Note: The following is an extract from my new book ‘Working Class Hero’, a full-length study of Robert Tressell’s classic Socialist novel ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.’ Out now in hardcover, paperback or Kindle editions.

INTRODUCTION

Tressell and Me

I first read Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in 1984, when I was nineteen.

Nineteen. It’s an interesting age. On the one hand, like almost all very young men who are convinced that they know everything, I knew pretty much nothing at all, and I understood even less than that. Nonetheless, nineteen is also an age when the mind is sharp and nimble and restlessly curious in a way I can only marvel at as the middle-aged man I now am. The doors of perception are ready to fly wide open at nineteen, and it’s fair to say that Tressell’s novel burst through those doors in a way that only a few things in a lifetime really can, often only when you’re very young. In fact, as Michael Caine almost said, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists didn’t so much just open the doors of perception as blow the bloody doors off.

Not that the novel changed my political stance. I was inspired and astounded by Tressell on first reading, but not converted – he found me much too late for that. I’d been stridently and vocally ‘of the Left’ for several years by the time I hit nineteen. No real surprise there. As Alan Bleasdale has one of the Boys from the Blackstuff point out with a sigh of disillusionment, “Everybody was a socialist in the seventies.”

So why hadn’t I read the book already? Simple. I’d never heard of it. Back in the early eighties, the novel was very much an underground piece. A popular success on its own unique hand to hand workshop and builder’s yard terms certainly, but a long way from achieving any kind of interest or acceptance from the literary establishment, which was where, as an English undergraduate at the time, I got my sense of which books it was important for me to read. When I was eventually introduced to the novel and fell utterly under its spell, I quickly discovered that neither my fellow students nor any of my lecturers or professors had ever heard of it either. That the novel survived at all was down to its level of popular rather than literary appeal, and more specifically to the efforts of a dedicated group of working-class enthusiasts, leftwing activists and trade unionists.

That’s gradually changed – at least a bit – so that today you might well find Tressell on many a university syllabus. Even so, he’ll still almost certainly be confined to a kind of ghetto – studied in specialist units on ‘The Literature of Protest’ alongside Chartist poetry from the nineteenth century, or beside Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair, Lewis Jones’s We Live, a spot of Sillitoe and Hines, and maybe, if they’re really daring, a sprinkling of contemporary stuff by Pat Barker, David Peace or Irvine Welsh in a unit on ‘The Working-Class Novel’ (a term which I’m prepared to use here for the sake of its convenience, but all the time with the retort prepared that it only applies if we’re also prepared to accept that all other long form prose fiction should now be referred to as ‘the middle-class novel.’). It would be much rarer to find Tressell sitting straightforwardly alongside the acknowledged big hitters of the early twentieth century canon – he doesn’t seem to be considered sufficiently refined to share a dinner table with Conrad, Forster, Joyce or Woolf. The exception might be D.H. Lawrence, whose mining background will sometimes see him rubbing shoulders with the likes of Tressell or Jack Common, although Lawrence is still much more likely to be encountered in the middle of a mainstream unit on the Modernists.

Working-class writing, in other words, is subject to an even more extreme form of ghettoization than  the way in which a select handful of women writers – Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Woolf – have been granted the keys to the Shining Citadel of the Great Tradition while the majority of writing by women from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has had to be content with being rescued from complete oblivion and obscurity by the Virago Press and admitted into the outlying suburbs of ‘Women’s Studies’ – wherever those courses have not yet been cancelled for their radical feminist tendency to exclude the penised from their reading lists.

So, if not by reading on-syllabus, how did I finally encounter the great classic of working-class fiction? Like most of its readers for more than a century, by word-of-mouth recommendation and being lent a copy.

Enthusiasts of Tressell’s novel will almost always begin by explaining who first introduced the book to them, just as I’m about to do here. I know an extraordinary number of those kinds of stories for a novel that is still too little-read and too little-known. I know, for instance, that George Orwell first came into contact with what he called this ‘wonderful book’ when it was recommended to him by a Leeds librarian during his tour of the North for The Road to Wigan Pier. I know that Alan Sillitoe was introduced to the novel by a wireless operator while he was serving in the RAF in Malaya. I know that Jeremy Corbyn’s mother introduced the book to him, and that Ricky Tomlinson was given a copy by his prison governor while he was in solitary confinement. These kinds of accounts will frequently describe the copy as ‘batterered’ or ‘tattered,’ ‘worn’ or ‘well-thumbed,’ with one  reviewer from 1955 suggesting that the book was ‘handed around and read and read until it literally fell to pieces’ among British troops in Burma. The testimony speaks to an altogether different means of transmission, a hand-to-hand culture of shared reading which suggests that, even though the novel sold respectably through the middle years of the twentieth century, its actual reach and influence has always been much wider than sales figures of well over a million copies alone can suggest.

Here then is my own small contribution to this tradition. I was introduced to the book as a first-year student by a friend called Lee Paige. I’d met Lee during the first couple of weeks of our first term when we’d both been living, briefly, in one of the seaside Guest Houses which my obscure Irish university, without Halls of Residence places, recommended as short-term accommodation to new students. I say ‘briefly’ because none of us could wait to escape from this coastal Colditz presided over by the terrifying Mrs. Ebbitt and her no less terrifying attack daughter. Fortunately, friendships formed fairly quickly among us, and soon we had all slipped the clutches of the fearsome landlady (picture the illicit lovechild of Agatha Trunchbull and Ian Paisley) and were happily sharing a variety of shockingly awful student flats instead.

I kept in touch with Lee, although we were soon moving in quite different circles. He studied Sociology, I studied English. He was an outgoing, sociable, fair-haired Londoner. I was an introverted, skinny, long-haired kid from Norwich. Despite what our hairstyles might suggest, he was into Prog Rock, and particularly Genesis, a band that I, having emerged fully-formed from the cleansing fires of Punk, knew to be the ultimate epitome of all that was evil and heinous in the world. Almost the only cultural interest we had in common was a shared love of Laurel and Hardy. And yet despite all that we remained friends throughout that first year, and even beyond it a little – Lee being the only one of my university friends to visit me at home in the holidays, though the visit turned out to be a farewell one since he had failed his end of year exams and left his course that Summer.

You see, despite all the differences, despite him being from the Big Smoke and me from a provincial backwater, we had one thing in common that was even more significant than a finely tuned aesthetic appreciation of Ollie’s slow-burning fourth wall breaking double-take looks to camera; a thing so powerful that it bound us, and only us, together. It wasn’t politics exactly, although we were both firebrand socialists before we arrived. Right-on 80s left-wing politics were by no means exclusive to us – in fact they were pretty much universal on campus.

It was Class.

We were the only people either of us knew in this brave new world who had come from a working-class background. This gave us a shared set of references, a shared culture, and just as importantly a shared set of insecurities as we found ourselves negotiating an unfamiliar world, populated almost completely by people with a very different set of cultural assumptions which existed entirely outside our experience. It made each of us a kind of touchstone on reality for the other as we stepped uncertainly into a world where people knew about wine, and foreign food, and foreign cities and a thousand and one other things which had previously been beyond our horizons.

Although outside those specific limits we were never especially close, it was this that kept us sharing the occasional pint or nine, or popping round to each other’s flats for a cuppa. One of these occasions had been prompted by Lee craving the comfort of home food. Unsurprising really, when you consider that if you discount greasy takeaways, the student diet seemed to consist almost entirely of bizarre curries made by throwing whatever combination of ingredients were lurking in the back of a cupboard into a pan and smothering them with curry powder and whatever herbs and spices were knocking around. These carried twin disadvantages, the first being that they were always quite extraordinarily disgusting (if you’ve never sampled sprout and apple curry then simply thank your lucky stars and do everything humanly possible to keep it that way) and the second that, however disgusting they were, they still seemed inevitably to be served with a side order of your own ignorance, because they were filled with stuff you’d never heard of. Herbs and spices that, forty years on, after the society-transforming power of Delia and the thousand lifestyle and cookery shows that followed in her wake are perfectly commonplace but were exotically new and intimidating to working-class kids like us back in the mid-80s. Oregano, Coriander, Fenugreek, Turmeric, Paprika, Cumin, the list intoned with the same sense of mystery as the names in the Shipping Forecast; some strange foreign language from an alien world. I spoke only Findus.

As a result, Lee and I had come up with a plan to have a go at making a real meal, and between us we’d managed to cook something that was some kind of approximation of a Sunday roast, despite the best efforts of my flat’s hideous kitchen (think the early scenes of Withnail and I to establish the level of hideousness we’re discussing) to prevent such temerity.

After we’d eaten, and basking for a while in the unfamiliar sensation of something approaching satisfaction, we were sitting back bloatedly in the red plastic armchairs in the living room. Mostly red plastic, that is, since the vinyl had been ripped away from the arms to reveal the yellow foam within. We were gazing contentedly at the genuinely spectacular sea view through the long window on the facing wall, the effect hardly at all diminished by the strange mushroomy fungal patches growing like Krynoids in the corners of the wooden window frames.

‘Have you read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists?’ Lee asked quietly.

I hadn’t. I’d never heard of it. A bit uncertainly, he pulled a copy out of the canvas bag he had with him. It seemed a slightly odd moment to both of us, I think, because we would have been aware that I was the bookish one who would normally be recommending unfamiliar reading to him. I think too, though I can’t in all honesty remember, that I was probably anticipating awkwardness. Didn’t he realise that I already knew everything that was worth reading? I didn’t need word-of-mouth. I hadn’t needed a mate to tell me that I should read Shakespeare, or Great Expectations, or Tom Jones, or Tristram Shandy or Nineteen Eighty-Four or Ulysses, had I? I probably assumed that he was going to try to get me to read some rubbishy paperback (it was a paperback copy he produced, the same red Panther edition I have to this day) which would be completely beneath me. A bit like that moment early on in Willy Russell’s Educating Rita when Rita breathlessly recommends Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle and the work of Harold Robbins to the slightly bewildered lecturer who offers her Howard’s End in return. I was a fully paid-up highbrow student of Literature with a capital L, for God’s sake (I may have to confess that with the benefit of forty years or so of hindsight there may just conceivably have been just the tiniest whiff of pretentiousness about me back then, although to defend that naïve child a little I can see now that it stemmed from insecurity rather than genuine arrogance).

‘Read this bit,’ Lee persisted, despite my apparent reluctance, and he opened the novel at Chapter 21, ‘The Great Money Trick.’ I began to read and found myself instantly gripped. I read the whole chapter as Lee continued to look silently out at the sea. The politics, of course, were mine already. I’d been a conscious Red for about as long as I even began to understand what politics were. Mum and dad were both old school working-class Labour voters and, to be honest, if you weren’t vocally and actively left wing after the 1979 advent of the Anti-Christ in twinset and pearls then it meant there was something wrong with you. By 1984, when I first encountered Tressell, it had come to feel as though a life-or-death struggle was being waged for the soul of the country; a struggle between decency, kindness and community on one side and avarice, brutality and malice on the other; a struggle we seemed to be steadily losing. Living through the nineteen eighties made you feel a little like Tressell’s Frank Owen, constantly banging your head against the brick wall of other people’s ignorance, folly and stubborn unwillingness to see. Recently that feeling has become familiar once more, history repeating itself first as tragedy then as farce.

What was new to me as I read was not the politics, but the clarity and ingenuity. I’d always struggled to find the language that could define my politics clearly enough. I was a Socialist, yes, but any time I ended up trying to explain what I meant by that I found myself stumbling inarticulately between tongue-tied complexity and bland generalizations. Called on as resident Class Lefty to explain the difference between Socialism and Communism in one particularly excruciating A level History lesson, I couldn’t manage anything more articulate than muttering that Communism was like Socialism only a bit more left wing. I’d read Marx as a Sixth Former, but Das Kapital didn’t help; it was too broad, too exhaustive, too dry. But now, suddenly here it was in a single chapter of Tressell’s novel, made crystal clear in a way that no-one could fail to understand. Capitalism in a nutshell. The idea of surplus value laid out for all to see. That should have been enough. But it wasn’t all.

There was also a strange tingle of recognition. Almost of deja-vu. I’d seen this trick before, years ago. A long, sunny late Summer’s evening, shadows slowly lengthening across a cricket pitch. A staff cricket match at my dad’s work. His side were a man short, and with me being a decent enough schoolboy player my dad had brought me along to play. I must have been about 10 or 11. And during our innings, with everyone waiting their turn to bat sitting in a rough circle, the chat had turned to politics and one of the men – I can’t remember now who it was – had done a version of the Great Money Trick. He didn’t mention The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, at least not that I recall, and it wasn’t absolutely identical. The workers tore pages of a copy of the Daily Mirror into strips rather than cutting slices of bread into squares, but it was essentially this same brilliant illustration of the absurdity at the heart of the system that I now found myself reading almost a decade later in a book published many decades before, the absurdity of the system we were still living under. I borrowed Lee’s copy of the novel, of course, and devoured it in full very quickly. All these years later, I can’t remember if I gave it back and bought myself another, or if the copy I still have on my shelves is actually Lee’s. Property is theft, I know, but still I hope I returned it. That would have been the least I could do to thank him for sharing with me the novel that now means more to me than any other. Almost any other. Horror fan as well as wild-eyed leftie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (which Tressell also enjoyed, according to the testimony of his daughter) pushes it close.

But as I read and quickly re-read the novel, that sense of familiarity and recognition began to run even deeper and more consciously than just a vague, half-lost ten-year-old memory of my first unknowing encounter with the Money Trick. I knew this. I knew these people. The workshop and the yard. The speech patterns and the cast of thought. I knew it all, and unlike almost everything else I knew at that age, I knew it from life – not from books or films or TV. It wasn’t like Boys from the Blackstuff, my main touchstone for working-class writing at that point. I’d loved Bleasdale’s excoriating portrait of Thatcher’s Britain, felt the passion and the power of the writing, but it was too Northern, too Scouse, too post-industrial to be really familiar to me. Tressell’s painters and decorators, on the other hand, and the provincial backwater of Mugsborough – small businesses rather than large-scale industrial employers, old-fashioned working practices, a sense of having almost sidestepped the developments of the industrial revolution – felt much closer to home.  My home city had very little large-scale industrial manufacturing back then – it has even less now. My mum, it’s true, worked on the line in a plastics factory, but that was another world, entirely out of my experience. My dad’s work, on the other hand, was very much a part of my life and world; a place and a group of people I knew well and had spent a lot of time around while growing up, and it was this world that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists seemed to plug directly into.

So let me take you back, just briefly. Back to a working world of blue overalls and the all-pervading smell of tobacco – almost as likely back then to be from a pipe or a Panatella as a packet of Players No. 6. Back to a world where payday meant lining up at a window to be handed your wages in cash, the wage-packet a small brown paper envelope with a cellophane panel to make it possible to check the amount before opening. A handwritten working world before emails or mobiles. A world in which you couldn’t even rely on the electricity being on all the time.

For as long as I could really remember at this point, my dad had worked as a maintenance electrician at St. Andrews, the local mental hospital, a twenty-minute walk from our house – not that my dad walked, he cycled, little black cycle clips assiduously gripping the bottoms of his trouser legs. It was a journey which began with a couple of suburban residential streets, mainly 1930s built semis full of the lower middle classes and, increasingly at the time, a handful of families like us, skilled working-class with a few aspirations. It went on to take in two pubs, neither of which served food and neither of which exists any more, two newsagents (both gone now); two convenience stores (one is now a bank and the other part of the One Stop national chain rather than the independent it used to be), a hairdressers which at the end of the 60s was an old-school ‘short back and sides something for the weekend sir?’ gent’s barber shop and in the 70s morphed into a shockingly modern unisex hair stylists (gone now); my primary and secondary school (both still there despite my daily childhood prayers for a rain of bombs to erase them from the landscape); the edge of the recreation ground (always just referred to as ‘the rec’ – essentially a big field skirted by a rough patch of woodland with football pitches and teenagers doing stuff they shouldn’t, in which regard nothing has changed); a tiny shopping centre which in the 70s was a grocery, haberdashery and ironmongery store, in the 80s sold kitchens, then was variously a video rental store, a ‘seconds’ catalogue clothes shop and budget footware outlet, a Spar, a Mace and a tropical fish store before finally closing altogether. Perhaps the rapid turnover of businesses can be explained partly by the fact that in the later days of my dad’s time there, the short journey ended by passing a brand spanking new Sainsbury’s out of town supermarket and a soulless new-build housing estate before arriving at the sprawling Victorian complex of the hospital itself. I haven’t had cause to walk it often since the death of my parents, but following the route now gives me an eerie, haunted feeling, that dream-like deja-vu in which the childhood landscape is still utterly familiar and yet all the details are wrong.

Half a century and more of social change can be traced through that twenty-minute walk, including, of course, the fact that the Victorian edifice of the hospital itself is long closed, its grounds now swallowed by an ugly business park, a victim of the Conservative care in the community land grab swindle.

Before that, when I knew it in the 70s and early 80s the working atmosphere of the hospital, for all its similarities to the working world of Tressell’s philanthropists, was very different in one key regard. Everyone there was working in the public rather than the private sector. There were managers and foremen, certainly, to supervise and chivy along the work and a strong sense of ‘them and us’ accordingly, requiring a keen eye to be kept out for opportunities to ‘get a little of your own back’ as Philpot has it in the novel. Twenty minutes impromptu cricket or footie in the yard when the foreman wasn’t looking, a swift illicit cigarette break or two, adding a few minutes to the tea break wherever possible. But thanks to the Labour reforms of the 1940s, and the foundation of the welfare state, the profits of bosses like Rushton and Sweater were not an issue for tradesmen like my dad. His entire working life, beginning in the 1950s, was spent in different forms of the public sector – the navy; a nationalized railway industry; the prison service briefly, and then an NHS mental hospital. The wages were low, of course, but work didn’t necessarily carry with it the sense that you were – directly – lining someone else’s pockets. The broader political and economic injustices of the time are another question – it was still a capitalist world, after all – but by comparison it would have seemed a paradise to Tressell’s workers who could barely have dreamed of a National Health system which would not only help them if they got sick but offer them an opportunity of working for the public good rather than private profit.

Of course, it was also just as different from anything you would find in an NHS hospital today. Back then, there was none of the Blairite dogma of Private Finance Initiatives, none of the Thatcherite contracting out of services. In my dad’s time, the hospital itself was his employer, not a private electrical contractor as it would be today, and he was one of four or five electricians permanently on site. The hospital also employed fitters and carpenters and boilermen and gardeners and cleaners and laundry staff. There were workshops for different trades, and best of all to my wide eyes as a child, a storeroom so positively Dickensian in atmosphere that it was like stepping a hundred years into the past. ‘Wasteful!’ the right wing cried. ‘A shockingly inefficient use of taxpayers’ money.’ Though in our privatized world of sky-rocketing fuel bills, collapsing rail networks and hospitals unable to keep themselves clean enough to prevent epidemic levels of hospital-acquired infections like MRSA or C. difficile, no-one has ever satisfactorily explained to me why it is so much more ‘efficient’ to use that taxpayers’ money to fund the profits of the private companies now contracted to do that public work, the luxurious lifestyles of the company bosses and the shareholders’ dividends, rather than to simply pay working people a living wage to do the work that needs doing. It’s ‘value for money’ when tax revenue is handed to wealthy profiteers trading on public service contracts, it’s ‘wasteful’ when it is used to pay working-class wages.

Dad in the Dickensian storeroom around 1980 (Photograph by Gilbert Plummer)

This was the working world I recognized so immediately when I first devoured The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as a callow university student,this ‘all human life is here’ ragtag of trades and ages, not in many of its overalled essentials very different to the world Tressell captured so perfectly some sixty or seventy years before. There were old men, like Eric ‘Sam’ Browne the foreman and the kindly widower Sid Pobgee, Tressell’s Philpot to the life, who lived alone, liked fishing and the occasional beer and once gave me his deerstalker hat and pipe for Christmas, knowing how I coveted them as a young Holmesian obsessive. There were the middle-aged old hands, men like Donny Franklin, left winger, union man and the very soul of decency and principle. Men like my dad, and the steely-eyed white-haired Lennie Stubbs, and Gilbert ‘Gilly’ Plummer, who together undertook an epic three-year pub crawl in the late 70s, spending every Sunday lunchtime steadily (and at times unsteadily) drinking their way around every pub in the city, inspired to discover how much truth remained of the old local saying that Norwich had a church for every week of the year and a pub for every day. Gilbert being a skilled amateur photographer, and my dad having a way with a pen (the widespread idea that creativity is the exclusive preserve of the middle and upper classes has never accorded with my experience), they catalogued the pilgrimage through Gilbert’s photographs and my dad’s handwritten pen portraits of the décor and customers of each pub they visited. And then there were young men like David ‘Wol’ Bates with his long blond hair, his Rolling Stones badges and his Serious Rock albums, unspeakably glamorous to my adolescent eyes because he played bass in a prog rock outfit called The Frequency Band, successful enough on the local scene to cut a couple of singles.

The unspeakably glamorous David ‘Wol’ Bates, Eric ‘Sam’ Browne and my dad (Photograph Gilbert Plummer)

Discussing Tressell’s novel, Raymond Williams suggests ‘there is no finer representation, anywhere in English writing of a certain rough-edged, mocking, give-and-take conversation between workmen and mates. This humour, this edge, is one of the most remarkable achievements.’ The assertion rang true for me, when I recalled the speech patterns, the insults, the jokes, what would now be called the ‘banter’ which marked the relationships between these working men I knew. Gilbert in particular had an unrivalled mastery of the sarcastic retort and the sneering putdown, always delivered with a kind of wide-eyed innocence, displaying perhaps the sharpest wit of anyone I’ve ever encountered in any walk of life. In reading, I could readily see the skill and precision with which Tressell captured the sometimes easy, sometimes cutting give and take of workmen’s voices, but it’s also true to say that, although  I could appreciate and understand those voices, with my eleven plus pass and my grammar school education, let alone my eventual scuttling off to the Irish university where I finally encountered The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,  I was growing ever more detached from that life and those people. Even at the time when I had been among them as a child and a teenager, as well as looking back from the age of nineteen when I first read Tressell’s novel, and just as surely today, looking back from my fifties, I was both inside and outside that world, never fully of it. Just as was Tressell himself; an Irishman in England who found himself part of the working-class rather than having been born so (he was the illegitimate son of an eminently respectable upper middle-class Dubliner named Samuel Croker, a well-heeled Inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary and Resident Magistrate), as I later discovered thanks to the tireless biographical research of Fred Ball.

It’s a story often told, but that journey away from your roots and between classes – at least when it’s a question of ‘moving up in the world’ like me, rather than downward like Tressell – is always in some sense a story of betrayal and loss, and an accompanying sense of guilt is an inevitable part of the baggage that you take with you. It’s there in John Braine’s Room at the Top and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar and to differing degrees in a number of other fifties ‘angry young men’ novels. It’s a theme which a later writer like Dennis Potter, for instance, can never quite let go of. And this, I think, is another reason why Tressell’s magnificent book took hold of me so instantly, a hold it has never relinquished. It seemed to offer the possibility of finding a connection between where I was, in the rarified atmosphere of academic ivory towers – or concrete and glass towers more accurately given that we’re talking about an obscure Northern Irish university – and where I had come from. Going back, really going back, not just physically but psychologically and emotionally wasn’t possible even if I wanted to, like in that joke about asking someone for directions and them replying ‘well if I were you I wouldn’t start from here.’ I was where I was, and there was nothing I could do about that, but what I suddenly felt I could do was make this new world recover a kind of contact with the place I had come from. When I finished my degree and had a choice of what to make the basis of my postgraduate research, there was only one novel I even considered, despite its lack of academic respectability at the time. I wrote my MA dissertation on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – though much amended and developed some of that material still forms the spine of the main section of this book – and have never stopped thinking about, re-reading, recommending and teaching the novel ever since. Because in some senses I was writing and thinking about the novel not just for myself, not just from a purely academic interest, but for my mum and dad, for the people I’d known and in some ways left behind, for the world I’d come from.

In his poem Digging, Seamus Heaney talks about watching his father and grandfather working the land, and throughout the poem alongside its tone of celebration and salute is an undercurrent of guilt that he has left that rural working-class life behind. He concludes with a commitment to find a continuity between their world of the shovel and his of the pen:

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

That felt very much like the relationship that, by writing about my favourite novel, I thought I could find between my educationally driven move from one class to another, and my background. Adopting and advocating a socialist world view is a rational and honourable position – perhaps the only rational and honourable political position it is possible to take. Declaring and reclaiming the importance of working-class voices in the literary world – with Tressell preeminent among them – is also an important and honourable thing to do. Both were also, for me, (perhaps less nobly) a way of assuaging a degree of middle-class guilt I can never stop feeling. For all that, however, it makes me smile a little that when I began working on this book, digging through a few battered cardboard boxes from the back of cupboards to find my old dissertation, boxes that have survived house moves and breakups and several decades of dusty neglect, I came across not only the cheaply bound manually typed copy of the finished thing, but also the handwritten drafts. Because they’re scrawled, along with lecture notes, ideas for never written novels and some truly excruciating poetry, into a large narrow feint A4 notebook bearing the crest of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, a notebook which could only have been illicitly liberated from the Dickensian storeroom of St Andrews hospital for his university- bound son by my not normally light-fingered dad. Getting a little of his own back. Philpot would certainly have approved.

Out now in hardcover, paperback or on Kindle.