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If I was nervous today about serious academic analysis of the novel and of its creation and reception, it was not because I feel that it is not worthy of such treatment, but rather because I feared that studying the novel might lessen the likelihood that we will read it. But this is a nervousness that did not survive long after I read that opening sentence: “The house was named ‘The Cave’ ”. It still is. And as we read, this resilient novel forces us once again to confront the questions that confronted Tressell and that confront Owen, his fellow workers, and their families.
*All references are to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, ed. Peter Miles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).