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In chapter 3, Julie Cairnie offers a broad overview of women’s roles in the text’s production. Cairnie makes visible the women who are normally invisible (or at least faint) in discussions of TRTP—the women’s suffrage movement and the women central to the text’s maintenance (Jessie Pope, Jacquie Ball, and Kathleen Noonan)—and argues that they make a significant imprint on the text itself.
The second section, “New Contexts for Reading TRTP”, comprises five chapters which resituate TRTP. In chapter 4, Cairnie continues to evaluate gender and the text’s Edwardian context, but this time in terms of masculinity. She points out that the text resists dominant ideas about the inferiority of working-class men’s bodies: While this is obviously a concern, TRTP posits that Owen, sick and emaciated, is an exemplar of masculinity, while the fat and corpulent capitalists are not only demonised, but physically vulnerable, too. In chapter 5, Marion Walls builds an Irish context from a vast archive and from the text itself. While Fred Ball explored the Irish connection, he ultimately anglicised the text; in contrast, Walls argues that Tressell’s Irish biography is vital to the text’s representation of the working class. In chapter 6, Julie Cairnie and Jonathan Hyslop place the writer and text in another context: South Africa in the 1890s. Tressell lived there for more than a decade, and the influence of that time and place is indelible. A historian, Hyslop reads Tressell’s South African divorce in the relationship between Ruth and Will Easton; while Cairnie, a literary critic, traces and reads the imprint of South Africa and the problem of imperial poverty on the text itself. In chapter 7, Marion Walls traces Tressell’s use of the Bible and the Protestant church as a psychological tool to colonise the minds of the working class. While the text is critical of the manipulative conflation of the Christian religion with capitalism and imperialism, it also uses Christianity’s metaphors in order to advance its socialist argument.