Modernism, class and colonialism in Robert Noonan’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

ABSTRACT

This essay explores Robert Noonan’s 1914 novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, as a work of Irish modernist fiction. Reading its fragmented narrative as a reflection of the author’s subaltern position as an Irish republican and socialist, it interprets Noonan’s work as the product of the anticolonial and class struggles in which he was involved. Its critique of capitalist and imperial hegemony and the assertions that suffering, injustice and violence are normal, natural or inevitable phenomena reflects the author’s frustration, anger and desperation. In this way the novel counters and decentres the bourgeois-imperial dynamic that was reflected in the textual stability of Victorian realism. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is an uneasy text that is at once ruptured and uncertain of its own aesthetic status and conveys, through its shifting, episodic plot, the precariousness of a working-class existence permanently poised “on the brink of destitution.”

KEYWORDS:

• Robert Noonan
• Robert Tressell
• The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
• modernism
• colonialism
• class

Notes

1. Behan, Borstal Boy, 293.

2. Tressell/Noonan, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. All citations are from this edition.

3. Alfred, “Introduction,” 2–3.

4. Williams, “Foreword,” xiii.

5. For an account of the novel’s circulation among these circles, and its mediation in dramatic form, see Miles, “The Painter’s Bible.”

6. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 15.

7. See Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.

8. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 322.

9. See Day, 2005.

10. See Sillitoe, “Introduction”; see also Mitchell, Tressell and the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 63, and Miles, “The Painter’s Bible.”

11. When he gave the annual Robert Tressell Lecture to the Workers’ Educational Association in 1984, Tony Benn evinced the belief that the novel’s most important legacy lay in the relevance of its analysis of the problems facing workers both in 1914 and in late twentieth-century Britain. For Benn, Noonan’s genius lay in his capacity to “speak … from the past to give us hope for the future” (1988, 78).

12. Gibbons, “Labour and Local History.”

13. Behan, Confessions, 64.

14. See Connolly, Revolutionary and Anti-imperialist Writings; also Lordan, “Raising the Devil.”

15. See Pierse, “Introduction.”

16. Richards, Author Hunting, 280.

17. Ball, One of the Damned, 257.

18. Orwell, “Review,” 257.

19. Harker, “Robert Tressell.”

20. Harker, Tressell, 5–9.

21. Ibid., 37–9.

22. See Peppis, Literature, Politics and the English Avant Garde; and Potter, Modernism and Democracy. I explore these issues at length in Chapter 5 of my book Blasted Literature.

23. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 550.

24. In doing so the novel fulfils Raymond Williams’ categorisation of progressive art as that which reflects contemporary society’s “structure of feeling.” See The Long Revolution, especially Chapter 2, “The Analysis of Culture,” 57–88.

25. Cleary, “The National Novel,” 72–3.

26. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 16–17.

27. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 29.

28. Ibid., 156.

29. Ibid., 588.

30. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 13.

31. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 202.

32. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 564.

33. Wells, This Misery of Boots, 39–40. As examples of these narratives, see Wells’ call for a “trained and disciplined” capitalist state in his 1911 novel, The New Machiavelli, in which the Liberal MP, Richard Remington, wishes to see socialism “more organized, more correlated with government” and operating “in terms of functionaries, legislative change and methods of administration” (268–9). Remington also believes that “in some development of the idea of Imperial patriotism might be found … [a] politically acceptable expression of a constructive dream” of super liberalism led by “New Imperialists” dedicated to “a new, severer, aristocratic culture” (276). Similar ideas are expressed in his 1905 Fabian novel A Modern Utopia, in which the evolution of class peaks with the emergence of another élite, “the order of the Samurai” (Wells, A Modern Utopia, 1).

34. Williams, “The Ragged-Arsed Philanthropists,” 21.

35. Jameson, The Modernist Papers, ix.

36. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 13.

37. Ibid., 14.

38. R.M. Fox, The Triumphant Machine (1928), as quoted in Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 303. Fox, a factory labourer, was a syndicalist anarchist who supported the cause of Irish Independence.

39. Moretti, The Bourgeois, 94.

40. Mitchell, Robert Tressell, 10.

41. Miles, “The Painter’s Bible,” passim.

42. See Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 536.

43. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 226.

44. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 252.

45. Sharratt, “Tressell and the Truths of Fiction,” 108.

46. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 228, 587.

47. Jameson, Marxism and Form, 87.

48. Mitchell, Robert Tressell, 63.

49. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 278, 309, 88, 256.

50. Ibid., 204.

51. Williams, “The Ragged-Arsed Philanthropists,” 23.

52. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 316.

53. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 22.

54. Ibid., 574.

55. Ibid., 18.

56. Ibid., 21.

57. Ibid., 25.

58. Ibid., 270.

59. Ibid., 268.

60. Ibid., 269.

61. Ibid., 28.

62. Ibid., 209.

63. Ibid., 21.

64. Ibid., 23.

65. Ibid., 26.

66. In Outrageous Fortune, Cleary draws on Mike Davis’s analysis of Ireland’s role as a “Utilitarian laboratory” in which “millions of lives were wagered against dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets” (78). See also Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 31; and Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, 6.

67. In her forthcoming essay “Food Sovereignty,” pointing to the efforts of George Russell(Æ) to address the possibility of a return to Victorian levels of starvation, dependence and degradation in Ireland in 1914, Jessica Martell argues that colonial economic models characterized and informed contemporary capitalist practice.

68. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 87.

69. Joyce, Ulysses, 42.

70. Ball, One of the Damned, 62.

71. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 93.

72. Ibid., 102–3.

73. Ibid., 103.

74. Ibid., 274.

75. Ibid., 66, 78–85, 65, 88.

76. Ibid., 42.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid., 311.

79. Ibid., 13.

80. Ibid., 202.

81. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 214.

82. Ibid., 546.

83. Ibid., 148.

84. Ibid., 545.

85. Ibid., 370.

86. In Robert Tressell and the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Jack Mitchell provides a detailed account of the stagnation of the building trade during this period (7–10).

87. Williams, “Foreword,” ix–x.