The individual and the collective in early twentieth century working-class literature: Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) and James Hanley’s Boy (1931)

Abstract

This essay argues that both James Hanley’s Boy and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists show genuine individual escape from socioeconomic oppression and poverty to be impossible without collective action or social upheaval. The individual working-class character is isolated, and it is not until all characters are liberated that they are able to escape the constraints of their class. In The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, though Owen has mentally escaped the constraints of capitalism, it remains impossible for his material circumstances to change significantly, because the other workers refuse to listen to his enlightened ideas. Boy shows Arthur Fearon attempt to make a physical escape, but nothing affects the fact that he and everyone else in the novel find themselves trapped in their class. Through literary realism and fragmentation, displaced abjection and contrasting endings, both novels reveal the futility of the working-class individual’s attempt to escape a pervasive class structure without collective effort.