Welcome to Mugsborough // New Socialist

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is the closest thing the British left has to a sacred text. People from across the movement have paid tribute to Robert Tressell’s tale of early twentieth century builders and decorators. My copy¹ comes with an introduction by the Engels scholar/Blairite MP/museum boss Tristram Hunt, in which he says “a leading figure in the New Labour administration” claimed that it was the book which had the greatest impact on her politics (p.vii). Hunt also quotes Jack Jones, the Spanish Civil War veteran who led the Transport and General Workers Union, saying a similar thing; and John Nettleton, a 1980s shop steward for that same union, reporting of one of the book’s key chapters: “every new apprentice who ever comes off the building site on the Liverpool Cathedral, that’s his first lesson. He learns that [the book] before he learns about the trade; he learns that and that’s the way it should be” (pp.xxvi-xxvii). Even fictional Labour politicians read Philanthropists: it is a gift of this book to a love interest that brings down Harry Perkins in Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup. The actor Ricky Tomlinson was given the book by a prison governor, and it converted him from fascism to socialism. I was given my copy by my grandad, whose father was a builder in Hastings (where, thinly veiled under the name ‘Mugsborough’, Philanthropists is set), and who could recognise Tressell’s town all too well.

The book’s popularity is in many ways strange. As a novel, it is bad. As Andy McGeeney says, there is no “driving narrative” to the book: no mystery, no quest, no romance, little humour and no denouement. There is housepainting, then a tea break involving a lecture about the virtues of socialism, then more housepainting, then more lectures, then one of the common tragedies that befalls working class lives, which is described sympathetically but bloodlessly; then more housepainting, more lectures, and some clumsy attempts at satire.

The painstaking detail with which Tressell describes the world of working class people in Edwardian small-town southern England are of great interest to the social historian but less to a reader of fiction. Perhaps Tressell intended the medium to be the message: the monotony of the novel conveying the dullness of the workers’ situation. And we must remember that Tressell wrote the novel in bits, in his evenings, after a hard day’s labour – and died before it was published. As George Orwell notes,² unlike many things called ‘proletarian novels’, Philanthropists was written by an actual proletarian. The best writing in the book is found in the conversations between workmen. Raymond Williams claims that “there is no finer representation, anywhere in English writing, of a certain rough edged, mocking, give-and-take conversation between workmen and mates.”³ It is perhaps this, and the book’s realism, which has attracted generations of working class readers. But it does not save such a long book (my copy is 742 pages, and one can see why it was originally published in an abridged version) from being somewhat boring. Tomlinson enjoyed it in solitary confinement, but read elsewhere, it is a drag.

This doesn’t mean that the book is not worth reading, for Philanthropists is not simply a novel; it is also a tool for informing socialist strategy. The running theme of the book is the attempt of the protagonist, Frank Owen (based, to some degree, on Tressell himself), to convince his workmates that their problems are caused by capitalism, and that socialism is the answer. There are, however, many ways in which Philanthropists is a surprising choice for a strategic guide. In the rest of this review I will note some of them, whilst also arguing that it has insights we can learn from today.

Unlike many things called ‘proletarian novels’, ‘Philanthropists’ was written by an actual proletarian. Tressell wrote the novel in bits, in his evenings, after a hard day’s labour – and died before it was published.

Welcome to Mugsborough

The first surprise about this bible of the British labour movement is that it was written and set in Hastings, a small seaside town which was represented by Conservatives for ninety-one years of the 20th century, the clean sweep disrupted at both ends by the wonderfully named aristocratic Liberal Freeman Freeman-Thomas (1900-1906) and the soft left Labour lawyer Michael Jabez Foster (1997-2010). Though it was recaptured for Labour by Helena Dollimore in the 2024 general election, Hastings is about as far from the traditional bastions of labour (and Labour) – the mines, the ports, the mills, the inner cities – as it is possible to get. It is this geography that Williams picks up on in his memorial lecture on Tressell:

There are certain kinds of labour process which need a certain significant kind of close, even closed, community. And you find also that it is these communities which have been most prolific over a run of time, to our own day, in producing working-class novels: the mining areas, whether the coal mining areas or the quarries; or the tailoring sweatshops; or the shipyards or the docks: places where you are simultaneously a working man or woman, a member of a working class family in the simple, descriptive sense, but also a member of a working class community… within that very intense, often one-track community, the problem of class… arrives enmeshed with what is also your identity as the people of that place and the people of that region, for you belong, simultaneously, over the whole range.

In certain parts of the country, where the problems of social self-definition, of class-consciousness in that hard, arresting, challenging form, are in fact quite different, there was significant recruiting of poor men against what was objectively their own class… What is a surprise is that the first socialist working-class novel in English was written in… a community which did not, so to say, deliver class consciousness, but actually obstructed and confused it.⁴

The conditions of Hastings/Mugsborough, then, were not promising for socialist agitation. And true to Williams’s thought, Frank Owen fails to raise much class consciousness at all. He converts a couple of workmates; he finds out that another, Barrington, is an Orwell-style wealthy socialist who has voluntarily dropped down the social scale to find out how the workers really live. Many of the book’s working class characters remain implacably, even violently, opposed to socialism: grateful to their employers, un-organised and without hope. This is the second surprise: this sacred text of the labour movement is a story about the failure to build a labour movement.

These surprising aspects—the political geography, and the narrative of failure—are what make Philanthropists relevant to us today. The closed working class communities described by Williams have all but disappeared in post-industrial Britain. We all live in a kind of Mugsborough, in what Williams describes as:

a mixed community… where people are living next door to each other but are not necessarily in the same kind of work… where there are radical differences of social situation and position right inside the community, and you have a different basic sense of what a community is.⁵

Working class people in Britain today more closely resemble Tressell’s housepainters: transient, precariously employed, service sector, un-unionised—than the subjects of more recent popular socialist films such as Pride or Made in Dagenham. Following Williams’s line of thought, some of the reasons that class consciousness and integration into trade unions and political parties have diminished in the twenty first century are the same reasons that, throughout the twentieth century, Hastings was Tory and the Welsh Valleys were Labour. As we seek to gain both—not just for Labour, but for the left—we are likely to face many of the challenges that Owen faced in Mugsborough.

This sacred text of the labour movement is a story about the failure to build a labour movement.

Some of those challenges are depressingly familiar. Owen’s colleagues are under the sway of an ideological press: the Daily Obscurer and the Daily Chloroform. The novel begins with an argument over “this ’ere fissical policy” (p.11), with those in favour of protectionist tariffs lining up behind the Conservatives, and those for ‘free trade’ backing the Liberals. Owen’s view—that free trade is probably better, and protectionism draws its appeal from an ugly xenophobia, but that the debate is a distraction from the real problem, capitalism—is drowned out. The parallels with Brexit and the 2016-19 period are upsettingly obvious. Owen also faces the kind of objections to socialist transformation that we have come to know all too well: humans are naturally greedy; nationalisation would cost too much; a socialist with property is a hypocrite, and one with none is a layabout and a thief.

One thing we can learn from the novel, then, is that such problems have a long history, and are likely to recur again; and that we need a strategy for dealing with them. The strategy of the socialists in Philanthropists is to engage patiently in the education of their fellow workers, offering a detailed explanation of the socialist programme. By the novel’s end, this has not succeeded, but nonetheless, this strategy retains a definite appeal.

‘Socialism is a Plan’

In Mugsborough, class consciousness is weak, the press obscures the truth, and disputes about trade deals crowd out deeper thought about political economy. Socialism is barely understood. One of Owen’s colleagues—Joe Philpot, a “prematurely aged” (p.33) painter-decorator—poses the question:

Now, some people tells us the way to put everything right is to ’ave Free Trade and plenty of cheap food. Well, we’ve got them all now, but the misery seems to go on all around us all the same. Then there’s other people tells us as the “friscal policy” is the thing to put everything right… And then there’s another lot that ses Socialism is the only remedy. Well, we all know pretty well wot Free Trade and Protection means, but most of us don’t know exactly what Socialism means… (pp. 589-90)

Tressell’s answer is this:

Socialism is a plan by which poverty will be abolished, and everyone enabled to live in plenty and comfort, with leisure and opportunity for ampler life. (p. 537)

Barrington (the wealthy socialist) lays out that plan. His vision is of an economy in which a democratic state owns all capital, employs all labour, and provides all housing. You know what it is, he says, for a company to own capital, a boss to employ you, a landlord to take your rent – now, simply replace these with the state; that is, with the people. Corporations will be taken into public ownership peacefully and gradually:

The state would continue to pay to the shareholders the same dividents [sic] they had received on average for, say, the previous three years. These payments would be continued to the present shareholders for life, or the payments might be limited to a stated number of years and the shares would be made non-transferable. As for the factories, shops and other means of production and distribution, the State must adopt the same methods of doing business as the present owners. I mean that even as the big Trusts and companies are crushing – by competition – the individual workers and small traders, so the State should crush the trusts by competition… The first step in this direction will be the establishment of Retail Stores for the purpose of supplying all national and municipal employees with the necessaries of life at the lowest possible prices. (pp. 601-02)

Barrington then proposes that public employees will be paid in paper money that is redeemable in these Retail Stores; thus the emergent socialist state will bypass the current monetary system. Since the Retail Stores are so cheap, every worker will want this paper money, which can only be got through working for the State, so private enterprises will struggle to find employees. The influx of labour into the public sector will then be put to work in a war against poverty and for the rapid development of productive forces. The investment in labour-saving machinery thus made possible will allow for the reduction of the working day and greater focus on culture and opportunities for leisure.

In today’s Mugsboroughs, with socialist traditions and class consciousness at low ebbs, clear plans act as a rallying point for otherwise disparate people. A plan can play an identity-constituting role.

Now, we may disagree with Barrington’s vision – in particular, about whether such an overwhelmingly powerful state is desirable. We may disagree with his strategy – he seems to assume an economy closed to international pressures and a lack of organised anti-socialist opposition. But it is refreshing to see a plan: what socialism would be like, why it would be better than what we have, and how we get there from here. Marx warned against “writing recipes for the cookshops of the future,” but his proscription should probably be read as applying to the kinds of extremely detailed plans of earlier utopian socialists such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, in which the lives of socialist citizens were described in minute detail, down to the architecture of their houses. We need not do this. But to answer today’s Philpots, we need more than vague slogans and declarations of allegiance (“We’re for saving the planet, against patriarchy, for social justice, against billionaires…” – however correct these may be), and more than a grab-bag of piecemeal improvements (however welcome these may be).

Philpot’s question needs answering, not simply because it is embarrassing for socialists to find themselves lost for words, nor even (or at least not necessarily) because we need to have and to give instructions. It needs answering because, in today’s Mugsboroughs, with socialist traditions and class consciousness at low ebbs, clear plans act as a rallying point for otherwise disparate people. Workers can feel: I know what that is, I like the sound of it, I can see how we can get there, and I will do my bit to realise it. In a plan – a good plan, anyway – they can see too how different interests can be fulfilled together, and the part each different person has to play. Slogans and principles do not have that capacity; piecemeal reform lacks the motivational power. To paraphrase GA Cohen: unless we have some idea of which recipes the cookshops of the future will use, we’ll have a hard time persuading people that they’ll like the food there.

The nearest thing we have to Barrington’s plan is the Green New Deal, which aims to show how the interests of both workers in the deindustrialised Global North, and those vulnerable to climate change in the Global South; those who fear civilisational collapse and the loss of the wonder of nature and those with more mundane concerns for breathable air, lower energy bills, and job security, can coincide. It suggests a role in the plan for trade unionists, voters, engineers and economists. Perhaps it can play the role, in our own times, of establishing the coalition for twenty-first century socialism. Even here, we could do with paying attention to details over slogans: could you explain to a colleague how your favoured version of the Green New Deal would be implemented?

Owen’s own lectures to his colleagues tend to focus more on the analysis of capitalism than the details of socialism, but exhibit the same accessible-yet-thorough style as Barrington’s. He explains a theory of surplus value using pieces of bread; he demonstrates the inefficiencies of capitalism with an oblong drawn on a to-be-plastered wall with a charred piece of wood. His economic theory, like Barrington’s political strategy, is in places questionable – for instance, he neglects competition between capitalists, and the possibility of economic growth – but it is again refreshing to see clear and detailed, but also ambitious and wide-ranging analysis expressed in such a way. Even the best politicians and organisers today tend to shy away from offering a general theory of capitalism, preferring to focus on particular symptoms.

Although Owen and Barrington fail to convince many of their colleagues in the novel, in the real world, their strategy was not altogether unsuccessful.⁶ Many of the things Owen struggles to get his colleagues to believe in Philanthropists – that money is a mere token, that labour creates value, that different classes had different interests, that things didn’t have to be like this – became commonplace sentiments amongst the British working-class in the subsequent decades. This was due, Orwell says, in no small part to people like Owen patiently and passionately persuading their colleagues.⁷ It was also due to the book itself. In particular, Philanthropists helped to play the sort of consciousness-raising, identity-forming, and hope-giving role that Owen ultimately fails to play in the story – hence its being read by trade union leaders, Labour politicians both real and fictional, and plasterers-turned-actors making their way from the far-right to the left. Philanthropists is perhaps the great British contribution to what Michael Heinrich calls “worldview Marxism”, a crude kind of social analysis, yes, but one “which played above all an identity-constituting role: it revealed one’s place as a worker and socialist, and explained all problems in the simplest way imaginable.”⁸ For all its shortcomings, such a worldview attaining a degree of popularity was a necessary condition for the social democratic movements of the early twentieth century. And, in turn, these sentiments and movements contributed to the material gains achieved by the working class in the twentieth century: the NHS, health and safety law, secure employment, progressive taxation, the welfare state, trade union rights.

Mugsborough, of course, lacked these things – and all have been diminished or threatened in recent times. As Tressell notes, insecurity itself is inimical to the solidarity that socialist organising requires:

all who live under the present system practise selfishness, more or less. We must be selfish: the System demands it. We must be selfish or we shall be hungry and ragged and finally die in the gutter. The more selfish we are the better off we shall be. In the “Battle of Life” only the selfish and cunning are able to survive: all others are beaten down and trampled underfoot. No one can justly be blamed for acting selfishly – it is a matter of self-preservation – we must either injure or be injured. It is the system that deserves to be blamed. (pp. 139-140)

If we are going back to Mugsborough, we should not assume that hardship and precarity makes people into revolutionaries; it can just as easily (and quite reasonably) make them selfish and cowed. In Philanthropists, this is part of the reason that the protagonists ultimately fail to build a movement.

But the way they fail is instructive. As Williams notes:

What Tressell has tackled is not just the pity of it, which recommends sympathy, which passes too easily into the notion that we could all live better and differently if we’d only make up our minds to. The book gets to that position, in the end, but it halts very deliberately, along the way, to see what is really involved in making up your mind about it, setting your mind to it. It looks hard at the obstacles, the barriers, which are put up not only among those who have a lot to lose but among those who have everything to gain.⁹

Narratives of heroism and victory, of a people awakened by a charismatic speech or a moment of collective defiance, can be inspirational. But Philanthropists is more real, and in this realism, gives a kind of inspiration. To know that we are part of a long struggle, and one that requires care, is vital. Barrington and Owen’s halting conversations with their colleagues, unsuccessful as they tend to be, also differ in a virtuous way from the plans of the protectionists and free-traders: the latter are handed down from elites via the media, whilst the plan for socialism is created – for better and for worse, but surely mostly for the better – by deliberation between workers themselves.

To sum up, Tressell presents a worst-case scenario for socialist organising: atomised and precarious workers in a mixed community with low levels of class consciousness, under the grip of a bourgeois press and a politics dominated by disputes between liberal and conservative capitalists. In this situation – one which we may find familiar! – he prescribes clear ideas, thoroughly and accessibly presented. In the real world, this kind of work delivered material gains for the working class: not the implementation of Barrington’s plan, or anything like it, but things like the welfare state, and the advancement of class consciousness within trade unions. Philanthopists played an important motivating role in these. Tressell’s narrative of failure and utopia ironically found (limited) practical success – and has much to teach the contemporary organiser.

Tressell presents a worst-case scenario for socialist organising: atomised and precarious workers in a mixed community with low levels of class consciousness, under the grip of a bourgeois press.

Tressell, Noonan, and some Final Surprises

I have already noted Orwell’s description of Philanthropists as a book written by a true proletarian. Orwell is correct – but Tressell’s proletarian experience was less typical than we might expect.¹⁰ Robert Tressell was the pen name of Robert Noonan. An Irish immigrant, he worked as a sign-painter in Hastings, and died of tuberculosis in Liverpool whilst awaiting a boat to Canada. Philanthropists was saved by his daughter Kathleen (whom he had raised largely alone), and was published posthumously. So far, so proletarian. However, Noonan was the son not of a Dublin labourer, but of a magistrate, part of the Protestant Irish elite. He also spent much of his life in South Africa. Thus, as Williams notes, Noonan had a kind of distance from the working-class people he writes about. Williams finds that this gives Noonan a useful kind of “double vision,”¹¹ both proletarian and outsider; but it perhaps explains the element of the book that most jars with the modern reader: the ire that Noonan, through Owen, directs at his fellow workers.

Before reading the novel, I had assumed that the titular ‘ragged-trousered philanthropists’ were working class people whose philanthropy – love for humanity – was such that they helped one another out in hard times. This is wrong: the title is meant with irony and bitterness. The ‘philanthropy’ of Owen’s colleagues is not their solidarity, but rather their willingness to sell their labour below its value, and to perpetuate a system that transfers wealth to the wealthy. In Noonan’s view, workers make a kind of charitable donation to capitalists, a hideous inversion of what we usually take philanthropy to be. As he writes:

There was in existence a huge accumulation of everything necessary. A great number of the people whose labour had produced that vast store were now living in want, but the System said that they could not be permitted to partake of the things they had created. Then, after a time, when these people, being reduced to the last extreme of misery, cried out that they and their children were dying of hunger, the System grudgingly unlocked the doors of the great warehouses, and taking out a small part of the things that were stored within, distributed it amongst the famished workers, at the same time reminding them that it was Charity, because all the things in the warehouses, although they had been made by the workers, were now the property of the people who do nothing.

And then the starving, bootless, ragged, stupid wretches fell down and worshipped the System, and offered up their children as living sacrifices upon its altars, saying: “This beautiful System is the only one possible, and the best that human wisdom can devise. May the System live for ever! Cursed be those who seek to destroy the System!” (p. 460)

His socialist propaganda, he concludes, is “as pearls cast before swine” as long as the working-classes keep up their “philanthropic” support of the leisure classes. Another surprise of this labour movement bible, then, is that it insults labourers themselves, calling them “wretches” and “swine”.

But in this passage we also find a Ricardian aspect¹² to Noonan’s outlook: what fills him with rage is that the people who produce things – workers – are not getting the value they produce. As the Labour Party’s old Clause IV put it, the aim is “to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry,” and the solution “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” But returning to workers the full value of their product is a problematic goal. For one thing, society’s resources are not traceable to particular workers, or even to workers alone: there is a total social product, stemming from the combined efforts of workers across the economy, to the reproductive labour (biological and social) that keeps them going, and the culture and leisure and art and family life that makes their lives, such as they are, worth living. To each, his own is no slogan for a modern economy in which each person’s contribution is predicated on those of countless others. Perhaps this Ricardianism is more appealing in the context of the labour process found in Mugsborough: one worker wallpapering, another painting, another plastering, all in separate rooms, all contributing their own bit, to which they can point and say, “I did this.” It makes less sense to workers in a large factory, who cannot say, “this is the car I built.” And it is clear that what we build, we build together.

Ricardian socialism also poses problems regarding gender and race and disability. Owen and Barrington equate “those who won’t work” not with the unemployed, but with the capitalists and aristocrats who live off other people’s labour, and this is a nice piece of rhetoric. However, one is left wondering where, in their system, those who can’t work (or can’t work so much, or can’t work under current conditions) are able to contribute; and if those people can’t engage in industry, which of its fruits they deserve.

The race and gender aspects of Philanthropists might not be immediately clear. It is largely a book about white English men. But race and gender are important, albeit under the surface, and they connect with Noonan’s time in South Africa. He lived in Cape Town and Johannesburg from around 1890 to 1901, the entirety of his twenties. In 1891 he married Elizabeth Hartel. In 1897 he divorced her for adultery, taking their daughter (the eventual saviour of the Philanthropists manuscript) Kathleen.¹³

The race and gender aspects of ‘Philanthropists’ might not be immediately clear. It is largely a book about white English men. But race and gender are important, though under the surface.

The book’s attitude towards women is mixed. Noonan seems to think that it is demonstrative of capitalism’s violence to the natural and the good that working class women have to leave the home to work – a position that few feminists today would endorse. Given the Ricardian element to his thought, one wonders whether, in Noonan’s socialist utopia, women would be entitled to financial independence, since they ought not to work (at least not for wages, outside the home). There are very few women characters in the book. But there is a real imaginative sympathy for the few that there are: Owen’s wife Nora, and Ruth, the wife of Owen’s colleague Easton. In a chapter devoted to her perspective, Ruth, having drunk more than she is used to, is seduced (or perhaps raped) by one of her husband’s colleagues. When Easton learns of this episode, he is angry with her. But Owen defends her:

you treated [Ruth] with indifference and exposed her to temptation. What has happened is the natural result of your neglect and want of care for her. The responsibility for what has happened is mainly yours… apparently you wish to pose as being very generous and to “forgive her” - you are “willing” to take her back: but it seems more fitting that you should ask her to forgive you.’ (pp. 704-5)

In its time, this would have been a highly progressive attitude – to his colleagues, another aspect of Owen’s weird radicalism. But it could also be read, as Hyslop suggests,¹⁴ as Noonan criticising himself for the breakdown of his marriage to Elizabeth.

The book’s racial politics are similar, though even more submerged. Philanthropists is oddly monocultural: no migrant workers appear in the book, though their presence in Mugsborough is used as a scapegoat by the proponents of Protection. This is especially surprising in the work of a man who was an immigrant himself: born in Ireland, starting his adult life in a Cape Town that was “remarkable in the colonial world of the late nineteenth century [for] its relative lack of racial segregation,”¹⁵ living and working in England, and dying in an attempt to migrate again. Though Noonan had organised in South Africa alongside future Sinn Féin leader Arthur Griffith and Easter Rising martyr John MacBride, the question of Ireland appears nowhere in the book.

Noonan’s South African organising has a grim undercurrent. He, and many Irishmen in the Cape, were understandably sympathetic to Boer resistance to the British Empire. Drawing on some remarks of James Connolly, Ronan Burtenshaw suggests in Tribune that this Irish-Boer solidarity was part of a more general anti-imperialism. But the basis for this solidarity was white supremacy. Noonan was an activist in the Transvaal Trade and Labour Council, whose first action was

to protest against the employment of black skilled labour. The protest proved to be a popular one, and one of the results was that after that architects inserted in their contracts clauses that only white skilled workmen should be employed.¹⁶

Hyslop finds in Philanthropists “White Labourist” ideas: the goal of socialism being to “enjoy the benefits of civilisation – the accumulation of knowledge which has come down to us from our forefathers.” Of course, only some people’s forefathers were ‘civilised’. And again, the Ricardian desire to take back the value of one’s labour seems to neglect the international aspect of value chains, and to exclude – on racist terms – those beyond the industrial labour market from deserving anything at all:

the savages [sic] of New Guinea or the Red Indians [sic] 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 civilisation, neither do they toil to create those things for the benefits of others. (p. 573)

On the other hand, Philanthropists is not an argument for a kind of labourist imperialism, by which the British working-classes are instructed to support the exploitation of foreign lands in order to make themselves, in Lenin’s memorable phrase, “the labour aristocracy”. Owen’s colleagues, barely subsisting, could not be called an aristocracy of any kind. The clear enemy throughout the book is the British aristocracy and bourgeoisie, rather than imperial rivals or ‘natives’ in the Global South – and Owen rejects the scapegoating of immigrants by his protectionist colleagues. Barrington mentions India in his great speech laying out the socialist programme:

India is a rich productive country. Every year millions of pounds worth of wealth are produced by her people, only to be stolen from them by means of the Money Trick and by the capitalist and official class. Her industrious sons and daughters… live in abject poverty, and their misery is not caused by laziness or want of thrift, or by Intemperance. They are poor for the same reason that we are poor – Because we are Robbed.’ (p. 598)

This passage suggests a possible solidarity between British and colonised workers – one that was present in British working class and radical politics of the time, as recently described by Priyamvada Gopal. I would like to think that, akin to the episode of Ruth and Easton, this passage is Noonan’s implicit repudiation of his behaviour in South Africa. And indeed, in a beautiful resolution, Hyslop claims that amongst the groups who used Philanthropists in their political education were the black South African trade unions FOSATU and SAAWU, who were leading anti-apartheid voices.¹⁷

The Ricardian desire to take back the value of one’s labour seems to neglect the international aspect of value chains, and to exclude – on racist terms – those beyond the industrial labour market from deserving anything at all.

Conclusion

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, then, is a strange bible. A proletarian novel written by a magistrate’s son, a British classic written by an immigrant, a handbook for the labour movement set at that movement’s weakest point, a drab story of failure that has proved inspirational to so many. Though we may quibble with some of its prescriptions, it reminds us of the virtues of laying out socialism as a programme: not a slogan, not a set of reforms, but a plan for a better future.

The appendix of the book ends thus:

Although they declined to buy the Gas Works, the people of Mugsborough had to buy the gas. The amount paid by the municipality to the Company for the public lighting of the town loomed large in the accounts of the Council. They managed to get some of their own back by imposing a duty of two shillings a ton upon coals imported into the Borough, but although it cost the Gas Works a lot of money for coal dues the Company in its turn got its own back by increasing the price of gas they sold to the inhabitants of the town… (p. 742)

As we try to rebuild the attitudes, narratives and institutions of popular collective action in the face of fossil fuel interests and fiscal rules, do we find ourselves in Mugsborough once again?

Robert Tressell. [1914] 2014. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, with an introduction by Tristram Hunt. London: Penguin, 2004. ↩
George Orwell. [1946] 2001. ‘Review of the The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressall [sic]’. In Smothered Under Journalism – the complete works of George Orwell vol. 18, edited by Peter Davison, assisted by Ian Angus and Sheila Davison. London: Penguin, p.255. ↩
Raymond Williams. 1983. ‘The Robert Tressell Memorial Lecture, 1982’. In History Workshop 16, Autumn, p.80. ↩
Williams, ‘The Robert Tressell Memorial Lecture 1982’, pp.74-5. ↩
Williams, ‘The Robert Tressell Memorial Lecture 1982’, p.75. ↩
Thus it inverts a common pattern in which a strategy works in fiction or in theory, but fails when placed in contact with reality. See also Kafka: “Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.” (Franz Kafka. 1971. ‘On Parables’. In Erich Heller (ed.): The Basic Kafka. New York: Pocket Books, p.158.) ↩
Orwell, ‘Review of the The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists’, p.257. ↩
Michael Heinrich. 2004. An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. Translated by Alexander Locascio, p.25. ↩
Williams, ‘The Robert Tressell Memorial Lecture 1982’, p.79. ↩
Little was known about Noonan’s life until the work of Hastings gas-meter reader Fred Ball, who published his research in 1973 (FC Ball. 1973. One of the Damned: the Life and Times of Robert Tressell, Author of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Orwell therefore did not know much of Noonan’s background, nor have access to the full manuscript of Philanthropists, which Ball recovered in 1955 – earlier editions were heavily abridged. ↩
Williams, ‘The Robert Tressell Memorial Lecture, 1982’, p.76. ↩
For the critique of “Ricardian Socialism”, see Simon Clarke. 1982. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. London: MacMillan. p.75. “Far from adopting the labour theory of value to ‘prove’ the exploitation of the working class, Marx’s critique of Ricardo undermines any such proof, both philosophically, in undermining the liberal theory of property which sees labour as the basis of proprietorial rights, and theoretically, in removing the immediate connection between the expenditure of individual labour and the value of the commodity, so that the relationship between ‘effort’ and ‘reward’ can only be constituted socially. Thus Marx was harshly critical of ‘Ricardian socialism’ which proclaimed labour’s entitlement to its product, arguing that such a ‘right’ was only a bourgeois right, expressing bourgeois property relations.” ↩
For detail about Noonan’s time in South Africa see Jonathan Hyslop. 2001. ‘A Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and the Empire: Robert Tressell’. In History Workshop Journal 51, Spring, pp.64-86. ↩
Hyslop. ‘A Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and the Empire.’ pp.70-3. ↩
Hyslop. ‘A Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and the Empire.’ p.69. ↩
Transvaal Leader, 2 May 1908. ↩
Hyslop. ‘A Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and the Empire’. pp.82-3. ↩