Fresh from the battle-front of Britain's privatised rail system, leaders of the RMT union have recently circulated a reading list to bolster socialist morale among its frontline troops. Naturally, top of the list of recommended books is Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
For, almost one hundred years after it was written, this labour classic still retains a remarkable hold on the socialist imagination. Yet a more circumspect reading reveals a far less heroic portrayal of working-class solidarity than the rail union stalwarts might imagine.
The story of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is in large part the story of its author, Robert Noonan. Born in 1870 the illegitimate son of an inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary, Noonan ended up as a decorator and lone parent in Hastings. A craftsman who shared Ruskin's belief in the dignity of labour, he was a gifted autodidact familiar with the radical canon from Shakespeare to William Morris.
Noonan's socialism overshadowed his painting skills and he was progressively impoverished as employers punished his political activism. During the early 1900s depression, the tuberculosis-ridden Noonan and his daughter Kathleen were reduced to living hand to mouth from casual labour. And it was these miserable, grinding days which provided the material for his novel written over 1908-09 in the hope of escaping Hastings. He chose the pseudonym "Tressell" in honour of his sign-writing trade.
Noonan's rambling story of painters and decorators in the coastal town of "Mugsborough" is one of the great literary depictions of the indignities of poverty: the tyranny of the overseer, the perpetual fear of dismissal, the driving down of wages. By avoiding the romanticised terrain of most labour novels - the mill town, the lock-out, the coal mine - Noonan offered a more typical setting for an account of class struggle. It was these petty gradations of small-scale, non-industrial work that were a galling experience for millions as well as the obstacle to effective labour politics.
But what Noonan also offered in the brittle, early morning scenes of mixing the paint or the raucous evenings at the pub was a previously unrecorded sense of working-class humanity. The workers were no longer a dumb, insurgent mob or destined to a hopeless abyss. They were alive with passion, comedy and pathos. "There is no finer representation, anywhere in English writing," Raymond Williams once suggested, "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."
Yet the deeper ambition of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was to explain the nature and promise of socialism. The novel's hero is Frank Owen, "who took no interest in racing or football and was always talking a lot of rot about religion and politics". A self-educated craftsman like Noonan, he is instantly distinct from his fellow employees at Rushton & Co thanks to his use of standard English rather than free-flowing slang.
Owen's series of lunchtime lectures provide the ideological backbone of the book. There, between the sausages and tea, Owen manages to outline the Marxist theory of surplus value ("The great money trick") as well as the need for the nationalisation of the means of production. Using the house they are sprucing up as a metaphor for the corrupt capitalist system, Owen suggests the only solution is "to pull it down and build another". But the terrible irony was that rather than destroying the rotten edifice, the working class were constantly repairing it. 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."
But it is in this criticism of misguided philanthropy that the book's status as a "working-class classic" runs into trouble. Noonan's approach is a product of the late-Victorian socialist revival when hopes of political transformation swept Britain with religious fervour. Socialists started to display the same kind of moral certainty as the Salvation Army; activists likened themselves to missionaries. Noonan himself found a niche in the Social Democratic Federation run by his fellow middle-class Marxist, Henry Hyndman. And this elevated approach, of a secular priesthood bringing salvation to the fallen, is exactly the tone Owen adopts with his fellow philanthropists.
Unfortunately, not everyone wanted to be saved. Kathleen Noonan once recalled her father's fury at his colleagues' failure to understand their socialist calling. "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." That cold anger towards a working class refusing to appreciate its revolutionary duty suffuses the novel. Owen even says 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 alter it." Indeed, Owen the elevated intellectual displays more hostility to his myopic comrades ("He hated and despised them...") than to the exploitative boss class.
Like many a Marxist scholar, Noonan blamed working-class lethargy on the effects of popular culture. The depoliticised world of the pub, organised sport and the yellow press was surreptitiously deadening class loyalties. And so the only real way to achieve political progress was for a properly educated, implicitly middle-class elite - led by the likes of Owen and his wealthy, articulate co-revolutionary Barrington - to drag the blighted working class towards the socialist future. This was the uncomfortable political reality behind Noonan's "working-class classic".
Amazingly, such a reactionary stance has never blunted the book's appeal. Noonan himself died a lonely death in 1911 in Liverpool seeking emigration, but thanks to the efforts of his daughter, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was published in 1914. In the sweatshops of the East End it quickly became a popular text, while in the wake of the 1926 General Strike the "Painter's Bible" (as it was christened in an another religious echo) was passed from believer to believer.
For the novel has always boasted high levels of unofficial lending and borrowing. A guided introduction to this sacred text was part of the process of socialist conversion. The young Alan Sillitoe remembered being handed a copy in Malaya by a Glaswegian radio operator who told him it "won the 45 election for Labour". In Chris Mullin's 1980s satire A Very British Coup, Prime Minister Harold Perkins gives his girlfriend Molly a copy. "In the front he had written with a red felt pen, 'To a slightly Tory lady in the hope that she will see the light'." Molly "struggled through the first 50 pages and then gave up".
Today, the tradition continues, with the torch now handed down by the RMT executive "to educate each generation of workers with the ideas of socialism". Fresh readers will, of course, learn much from this impassioned assault on the human cost of inequality and the need for political action. But the rank-and-file should be on their guard. For does Noonan simply foster working-class consciousness - or justify the leadership of a socialist elite?
· A new edition of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, with an introduction by Tristram Hunt, is published this week by Penguin Classics
