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And while we all owe a certain debt to the men who helped to circulate and promote the text, a mainstay of British working-class literature, for both of us there has also been a profound sense of being on the outside looking in.2 One of us is Canadian, and there is a prevalent myth that Canada and the United States are classless societies; this begs the question: What relevance can this canonical British working-class and socialist text have to North American readers? Furthermore, we are both women and literary critics with commitments to feminism, postcolonialism, and the intersection between academic worlds and (for want of a better word) “real” worlds. One of the difficulties with the novel is that it is understood by many at face value, and academics are often seen as interfering with its coherent message. The problem is that we do not see a coherent message: What engages both of us is the text’s messiness. We first met at the 2005 Tressell Festival, held annually in Hastings, England, the presumed birthplace of TRTP. While the festival is fun and invigorating, it is designed to “preserve” the text and its author; nothing too risky is broached. It was on the pilgrimage to the house where Tressell wrote the book (between 1906 and 1910) that we hatched the idea of a book-length study which would revisit the text, its writer, and their various contexts and influences. We also wanted to gather a range of contributors and speak to a wide and disparate audience: We hoped to include academics, trade unionists, leftists, feminists, antiglobalisation activists, and readers from across the world. This project appeared both exciting and daunting.
Robert Noonan (whose pseudonym was Robert Tressell) was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1870 and died in Liverpool, England, in 1911.