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I suggested above that when we start to reread the novel, we become more readers than scholars. However, scholarship, of course, makes us better readers. After having read the essays in the present volume, a reader will be able to relate his or her experience of the text to a more detailed understanding of the biographical, cultural, and political contexts in, and out of which, it emerged. But such an enrichment of our understanding of these contexts does not diminish the novel’s power to turn our attention to our present and our future—rather, the reverse. It reminds us that there is still a job to be done. The trousers of English workers may be less ragged today (although those of the child labourers in the third world who produce so many of the consumer goods purchased in England are probably more ragged than those of Tressell’s philanthropists). But the need to cultivate a confident belief that the world can and must be changed, and that this change requires education and imagination, is as much a part of our world as it was a part of Robert Tressell’s.
Rereading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in 2008, then, produces complex responses for me. What embarrasses me today is not the novel, but the memory of my earlier embarrassment. What seem old fashioned to me in 2008 are the Intentional Fallacy, the exclusive canon, the denial of literary quality to any work that has a didactic force or that engages with political issues in the world of its author (and reader), the ignoring of issues of gender and race. In the wake of second-wave feminism and postcolonialism, it is some of the novels that were canonical in 1965 and not The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists that seem vulnerable to critique, while the postmodernist novel has made Tressell’s shifts from realism to satirical pastiche and from reader involvement to distanced assessment less obviously the result of artistic incompetence.