Robert Noonan, whose pseudonym was Robert Tressell, was born in
Dublin, Ireland, in 1870, and died in Liverpool, England, in 1911.
During his short life, he lived in three countries, Ireland, South
Africa, and England, and was involved in and exposed to a range of
progressive issues such as Irish nationalism, Boer nationalism,
socialism, anti-imperialism, the co-operative movement, and the
women's suffrage campaign. He endured the poverty of a painter and
sign-writer's wages, struggled to convert his fellow workers to
socialism, experienced an acrimonious and ultimately secret divorce
in South Africa, raised a daughter on his own, dreamed of a better
life in Canada, and wrote a novel. The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists was first published posthumously in 1914. The
narrative provided a focus for his view of society and its imperial
and capitalist structures; it was a "map" that he hoped would guide
a future working class to consciousness. It was desperately hard to
write, particularly since he was labouring for fifty-six hours a
week at times and suffering from a serious illness, likely
tuberculosis. The text covers some sixteen hundred handwritten
folio pages. Before he left for Liverpool in 1910, ostensibly to
secure passages for him and his daughter to emigrate to Canada, he
left the manuscript with his daughter, Kathleen. She eventually
sold it the maverick publisher, Grant Richards, for twenty-five
pounds. Once published, it proved to be a best seller, both in its
heavily abridged editions (1914, 1918) and, since 1955, in its full
edition. Much of this biography--particularly Tressell's Irish,
South African, and gendered experiences--has been omitted or
treated as incidental. Readings of Tressell's life and text have
centered on their English, working-class, and socialist elements.
The late Fred Ball researched the first biography more than thirty
years after Tressell's death, using the only editions of the text
available. These were seriously edited and abridged by Jessie Pope
for Grant Richards; her preface maintained that the writer was a
"genuine working-class man." The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
was mostly seen as the work of a working-class writer; there was no
reason to think otherwise. Some recent scholarship disturbs the
text's perceived neatness, pointing out its elitism and
middle-class proclivities; and some work re-contextualizes
Tressell's book, placing it within modernist, Irish, South African,
and gendered frameworks. The narrative the authors present is not
out of step with the so-called "real" world, in fact, it engages
with popular reception and debates. This revolutionary book is an
edited collection of essays on Robert Tressell's, The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists. While two such books were published in
the 1980s, The Robert Tressell Papers (1982) and The Robert
Tressell Lectures, 1981-1988 (1988), both largely (with only a few
brief exceptions) rehearsed the dominant narrative of the text and
author as vigorously and unproblematically working class,
masculine, and English. This volume will introduce readers to an
array of voices and perspectives, specifically those of women and
international readers. The book comprises work by academics, a
librarian, and the widow of Tressell's biographer, Fred Ball. The
focus is on continuity and change in terms of how Tressell's text
is read. Revisiting Robert Tressell's Mugsborough will be an
important book for all literature collections.
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