This is a year of centenaries. The birth of Dylan Thomas. The start of the Great War. But among 2014 milestones, there’s one anniversary which is going, it seems to me, under-celebrated. 

It’s a hundred years this year since the first publication of Robert Tressell’s big, important, rambunctious and utterly brilliant novel, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.

The novel is about the lives of a group of Edwardian house painters — their work, their leisure, their children, their deaths. Most importantly, their struggle against profit-seeking bosses who consider them only in terms of how much they can be exploited. 

The novel rails against the utter pointlessness of an existence which involves a man working all week to end up in debt, working a lifetime to end up in the workhouse. A life in which a father can look at his newborn son not with joy but with despair for the suffering which will go on not for a lifetime, but for generations. The novel’s politically-charged social realism grows clearly out of Dickens, but arguably Tressell’s worldview is more brutally honest, the politics more to the fore. 

Like all great literary works, the novel is a one-off. There’s nothing else quite like it.

The book is a novel of ideas. It doesn’t wallow in the suffering of its characters — it dwells on the solutions to the systematic theft they experience at the hands of capitalism. 

It’s the only novel I know of whose didacticism does not mar its drama. 

Who would have guessed that some of the most compelling scenes in all literature could consist of a workman, standing in a half-decorated house during his lunch break, trying to explain, as simply as he can to his peers, the political solution to their lives? 

The novel contains some of the most accessible and timeless analysis of capitalism and the class system that I know of. 

Take, as just one example, what the novel has to say about promotion and status in the workplace under a capitalist system. This argument is propounded by one of the novel’s socialists, a man of mystery who eventually finds his voice, Barrington: “Under the present system, the men who become masters and employers succeed because they are cunning and selfish, not because they understand or are capable of doing the work out of which they make their money. Most of the employers in the building trade for instance would be incapable of doing any skilled work. Very few of them would be worth their salt as journeymen. The only work they do is to scheme to reap the benefit of the labour of others.”

A capitalist system promotes people, in other words, not on the basis of ability but on the basis of ambition. The higher salaries paid to those in charge inevitably ensure that those who are most self-seeking are those who rise to the top. Then we’re surprised that our bosses seem singularly unfit for positions which demand that they care about and take responsibility for those they manage.

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists is a novel of good ideas. But, more than this, it’s a novel which shows us why these ideas are important. 

If capitalism tells us that human beings don’t matter, this novel tells us, again and again, that they do. 

The novel is compelling because it takes us through every episode of its characters’ lives. 

Nearly 50 years after its publication, railing against a very different system in To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee showed us the importance of putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. 

Philanthropists is unparallelled in how clearly it shows the importance of empathy. We’re with the characters as they set out to work in the morning, as they go down the pub at night, in their domestic dramas and their workplace routines. 

The result is a novel which is a party of so many different moods, from the children’s get-togethers and young Bert’s “pandorama” to the love triangle of Easton, Slyme and Ruth, from the pitch-black humour of the undertakers who badger the bereaved for work, through to the broad humour of the workers’ annual beano. All life is here, and every detail of it.

So here’s to the next hundred years, and the hope that we’re still reading this book in 2114, and not because it analyses problems which still exist, but because we’ve put into practice the novel’s solutions of a just society, a place where everyone’s work is fitted to their talents rather than their selfishness, where the insanity of a system which places money above people is looked back on, rather than lived in. 

Sadly, Tressell never lived to see the publication of his novel, dead at 40, worn down by the same working life he describes. But thank god his book’s still here. In a world of credit cards and computers, direct debit and billion-dollar multimedia advertising campaigns, Tressell is here still, saying: “Look. Look at these lives.”

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter.
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