rushton. Yet if they had been in Rushton's place they would been compelled to adopt the same methods, or become bankrupt: for it is obvious that the only way to compete successfully against other employers who are sweaters is to be a sweater yourself. Therefore there is no upholder of the present system who can consistently blame any of these men. Blame the system."

But an inanimate thing such as is a system of running society cannot really bear the responsibility for its own being. So Tressell's thesis of blame becomes twofold. Whenever he speaks about those with whom the real responsibility lies, at, any rate the great bulk of the blame, his language contains words like "imbecility", "contemptuous", "stupidity", and "degraded". Words which most people would think much worse if applied to themselves than "hateful", "wicked", "cunning", or "aggressive". Who then are the people who inspire such feelings of contempt in the writer? Who then, are these contemptibles who are responsible for the iniquities of the Capitalist system? The high ranking Tories? The pastors and masters? The Capitalists themselves? Well, judge for yourself from this extract from the book -

"As for these people (the workers), they vote for what they want, they get what they vote for; and by God they deserve nothing better! They are being beaten with the whips of their own choosing and if I had my way they would be chastised with scorpions! For them the present system means semi-starvation, rags and premature death. They vote for it all and uphold it. Well let them have what they vote for. let them drudge - let them starve!"

Although this is from the lips of a disenchanted Socialist, one who had his head almost, stoved in by a rock thrown by one of the jeering crowd of workers as he tries to address them; although this is out of the mouth of a bitter man who has just witnessed the same crowd cheer him as he spoke to them (disguised with a beard) as a paid orator for the Tory candidate, in essence and in tone it is the same kind of statement that Tressell makes himself through the narrator of the story or through Owen and Barrington, two active Socialists. He does not of course conclude with the same sentiments but there often appears to be a kind of self-struggle to remain committed to the Socialist cause. Barrington undergoes this struggle, this revulsion of feeling following the scenes he witnesses at the elections.

"The blind, stupid, enthusiastic admiration displayed by the philanthropists for those who exploited and robbed them.., their callous indifference to the fate of their children, and the savage hatred they exhibited towards any one who dared to suggest the possibility of better things, forced upon him the thought that the hopes he cherished were impossible of realisation."

But his anguished feelings toward the children of the workers, "his younger brethren", save him from total disillusionment.
"He felt like a criminal because he was warmly clad and well fed in the midst of all this want and unhappiness, and 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 - the upholding of the disconsolate and the oppressed."

The same kind of see-sawing of feelings is witnessed in Owen, the chief character in the novel. Articulate, clear-thinking, and level-headed - if angry - Owen expresses most of Tressell's views, experiencing a curious love-hatred, of more accurately a compassion-contempt as he looked on these "little children in men's bodies", the same paradoxical feelings that Tressell must have felt, for he, like Owen, worked all of his life among them. "Thousands of (these) people like himself dragged out a wretched existence on the very verge of starvation...yet practically none of these people knew or even troubled themselves to enquire why they were in that condition! and for anyone else to try to explain to them was a ridiculous waste of time, for they did not want to know".
They did not want to know; yet this did not stop Owen from spending most,of his spare time and money (on pamphlets) in doggedly trying to force them to become aware" of their condition.  As also, we can surmise, Tressel must have done. In Owen we constantly witness the struggle between these two antipathetic states of mind and of feeling towards his fellow workers; feelings that we can be sure the author also fought with. But with Owen, as with Tressel, compassion and reason always triumph over revulsion and contempt. He knew the reason for this despicable lack of self-respect, for their abysmal ignorance and for their servility. He understood what made them roar with admiration as their betters fed them rhetoric, and what made them hoot with rage whenever anyone tried to show them the causes and the cure for their poverty, for their degradation. For the chains Karl Marx spoke of bound, not their wrists or their ankles, but their minds. "From their very infancy" says Owen, "they had drilled into them the doctrine of their own mental and social inferiority, and their conviction of this doctrine was voiced in the degraded expression that fell from their lips so frequently when speaking of themselves and each other . The likes of US!"

It is, I think, worth repeating here the same statement of fact, but more fully developed, as spoken by Barrington to the renegade socialist, towards the end of the book:-

"From their infancy most of them have been taught by priests and parents to regard themselves and their own class with contempt - a sort of lower animal - and to regard them who possess wealth with veneration, as superior beings. The idea that they are really human creatures, naturally absolutely the same as their so-called "betters, naturally equal in every way, naturally different from them only in those ways that their so-called superiors differ from each other, and inferior to them only because they have been deprived of education, culture and opportunity - you know as well as I do that they all have been taught to regard that idea as preposterous".

It is worthwhile also to listen to the renegade's answer, in order to see how once again Tressell balances one thought against another so that the facts of the situation continue to see-saw relentlessly in objectivity and truth.- "Go and undeceive them...go and try to tell them that the Supreme Being made the earth in all its fullness for the use and benefit of all his children. Go and explain to them that they are poor in body and mind and social condition not because of any natural inferiority, but because they have been robbed of their inheritance. Go and try to show them how to secure that inheritance for themselves and their children and see how grateful they'll be to you".

Of course the constant repetition of these two facts: the infamous treatment of the majority, the working class, by a minority, the established rulers, and the insane way that majority will insist on the privilege of being so treated, these two facts are not intended to be taken merely as a diatribe either against the working classes or against the rest of society. In the "loafer" classes, Tressell no doubt wanted to sow the seed of their guilt, and perhaps (but he hasn't much faith in this happening), spontaneously cause them to restructure Society more fairly. But most of all it is clear that his prime object was to stir the workers into awareness of their own shameful mental stultification; to show them themselves, as in a mirror, so that they might stiffen with horror at the sickening apparition that they perceive. And then, realising it is indeed their own image reflected there, be shaken to their roots with self-revulsion that will compel them to stiffen the sinews, summon the blood, disguise ugly nature with hard-favoured rage (to paraphrase Shakespeare^ Henry V) and then do something about their "heritage".

The "pull" of these two facts: an intolerable system and the paradox of the people who incredibly (to Owen and the socially aware), and degradingly tolerate that system is felt throughout the book, and provides the extraordinary force of the message. And although Tressell may play upon the emotions of the reader like an inspired musician plays upon his instrument, he never indulges in sentimentality! he is always scrupulously fair in his judgement and in his apportionment of the blame, and scathingly, almost brutally frank about the character of the people whose rights ,he champions. It is this determination on the part of the author not to let his political bias cloud his judgement that gives his assessment of the state of society at that time its ring of truth, its powerful impact and its claim to greatness both as a political indictment and as a novel.

EDWARD MORRISON
 

This article first appeared in Voices 2 - 1973