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Why, Tressell seems to demand, can his “philanthropists” plan to refurbish a dilapidated house but not to renovate a ramshackle social system? No matter that Tressell’s own future is, in part, our past; in reading the novel we cannot escape from its imperative to look forward, to consider, as the title of one of Lenin’s pamphlets has it, what is to be done.
One of the lasting surprises about this novel is just this capacity to transform us, as soon as we start reading or rereading it, from scholars to readers. Turning the pages, we again find our attention focused not on a world that has disappeared but on the world that is still to come—both in the sense of the “what is to come” of the novel’s characters and plot, and in the sense of what is to come in our own lives in the twenty-first century. This capacity is surprising because the sociopolitical future trumpeted by the novel—the Cooperative Commonwealth—has not arrived. And indeed, that sociopolitical reality that some thought represented an early stage of Tressell’s imagined future—the “socialist” countries of Eastern Europe—has gone the way of all flesh. Nonetheless, as readers we must ask: How is it that at the level of the characters and action of the novel, we become engaged with the lives of those who are portrayed with so little apparent sympathy and so much contempt by a narrator whose visionary predictions seem, in the light of the history of the past century, more like pipe dreams now?
Again: if from a narratological perspective this is a novel that is full of telling rather than showing it is also a novel in which the narrator’s god-like ability to see into the hearts and minds of characters––many of whose very names serve to remind us of their fictional status––ought to diminish our sense of them as independent human beings.