The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

Glossary

A

Adam Sweater: The novel's chief hypocrite: a draper grown rich by underpaying indentured apprentices and homeworkers, repeated Mayor of Mugsborough, "Chief" of the corrupt council faction nicknamed the Forty Thieves, and a pillar of the Shining Light Chapel whose ostentatious piety and charitable subscriptions mask a business built on unpaid and underpaid female labor.; Related: The Forty Thieves, The Shining Light Chapel, Mugsborough
Amos Grinder: A greengrocer-turned-monopolist Councillor who drives rival fruiterers out of business by opening loss-leading branches next door to them, then folds them into his own company — the "Forty Thieves" member whose method is straightforward predatory competition rather than Sweater's or Didlum's more genteel exploitation.; Related: The Forty Thieves, Adam Sweater

B

Barrington: A labourer at Rushton & Co. who is, unknown to his workmates for most of the novel, a wealthy young man's son deliberately living and working among the poor to "see life as it is lived by the majority." A convinced but often despairing Socialist, he anonymously plays Santa Claus for the tradesmen's children at Christmas, announces plans to return in spring with a Socialist propaganda van, and leaves Owen a parting gift of bank-notes for himself and for the Lindens and White family.; Related: Frank Owen, The Great Money Trick, Mugsborough
Barrington's Christmas Charity: The episode in which Barrington, posing as Santa Claus's paid helper, buys the tradesmen's children — the Lindens, Frankie Owen, Freddie Easton — the exact toys they'd been longing for outside a shop window, then quietly adds boots and stockings once he notices their ragged footwear, all funded from his own wealthy family's money rather than any real Christmas magic — a scene that makes the gap between the children's poverty and their unspoiled wonder almost unbearable.; Related: Barrington, Frankie Owen, Jack Linden
Bert White: The painters' apprentice, a frail fifteen-year-old boy dressed in ragged, outgrown clothes, who makes the men's tea and is bullied by Sawkins over its quality — a small, sustained example of the novel's larger argument that even children are ground down by the trade's poverty and petty tyranny.; Related: Bob Crass, Sawkins
Bob Crass: The painters' foreman at Rushton & Co., who curries favor with the firm by driving the other hands relentlessly, insinuates he is "in the confidence" of the bosses to boost his own standing, and reliably takes the anti-Owen, anti-Socialist side in every argument in the workmen's mess-room — reading the Tory Obscurer and repeating its foreign-competition scares as his own settled opinions.; Related: Frank Owen, Rushton, Bert White
Bundy: A plasterer at Rushton & Co. who forms a betting syndicate with his workmates around racing tips from the Obscurer, works in the fetid, health-ruining conditions of the drain trenches outside "The Cave," and represents the ordinary tradesman's diversions and daily physical toll that the novel sets alongside its political argument.; Related: Bob Crass, The Obscurer

C

Councillor Weakling: The one Town Councillor who does not belong to the Forty Thieves — a retired physician who protests and votes against the Band's schemes but always "collapses" rather than fights, his lone objections brushed aside by acclamation since no one will second his amendments. Tressell uses him to show that individual respectability without organized opposition changes nothing.; Related: The Forty Thieves, Adam Sweater

E

Easton and Ruth Easton: A young painter, William Easton, and his wife Ruth, whose marriage collapses under the strain of poverty and separation during the novel's year — Ruth leaves — before Frank and Nora Owen help engineer a reconciliation. Their reunion, and their giving the Owens their baby as "a Christmas box" while they get back on their feet, is the small domestic mercy the novel allows itself near its bleak close.; Related: Nora Owen, Frank Owen

F

Frank Owen: A signwriter at Rushton & Co. and the novel's central figure — the only workman who has worked out, and keeps trying to explain to his skeptical mates, why they stay poor while their employers prosper. Owen is consumptive, increasingly ill through the novel's year, and regarded by his workmates as a harmless crank ("the Professor") for talking about Socialism instead of racing or football, even as they can never quite answer his arguments.; Related: The Great Money Trick, Nora Owen, Frankie Owen
Frankie Owen: Frank and Nora's young son, whose wide-eyed presence — pressing his hands against a toyshop window with the other tradesmen's children, or watching for Barrington's train to cross the bridge — gives the novel some of its most tender scenes, and whose plans to help hand out Socialist handbills close the book on a note of hope for the next generation.; Related: Frank Owen, Nora Owen, Barrington

H

Harlow: A painter and member of the local Liberal club who argues (weakly) against Crass's Tory protectionism in the mess-room debates, plays along with Philpot's mock-unemployed-procession skit during the Great Money Trick, and represents the novel's ordinary workman: capable of glimpsing an argument's holes but never quite arriving at Owen's full analysis.; Related: Bob Crass, The Great Money Trick
Hunter ("Misery"/"Nimrod"): Rushton & Co.'s walking foreman and general manager, nicknamed "Misery," "Nimrod," and "Pontius Pilate" by the men for his relentless, often literally crawling-through-windows surveillance of them at work, ensuring not a moment is wasted — the novel's embodiment of management discipline exercised purely to extract maximum labor for minimum pay.; Related: Rushton, Bob Crass

J

Jeremiah Didlum: A house-furnisher and Town Councillor who runs a hire-purchase trade stocked largely with goods repossessed from customers who couldn't keep up instalments, or bought cheap from families ruined by unemployment — one of the "Forty Thieves" and, fittingly, a leader of the Shining Light Chapel's Christmas street preaching.; Related: The Forty Thieves, Adam Sweater

M

Mr. Rushton: The owner of Rushton & Co., Builders and Decorators, who wins contracts by underbidding competitors and then "scamping" the work and squeezing wages to still turn a profit — and who, in the novel's final chapter, is revealed as a leading light of the Shining Light Chapel, preaching a Christmas street-corner sermon to the same "Brothers and Sisters" he grinds down all year.; Related: Hunter, The Shining Light Chapel, Mugsborough
Mugsborough: The fictional south-of-England seaside town where the novel is set, based on Tressell's own Hastings — its name (a "mug" being a dupe) signals the book's central joke about who is really being fooled. An appendix describes it in detail: a resort town of roughly eighty thousand people, its wealthy west-end suburb of Irene set against the working-class east-end suburb of Windley, its Corporation debt-ridden and its profitable public services all in the hands of councillor-shareholders.; Related: The Cave, The Forty Thieves, Adam Sweater

N

Ned Dawson: A labourer paid fourpence an hour to act as mate to whichever tradesman needs him, so poorly used by the firm that his chief pleasure at dinner is simply lying down on the filthy floor to sleep — one of Tressell's smallest, bleakest sketches of casual labor at the very bottom of the trade's hierarchy.; Related: The Cave, Rushton
Nora Owen: Frank Owen's wife, who manages the family's precarious finances, buys him patent medicines she can't really afford, and — with him — engineers Ruth Easton's reconciliation with her husband. In the novel's final chapter she takes in Ruth and Easton's baby as a Christmas gift, and Barrington's parting gift of bank-notes lifts "a great burden" from her heart.; Related: Frank Owen, Frankie Owen, Ruth Easton

O

Old Jack Linden: An elderly painter who insists "there's always been rich and poor in the world, and there always will be" and bristles at Owen's suggestion that workmen live worse than slaves — a representative voice of resigned fatalism among the hands. His family's poverty (his grandchildren's ragged stockings) is one of the cases Barrington quietly relieves at Christmas, and Barrington's parting gift specifically earmarks money for Mrs. Linden.; Related: Frank Owen, Barrington
Old Joe Philpot: A good-natured, hard-drinking painter in his fifties, widowed with all three of his children dead in infancy, who plays master of ceremonies for the workmen's mockery of Owen's "lectures" — most memorably introducing the Great Money Trick demonstration — while genuinely liking Owen and disliking the rows that political argument tends to cause.; Related: The Great Money Trick, Frank Owen

R

Robert Tressell (Author): The pen name of Robert Noonan, a house painter and sign-writer working in Hastings (fictionalized as "Mugsborough") who wrote this novel in the evenings after full days of manual labor. He died of tuberculosis in 1911 without seeing it published; the 1914 first edition was heavily cut, and the full text did not appear until 1955. His preface states the book's intent plainly: to present "a faithful picture of working-class life" and to make the case for Socialism inside a readable story.; Related: Frank Owen, Mugsborough, The Great Money Trick

S

Sawkins: A labourer who has picked up a smattering of the painting trade and works for less than the standard rate, making him popular with the firm and unpopular with the other men, who regard him as a sneak who carries tales to the foreman and "the Bloke" (Rushton) — the novel's example of how underbidding wages pits worker against worker.; Related: Bob Crass, Rushton
Slyme: A pious, teetotal painter who has undergone a religious "conversion" and preaches that drink, early marriage, and laziness — not the economic system — cause poverty, while privately cheating Hunter on piecework by breaking rolls of wallpaper to inflate his count. He later turns up handing out religious tracts at Rushton's street-corner revival meeting, where Barrington coldly refuses one, alluding to some unspecified wrong Slyme did him or someone close to him.; Related: Frank Owen, Bob Crass, The Shining Light Chapel

T

The Cave: The large, long-empty house being renovated by Rushton & Co. for its new owner (revealed to be Adam Sweater) that occupies the workmen for most of the novel's action — its kitchen, with steps-and-planks seating and a pail of stewed tea, is the setting for the mess-room debates in which Owen tries and repeatedly fails to convert his mates to Socialism.; Related: Rushton, Adam Sweater, Frank Owen
The Co-operative Commonwealth: The novel's closing vision, delivered in Owen's voice as he watches Barrington's train vanish into the dark: a prophecy that the "Capitalist System," having reached the fullest measure of its "detestable injustice and cruelty," is doomed to collapse, giving way to a socialist "Golden Light" and a world where "men shall dwell together in true brotherhood." It is the book's most direct statement of hope, offered immediately after — and in tension with — its bleakest sustained portrait of poverty.; Related: Frank Owen, Barrington, The Great Money Trick
The Fiscal Policy Debate: The Free Trade versus Protection argument that dominates the workmen's mess-room politics — mangled by most of them into "the Fissical Policy" or "Friscal Policy" — which Owen dismisses as a false choice: Britain has had fifty years of Free Trade and still has mass poverty, while Protectionist countries have poverty too, because neither policy addresses land and capital ownership, the actual cause.; Related: The Obscurer, Bob Crass, Frank Owen
The Forty Thieves (The Brigands): The nickname the townspeople give the self-perpetuating clique of businessmen-councillors — led by Sweater, with Rushton, Didlum, and Grinder among them — who run the Municipal Council entirely for their own profit: looting the public park's flowers and fowl for their private gardens and tables, and forming a private Electric Light Company to buy public land from themselves at half its value while raising coal duties to squeeze the rival Gas Company. Only Councillor Weakling, a respectable but ultimately toothless dissenter, opposes them.; Related: Adam Sweater, Jeremiah Didlum, Amos Grinder, Councillor Weakling
The Great Money Trick: Owen's bread-and-pocketknife demonstration for his workmates during a rained-out lunch break — the novel's clearest statement of its economic argument. Playing "the whole Capitalist Class" against three workmen playing "the whole Working Class," Owen pays wages for produced goods, then sells the goods back to the workers at a markup, showing how full-value wages still let the capitalist end each cycle richer while the workers end with nothing, and finally lays off the "workers" entirely once his warehouses are glutted with "overproduction."; Related: Frank Owen, Old Joe Philpot, The Philanthropists
The Obscurer: The Tory local newspaper Crass and Easton read and trust, full of alarmist statistics about foreign competition and horse-racing tips from "Captain Kiddem" — Tressell's satire of how a partisan, poorly reasoned press manufactures working-class consent for policies (like tariff Protection) that do nothing to address the real cause of poverty.; Related: Bob Crass, The Fiscal Policy Debate
The Philanthropists (Title Concept): Tressell's own sardonic name for the workmen themselves — "ragged trousered philanthropists" who donate, unpaid, the difference between what their labor produces and what they're paid to their employers, and who — voting Tory or Liberal on foreign-competition scares, distrusting Socialism, and admiring the very men who exploit them — mostly work against their own interests while believing themselves sensibly apolitical.; Related: Frank Owen, The Great Money Trick, Bob Crass
The Rev. John Starr: A refined, well-spoken clergyman whose real function, in the novel's unsparing assessment, is to "pander to and flatter" wealthy congregants like Sweater and Rushton, lending an air of respectability to "the abominably selfish lives" of employers who grind down the very workers Starr is nominally meant to shepherd — one of the leading voices at the Shining Light Chapel's Christmas street-corner revival.; Related: The Shining Light Chapel, Adam Sweater, Rushton
The Shining Light Chapel: The chapel to which Sweater, Rushton, and other Forty Thieves belong, whose Christmas street-corner meeting closes the novel — Rushton preaching "Glad Tidings" to the same "Brothers and Sisters" he underpays and overworks all year, while Tressell catalogues, verse by verse, the gap between the Gospel's actual words ("Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth") and the accumulating, master-serving lives of its loudest professed followers.; Related: Rushton, Adam Sweater, Rev. John Starr