0362 | The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists | Robert Tressell

by John on March 25, 2012

Context: Was reading this when I visited PNG’s only shopping centre in Port Moresby. Saw a Huli warrior in the supemarket in full regalia!

REVIEW

Took me a long while to get through this. It’s a fairly large book and I found the writing repetitive and a bit tedious in places. However, there’s no denying that this is an important book and a milestone in British literature, illustrating as it does, a pivotal moment in the political ideology of that nation.

If you’ve ever read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair then you can basically describe Ragged as a British vegetarian’s Jungle. Instead of working in meat packing, the destitute in Ragged work in the building and decorating trade. And instead of being oppressed immigrants from Lithuania, they are local inhabitants. Both groups are still trodden on and abused by their industry bosses although in this book, you actually get to know the bosses a lot better than in the Jungle.

What Ragged really lacks though is the style that made scenes and characters in The Jungle come alive and jump off the page at you. Tressell writes somewhat verbosely and I found myself wanting him to just get on with it. The lectures on socialism that characters occasionally delivered reminded me of the awful ability that Ayn Rand has to give characters fourteen page long turns in conversations that are utterly unrealistic. In a similar way although nowhere near as bad as Rand’s, Tressell’s prose is very much the servant of socialism, not the other way round.

You do see into the home and working lives of a group of men in detail and you feel their pain as they face what must have been a horrific reality for most of Britain prior to WW1. In fact, it makes you understand why so many working class men decided that a life being shelled in the trenches offered them more than a working life in the UK.

But socialism has, particularly from propaganda that still pours like vitriol from the Republican camps of the US, had a bad rap over the last 100 years since Tressell wrote this. It has had a positive impact on many countries. I think books like this were particularly influential in the establishment of some great British institutions such as the National Health Service which I thank God for every time I use it in the UK.

But like all ideologies, socialism is flawed. It’s such a shame that writers like Tressell couldn’t see that at the time. It would have saved the world a lot of heartache. That Tressell was ignorant of this is evident throughout the book. Capitalism is totally lambasted and socialism is held up to be, literally, “the Golden Light.” Clearly such phrases as this are laughable today, and can’t be taken seriously.

Still, the book is an important one and should definitely be read as a good example of how the novel can be used as a vehicle of expression that captures the mood of a nation in history.

OPENING LINE	The house was named ‘The Cave.’
99TH PAGE QUOTE	This far into the book, some of the plot might be revealed. If you want to see the quote, click show A little way down the road was a church with a clock in the tower. It was five minutes to ten by this clock. Bert said to himself that when it was ten he would make another start. Whilst he was resting he thought of many things. Just behind that church was field with several ponds in it where he used to go with other boys to catch effets. If it were not for the cart he would go across now, to see whether there were any there still. He remembered that he had been very eager to leave school and go to work, but they used to be fine old times after all. Then he thought of the day when his mother took him to Mr Rushton’s office to ‘bind’ him. He remembered that day very vividly: it was almost a year ago. How nervous he had been! His hand had trembled so that he was scarcely able to hold the pen. And even when it was all over, they had both felt very miserable, somehow. His mother had been very nervous in the office also, and when they got home she cried a lot and called him poor little fatherless boy, and said she hoped he would be good and try to learn.
QUOTES	Like most other ‘Christians’ [Slyme] believed in taking thought for the morrow, what he should eat and drink and wherewithall he was to be clothed. He thought it wise to lay up for himself as much treasure on earth as possible. The fact that Jesus said that His disciples were not to do these things made no more difference to Slyme’s conduct than it does to the conduct of any other ‘Christian’. They are all agreed that when Jesus said this He meant something else: and all the other inconvenient things that Jesus said are disposed of in the same way. For instance, these ‘disciples’ assure us that when Jesus said, “Resist not evil, If a man smite thee upon the right cheek turn to him also the left’, He really meant “Turn on to him a Maxim gun; disembowel him with a bayonet or batter in his skull with the butt end of a rifle!”
CLOSING LINE	This might give the game away. If you want to see the last line, click show The Golden Light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism.