I found this article about the RTP on a trade union website. It is slightly ambivalent about the book. There are also some nice photographs of of Robert Tressell and his family. I read yesterday that his daughter was killed in a car crash after emigrating to Canada, but if she did, she was ninety-six at the time.
Some of the original book reviews are interesting too.
Last edited by kev67; 09-11-2013 at 05:58 PM.
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
OK now you've finished it, I'll relate my experience with the book. It is one of the very few I could not finish, not for the usual reason (too boring or badly written) but because I became too involved with the injustice portrayed, I just couldn't stand it! Looking back now, I can see that it must've been well written for me to become so affected by the plight of fictional characters. At the time I was struggling to provide for a young family and I think the book was a reflection of my fears and worries about the future. Perhaps I was depressed at that time. Anyway, I think it may have helped to direct my political leanings, but still to this day I don't want to finish it.
Last edited by prendrelemick; 09-16-2013 at 01:26 PM.
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The characters were fictional, but it seemed to me they were only semi-fictional. In particular, Owen seems to be pretty much to be Robert Tressell himself. The character Owen worries about what will become of his son Frankie if he dies, like I suppose Robert Tressell worried about his family, seeing that he was suffering from tuberculosis. Luckily, Tressell's daughter was a bit older than Owen's fictional son Frankie, so when Tressell died she was able to fend for herself.
I read that Tressell's original, uplifting ending was changed for a more downbeat ending in the abridged versions. The original ending is quite unlikely, but sometimes hope is the only thing that keeps you going, so perhaps it was wrong to change it. One problem with the original ending was that it depended on a character that was cut out of the book.
Historically speaking, there were never very many working class authors. D.H. Lawrence was a notable exception. Jack London was another. I suppose the reasons for this are obvious. Working-class people did not have the education, and probably not the encouragement or self-belief to think they could write a book that could be published. I was going to say they might not have the time neither, but I suppose that depends on whether they were in work or not. I have read that the few working-class writers that were around tended to be very political. The class system is not was it was these days, but the only working class author I can think of now is Andy McNab, who writes war stories. The problem with working class lack of articulacy is that you get a distorted view of society from reading literature.
Thinking about historical authors I have read recently who were sympathetic to the working class: Dickens came from a lower middle class background, and spent some time working in a blacking factory when his father was sent to debtors' prison, an experience that marked him deeply. Hardy received a middle class education but came from a working class background. His father was a mason and a builder, while his mother has been a domestic servant. George Gissing came from a middle class background - his father was a pharmacist - but he spent a month in prison as a youth, married a prostitute and later another working class girl.
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
I never got to the end.
Beryl Bainbridge is another author(ess) who was inspired by Tressell. She wrote the forward in my copy of RTP, and described how he had semi legendary status among the working class of Liverpool, and particularly with her family. (her family were bankrupt middle class socialists).
Last edited by prendrelemick; 09-17-2013 at 08:12 AM.
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Blake was from quite a humble background (London lower middle/ tradesman class) as was Keats I believe. Shakespeare was a middle class grammar school boy from a small town in the midlands who would certainly have been uncomfortable among aristocrats like Byron and Shelley. In fact, it's surprising how many of the great names in English literature weren't educated at Oxford or Cambridge: Shakespeare, Blake, Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence...Originally Posted by kev67
I definitely think novels like this need to be kept alive. The world that people like Orwell wrote about may no longer exist (factory workers, Jarrow marchers etc), but there will always be one group of humans exploiting another group. In the future we may find it's the Chinese doing the exploiting (and we may well be among its victims).
there are skilled workers in factories but is it true that the work of a pre industrial craftsman was far more rounded? One of the advantages of factory production, isn't it, is that it is the basis for a division of labour? This was recognized by Adam Smith as both the basis of increased productivity and decreased spiritual health.
"Spiritual health" is interesting, I believe it is important for the individual ONLY after the spectre of starvation has been avoided. And then I don't know if an uneducated man doing hard labour all the daylight hours would be too bothered. It was starvation and destitution in the countryside around the time of the enclosures of the common land that made people move into the manufactories. The pre industrial craftsman was a small percentage of the population and a few rungs up the social ladder from the labourer. Their trades continued, and even expanded into the industrial revolution like the painter and decorating firm of RTP. The problem for the poor was the price of becoming a skilled worker -usually through apprenticeships- was too high.
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would i be right in thinking that the industrial revolution saw the demise of craftsmen who produced, rather than sold services which many individual people can still do today of course, those who have served apprenticeships...plumbers , electricians etc. On the other hand Smith compares a group of individuals each undertaking all the tasks necessary to produce a pin which is much less productive than a group of individuals dividing up tasks (or rather them being divided for them)...and this seems to me to correspond to factory production.
I agree that when people were forced into factories poverty was the main concern. I think Smith simply thought that the freemarket was the best way to maximize prosperity. However socialists do worry about the division of labour and i think that marx talks about there being a fluidity of roles, when someone might be say a fisherman in the afternoon and a critic in the evening
I think you would be right - but my knowlege of the consequences of those times comes from those contemporary writers like Hardy and Dickens and from some modern writers, Glyn Hughes in particular. In other words from works of fiction. I doubt there is a single published contempory writer from the turn -of -the- century slums of Manchester. Their voice could only seep through via the Social Reformers of the time. And they did effect people like Engels and Marx and perhaps Smith.
Last edited by prendrelemick; 10-11-2013 at 04:02 AM.
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thinking about it smith was writing really before the industrial revolution and may even have been appalled at the subsistence wages (he argued i think that the market would flourish with high wages). I have not read much of Hardy or Dickens but what i have read did not strike me politically the way tressell obviously engages the reader
I've just finished reading this and thought it was a great read. I would think that anyone who likes Dickens or Steinbeck should like this. It does get kind of repetitive, but I did read it to the finish, without feeling bored at any stage. Tressell was trying to get his socialist message across, and it's the "lectures on Socialism" that make up most of the repetition. There is some excuse for this - it saves you having to revise the Socialist principles if he keeps on repeating them! The characters are very well drawn, and I found that the incidents maintained their novelty, interest, humour and pathos throughout.
I think the Victorian novels, that we both admire, have not devoted enough space to social injustice and it's possible solutions. The Edwardian era needed someone, like Tressell, to lay it on a bit thick, and in several coats. One wonders if we we would have had the NHS, and state pension, in the UK without Tressell. This novel has in fact persuaded me that novels shouldn't be all about pleasure, they should also speak truth to power. (Although there is enough pleasure in Tressell to enable it to stand beside novels that are purely about pleasure.)
That struck me as well, he really captures the working class voice, and the voice of talented Socialist intellectuals speaking to the working class. (Are there any Socialist intellectuals who can speak to the common man in this way today?)The dialogue is very well written; so much so, that I wondered whether some were remembered conversations.
Thomas Hardy was born in a village hamlet, where his father Thomas worked as a stonemason and builder. So he was inside a working class experience, but one that was much less traumatic than the average working class experience in large towns and cities like Hastings or Liverpool. In early works, like "Under the Greenwood Tree" he gives a picture of an idyllic working class life in which the bosses (mostly farmers), and even vicars, are part of a largely positive, mutually supportive environment (Although the vicar is usually a figure of fun...) This work feels just as "real" as Tressell's, it's just that Hardy's characters were lucky to be born in such an oasis! Later works get much darker, of course, and are more reminiscent of Tressell - Jude the Obscure is about a stone mason who tries to better himself in the "big city" and it all goes very badly. It's not a socialist work but compares well with Tressell for depth of ideas, although Hardy's ideas owe more to Schopenhauer than Socialism.
Persevere!
It's got to be more interesting than a World Cup match between two minor sides.
There are some really interesting incidents near the end - from a punch up between Liberals & Tories at a General Election (we can but dream!), to a scene where the rich socialist hero sees the poor kids looking longingly into a toy shop, and he buys out the toy shop (shades of Dickens' at his most sentimental here, but after all the Socialist lectures we need a scene like this...)
State pension, yes. I am pretty sure Lloyd George introduced this before Ragged Trousers was published. I may be wrong, but I think Germany and New Zealand introduced it before us. However, Tressell may have had a hand in the NHS. I have read that Ragged Trousered was passed around the soldiers, who were the ones who voted in Labour in 1945. That, however, was the abridged version of the book. If it had been the unabridged version, I doubt it would have been as effective.
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
It was said, in the early 20th century, of the engine sheds at Derby, that you could walk in at one end uncommitted & emerge at the other end as a lifelong socialist. I think the same benchmark could be applied to the RTP. I agree with most of your review of the book. It is one of the few books I`ve read that I would describe as life changing. I have owned a number of copies & given them all away. It is a book that I feel the need to prosletytize. I rather doubt your assertion that the book won the 1945 election for Attlee. That was more likely down to the khaki vote & the desire for change after five years of war. I would also add that Ibeleive that the book stands on its own merits as a work of literature as well as a political tract. I would rank it along side Zola`s Germinal.
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