The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

Membership Card for the Democratic Federation, designed by William Morris in 1883

I recently listened to the abridged version of Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, brilliantly read by Tony Robinson. He really brought those gnarly characters to life.

I'd tried to read the novel when I was in my late teens and had struggled. It was a hard, grim, read. The lives of Edwardian working people didn’t especially interest me, and I hated people arguing. The novel is, in large part, an account of people bitterly arguing. That said, I did have good reason to feel an affinity with it.  It was set in Hastings, where I grew up, and, like most kids my age that I knew, I’d worked since I was 12, starting with a paper-round. However, as a teenager, I didn't yet have enough perspective on myself as a working person within a specific economic system to be able to digest the fibrous message of this hard-hitting piece of political satire.

Listening to the novel again in retirement, and having ridden-out my aversion to conflict long enough to attend properly to its substance rather than only to its mode of delivery, I found myself engrossed, and even inspired, by the spirit of the novel’s message. I decided I wanted a physical copy of the book, so I could see those words on the page.

Audiobooks are great, but dense passages can rush by before a slow-thinker like me has taken them in. A physical book invites proper attention, lingering, thinking, and even the occasional interaction with a pencil. Apologies if that's sacrilege!

I randomly ordered a cheap second-hand copy, a 20-year-old version, in the Oxford World Classics series. When it arrived, I was overjoyed to see that this version had been edited and fronted with a critical introduction by one of my old university English Department lecturers, Peter Miles.

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I’d studied a joint degree in English and Religious Studies at a very small university in Wales that punched way above its weight on the world stage in several subjects. I’d had no sense of its status when I was a student. I’d gone there simply because a teacher at my school had said he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to study there. It was "tiny, remote, and had more sheep than people." That description had struck this awkward, nature-loving, teenager, as being pretty much as close to ideal as it is possible to get. And it was.

However, I had struggled terribly at first. Although I’d been keen to leave home, I was woefully underprepared for the challenges of self-care. I made poor decisions and was overwhelmed by the pressure of the academic work that seemed beyond my scope.

My enduring memory of Peter Miles was his kindness when, as a first year, I’d failed to submit an essay. I’d fully expected the punishment I undoubtedly deserved.

I'd been summoned to his office by an ominous note in my pigeon hole. He’d met me on the corridor and asked me to go in and wait for him a moment. The office was wildly untidy. Books, papers and dirty coffee mugs were strewn everywhere. I looked around, overawed, wide-eyed, quite literally shivering with shame and dread.

I didn’t know what the consequences of my submission failure would be. I didn’t think I’d be thrown out but, in truth, I wasn’t sure.

Could I be?

Would I have to repeat the year? Probably!

If so, that would mean the end anyway, because of the financial implications. But however awful the actual consequences were to be, what I was most afraid of was hearing the inevitable angry words about my not being good enough, and, worse, knowing them to be true.

Imagine my astonishment when, on his return, my breach of the rules was met with no punishment whatsoever, only active concern for my wellbeing.

This was a time before the formal ‘mitigating circumstances’ provisions that operate in universities now. Being late with an essay was not really a thing back then. You just weren’t late, so there wasn’t really a system for dealing with it. Not only was it a small university, but it was also a very small town, and one in which lecturers and students knew considerably more about each other’s lives than they do now. I didn’t know it at the time, though I learned it in a conversation decades later, but Peter knew very well some of the ways I was struggling and had determined that a punitive response in my case would be neither just, nor helpful. I was simply to hand the essay in when I could.

Reeling, I walked out of the English Department building into a still dewy-fresh late spring morning. I heard the rooks in the trees by the Old Building cawing their encouragement, too.

The experience was an archetypal and life-shaping one of ‘being forgiven’. I was so fortunate to have had it. It gave me hope, a sense that I mattered, and that I had a place within a larger system of care.

I began to flourish. Remarkable in the circumstances, really. Among other reasons I’d been unprepared for the experience was the fact that the odds were stacked against my ever feeling that I belonged at university. I’d been the first in my family to go. Other futures had been imagined for me: futures thought more suitable for a girl, and particularly for a girl of my class.

As I look back on that time from the perspective of much hindsight, none of this personal experience seems wholly unrelated to the content and message of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, nor to the fact that Peter Miles chose to focus his scholarship on such a volume.

The novel proposes a truly magnificent vision of a non-exploitative society that supports the worker and cares for its sick and elderly whatever the cost. It imagines a society where underperformance is met with facilitation, and struggle is met, not with exclusion, but with redress. It also shows just how far Edwardian England was from that utopian socialist vision, and of course, by extension how far from it our current political and economic system remains.

The satire in the novel is relentless and biting, even down to the title. The word philanthropy might carry a warm glow, but the recipients of the 'philanthropy' of the ragged-trousered workers are not the poor and needy. Far from it. The recipients are the rich bosses. ‘The Bloke'.

The labourers work themselves to the bone to keep the capitalist business owners in the manner to which they have become accustomed. They don’t see their own bondage. It is invisible to them because they’re subjugated. Desperate for the work that keeps them just this side of a worse fate; namely, starvation; they keep mindlessly and gratefully voting for it. They continue to make costly-to-them, generous, philanthropic donations to the already rich and privileged, unable to see that they are keeping the whole wretched system going, a system that relies on their own egregious exploitation.

It’s not difficult to draw contemporary parallels. Some of the most disenfranchised in our society continue to vote not for a state that might support them to flourish, but for cryptocurrency millionaires and billionaires who successfully persuade them that their ‘enemy’ is the impoverished foreigner taking what is rightfully theirs, and not, as is really the case, the very system that shores up the wealth and power of those glamorous demagogues, precisely at their expense. Power performs its oldest trick, that of directing anger away from those who possess it and towards those who possess even less. Awakening is very hard because those powerful demagogues have made the truth so very difficult to see.

Of course, the novel can be read in multiple ways, but as I listened and read, I couldn’t help but transpose the figure of ‘Vice Chancellor’ on to that of ‘The Bloke.’

Since Universities became businesses at the end of the last century, lecturer’s pay has significantly diminished, the debt faced by students has drastically increased, and student loans now fund almost the entire university estate (see the House of Commons Treasury Committee Report – Student Loans: Broken and Unfair).

However, VCs have become richer and richer, now earning on average 7 or 8 times more than a lecturer. 

Lecturers, on the other hand, are on increasingly precarious contracts, often employed on zero-hours terms. The ‘prestige’ of an academic career is leveraged to make them feel grateful to have any place in the HE system at all.

Once in, they join a kind of 'emotional economy' in which the currency is not money. How could it be? The pay is a very poor return for the hours and expertise. Most academics could earn significantly more in the private sector.

The currency in this emotional economy is not money, but status.

However, it is not all as self-serving as it may sound. For most, there is a vocational commitment to their subject, to the beneficiaries of their research projects, or to ‘the work’ as they see it. Often the driver is not personal status, but the status of their team or unit, or the success of their students. But, while society benefits immeasurably from all this incredible effort, there can be no doubt these complex emotional drivers also function super-efficiently to the advantage of Vice Chancellors: Vice Chancellors who enrich themselves—as Robert Tressell would put it— by ‘scamping’ the work (making false efficiencies), and ‘sweating’ the workers.

Addressing the explosion in Vice Chancellors’ pay would not, of course, solve HE’s problems at a stroke, though it would make a difference and should be undertaken as a matter of urgency. More fundamental work is needed on this ‘emotional economy’ of university life. The recent tragic death of Professor Jason Arday points, first and most importantly, to the horrifying freedom with which racism and ableism have been allowed to operate within our public institutions. But secondarily, it also prompts reflection on how toxic the emotional economy of the university can become when status takes on an almost irresistible power to shape how people are valued. Those who are ‘successful’ benefit as individuals of course, but the important fact here is that The Bloke benefits exponentially more.

VCs and Universities operate within a wider political system. Without a revolution of some kind, it might be hard to re-vision and build something more positive. We have to live with certain political realities, or at least we have to right now. But this should not mean we shouldn’t aspire to change the things we can. As I advocate for this, I’m aware that as someone who has benefitted, I contribute to the toxicity about which I’m complaining. It’s hard to speak about this from inside a system because of the legitimacy of the charge of hypocrisy. Unlike the character of Frank Owen in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, who had no choice but to work for a mercenary employer, I could quite easily have done something else.

That said, we desperately need universities. Imperfect, eroded, and co-opted into the neoliberal project as they are, they still remain our best hope for fostering the skills to properly identify ‘The Bloke’, hold him to account, and reduce the scope for his enrichment. I believed in what I did. Most of it, anyway. But, like Frank Owen, I’d argue that, while we are all implicated and there is no position outside of the system from which to reflect, reflect we must. Without reflection there can be no action: – action to build a society in which people are not means, in which the social participation is not an individualist, defensive, zero-sum effort, but one in which the structurally disadvantaged are supported, and the obstacles they face diminished or removed, not just for their good but for the good of all.

In his critical introduction to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Peter Miles argues that education lies at the heart of the novel's politics of hope. Critics have accused Tressell of brutally savaging the stupidity and ignorance of the working classes, but Miles rejects this reading. The novel's critique of their "philanthropy," he insists, "is not born of contempt, but [is] the product of a belief in brotherhood (sic) and cooperation." For Tressell, the book would have served no purpose had he not believed that "working people's beliefs might be changed." Miles reinforces this point by recalling that William Morris's design for the membership card of the Democratic Federation was emblazoned not only with the injunctions to Organise and Agitate, but first and foremost, with Educate. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, he suggests, is itself an instrument of education: one of the most practical and distinctive expressions of that democratic ideal.

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Perhaps, as a student, I went to Peter’s lectures on this novel. I don’t remember them. Equally, I may have skipped them. I skipped a lot. I don’t honestly remember much of my first year.

But I do remember with vivid clarity, Peter’s extraordinary determination that I was structurally disadvantaged and that he had the power to address that.  

Should he have given me that reprieve? Many lecturers would not have done – for good reasons of fairness to others. Or at least for reasons of the appearance of fairness.

The fruits of Peter’s actions on that late spring morning were to redirect my life by a few degrees. With time and 40 more years of distance travelled, what was a few degrees that day has evolved into acres and acres of distance between the life I may have had without his reprieve, and the one I have today.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, I’m enduringly grateful.