Revisiting Robert Tressell's Mugsborough: New Perspectives on The ...

But if Robert Tressell’s book is now welcomed into the academic fold, is there perhaps a danger than this may involve incorporation as well as acceptance? As scholars we face The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in 2008 from the vantage point of the present, looking back at a vanished world in and for which it was written. The future is, as it were, behind us; it is something that cannot affect our judgement of the personal and historical forces that contributed to the book’s creation. The more we learn of these forces, the better—we feel—will we understand the work. And we are, of course, right to feel this, right to wish to read the novel from the perspective of the particular experiences, processes, and events that were instrumental in bringing it into being. But if we spend too much time locating the novel in the intellectual, cultural, and political contexts from which it emerged, do we run the risk of consigning the novel to the tender mercies of academics and to a history that has no future? As I reread the novel, it took only a few pages to dispel such concerns.

The novel opens with a description of “The Cave”—the house that needs renovation—and the labour that is transforming it. Work is something that forces us to look forward, to envisage the final product of our efforts. “All the old whitewash had to be washed off the ceilings and all the old paper had to be scraped off the walls preparatory to the house being repainted and decorated” (7). Labour is of its very nature concerned with planning for the future, envisaging a different state of affairs from that of the present. If, as Karl Marx pointed out in the first volume of Capital, the difference between the worst of architects and the best of bees is that the architect raises his structure in the imagination before he raises it in reality, then the problem confronted by Robert Tressell is the paralysing lack of social architects, the inability of those about whom he writes to erect a new society in the imagination, to picture a future that is different from their past and their present.