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

Readings of Tressell’s life and text have centred on their English, working-class, and socialist elements. The late Fred Ball researched the first biography more than thirty years after Tressell’s death, using the only editions of the text available. These were seriously edited and abridged by Jessie Pope for Grant Richards; her preface maintained that the writer was a “genuine working class man” (Tressall n.p.). Richards’s press release presented Tressell as an unskilled “builder’s labourer” rather than a skilled “house-painter and signwriter” (qtd. in Ball 173)—the description Kathleen provided. Until the “rescue” of the manuscript by Fred Ball, and its subsequent publication as a full and unabridged text in 1955, TRTP was mostly seen as the work of a working-class writer; there was no reason to think otherwise. Ball conducted his work collaboratively: He purchased the manuscript in a Marble Arch tearoom in the late 1940s with the help and financing of a collective; he reassembled the text and conducted research for the second biography with his wife, Jacquie. The Balls worked tirelessly to reconstruct a life and a text, and their work has opened up new avenues of research and enquiry. They were the ones who uncovered Tressell’s Irish roots, his complex class and political locations, his anti-imperialist activities in South Africa, and his experience of raising a daughter under adverse conditions. Curiously, generations of readers have continued to identify Tressell and his text as uncomplicatedly working class and socialist. And these critics tend to look at the text from an English political viewpoint, as does the latest work of Dave Harker. Tressell: The Real Story of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is the most complete text on Tressell for some time, but it reads the novel from a classical Marxist position, and it narrowly focuses on the subsequent failure of successive British governments to address the problems inherent in capitalism.