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In 2008 Robert Tressell was celebrated during the Liverpool “Year of Culture” with the unveiling of a plaque at the hospital where he died; in addition, there was a dramatised version of the novel and a series of provocative lectures. What we struggle to avoid here is idolatry, a reluctance to subject this “sacred” text to scrutiny; at the same time, we acknowledge that Robert Tressell and TRTP have achieved an almost mythical status that shows no sign of decline in the twenty-first century.
The Chapters
Revisiting Robert Tressell’s Mugsborough: New Perspectives on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is divided into two sections: “The Production of the Text” and “New Contexts for Reading TRTP”. Both sections tell new stories in order to enhance and (in some cases) interrogate the ones that have already been told. In the spirit of the text’s history, many of the contributions are clearly collaborative (there is more than one author) and even the single-authored pieces have been produced through the collaborative, reciprocal, and admittedly challenging experience of trans-Atlantic coediting.
The first section, “The Production of the Text”, comprises three chapters which engage with the materiality, the life, and the tactility of the text. Chapter 1 is a collaboration of Jacquie and Clare Ball, the wife and daughter of Tressell’s late biographer, Fred Ball. Through a collage of voices and genre (written narratives, interviews), the two women recover the story of TRTP from their vantage points as wife and collaborator, and daughter and witness. This chapter responds to recent interest in working-class women’s lives and histories. In chapter 2, Christine Coates, curator of Trades Union Congress collections, offers a comprehensive history of the text’s journey—from its arrival in a processed peas box in 1958 to its digitisation in the 1990s. Also included in this chapter are a number of captivating personal narratives from those who have encountered the text in its original form.