|
|
The different groups on the left, then as now, spent as much time in arguing about their own versions of the Socialist Commonwealth as they do today (someone dryly remarked of Leeds students at this time that they represented a wide range of political positions from communist at one extreme to Marxist at the other), so we were perhaps thankful that Tressell’s character Owen refused to go into too much detail about the precise nature of the Socialist Commonwealth. Moreover, some of the heavy irony and (let us be honest) laboured sarcasm of the work embarrassed us. But at the same time, those of us who were on the left recognised that Tressell was dealing with issues that were as relevant for us as they had been for him sixty years earlier. Why were those who suffered most from the inequalities of the system often among its most faithful supporters? And even on an aesthetic level, the work raised awkward questions. Tressell’s skill with dialogue, his ability to make us believe in his characters at the same time that the unremitting didacticism of his satire was inescapable, and even the power of those so embarrassing stretches of sermonising—all of these aspects of the work made us pause to wonder whether there might be more skill and subtlety at work in the novel than we wanted to admit. We also recognised, I think, that whatever the novel’s weaknesses, its insistence on focusing on problems was vastly to be preferred to the manner in which certain examples of socialist realist fiction depicted the working classes and their political leaders as blemish free.
Returning to the novel in a new century, much has changed. Those absolute distinctions that separated the canonical from the noncanonical have largely disappeared in the course of the past four decades. Including The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in the syllabus of a university literature course has little or no shock value today. The fallacies of the Intentional Fallacy are common currency, and Dr. Leavis’s defence of Lawrentian “Life” has been severely bruised by feminist critiques.