© 2001 by Oxford University Press
A Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and the Empire: Robert Tressell in South Africa
1 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists probably had a greater impact upon the twentieth century British labour movement than any other novel. Tressell was the pen name of the Irish-born Robert Noonan. His book tells of a group of artisans in the southern English town of ‘Mugsborough’, drawing on Noonan's experience as a painter in Hastings, from about 1901 to 1910. This paper suggests that previous analyses of the novel have missed the crucial importance of the colonial dimension of Noonan's life. From about 1890 to 1901, Noonan lived in South Africa, first in the British Cape Colony then in the Boer-controlled Transvaal. The novel's critique of English society, it is suggested, reflects both Noonan's Irish background and his African experience. The paper seeks to demonstrate that a major sub-plot of the novel draws directly on Noonan's experience of, and reflection on, the break-up of his Cape Town marriage. Noonan's Socialism, it is contended, originated in the Johannesburg labour movement, and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is also argued to have owed its broad appeal to Noonan's deliberate avoidance in the book of two issues which loomed large in his life during his South African years: Irish nationalism and racial segregationism in the labour movement.