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At that time, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was not close enough to the canon to have been dismissed by F. R. Leavis, and even Arnold Kettle was slightly apologetic when he explained why he had included the novel in the syllabus. Nearly everyone who read, or had read, the novel at that time must have done so for political rather than academic reasons, and indeed the fact that Kettle was a communist was doubtless a factor in his own interest in the novel.
From the standpoint of the competing critical orthodoxies of the time, the novel represented all that was wrong. It was politically engaged and obviously concerned to encourage its readers to become politically active and committed. It mixed obvious satire and sarcasm on the part of its narrator with clear evidence of its author’s desire to manipulate characters and dialogues to propagandise for a political position. Not only did its characters preach—so, too, it seemed, did its author through his intrusive narrator. While we all knew that the job of the author was to show rather than to tell, Robert Tressell was responsible for an awful lot of telling. At a time when the Intentional Fallacy represented holy writ, here was an author who made his intentions crystal clear. Moreover, in the face of the Leavisite demand that a novel should reject technologico-Benthamism and the mechanical principle in favour of the organic community and life, here was a novel that suggested that the local communities of England were full of corruption and suffering and were in dire need not of a return to the unequal communities of the past but of a movement forward to a reorganised community or commonwealth of the future that would establish a real fellowship for the very first time.
I think that many of us who took the course in 1965 were affected in unexpected ways by the novel.