|
|
During his short life, he lived in three countries: Ireland, South Africa, and England; he was involved in and exposed to a range of progressive issues (Irish nationalism, Boer nationalism, socialism, anti-imperialism, the cooperative movement, and the women’s suffrage campaign); he endured the poverty of a painter and sign writer’s wages; he struggled to convert his fellow workers to socialism; he experienced an acrimonious and ultimately secret divorce in South Africa; he raised a daughter on his own; he dreamed of a better life in Canada; and he wrote a novel. TRTP was first published posthumously in 1914. While it is generally accepted that he began to write the novel in 1906 in Hastings (where he lived from 1902 to 1910), there is some evidence that he actually began the book in South Africa (where he lived from the late 1880s to 1902); he seems to have completed it during his final illness in 1910. 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 to 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 the full edition. Much of this biography—particularly Tressell’s Irish, South African, and gendered experiences—has been omitted or treated as incidental.3