[Marxism] The class war in fiction - and fact

["Jack Cade" <jack.cade@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The class war in fiction ? and fact

Hay festival After 111 editions of socialist classic, author's
family has received just £25

John Ezard

London Guardian, Saturday 4 June

Forty-five years ago, when British television dramatised Robert
Tressell's classic novel of socialism The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists, Tressell's granddaughter Joan and her husband,
Reg, were too poor to afford a TV set.

Wellwishers had to buy them one so that they could watch. Joan
died five years ago, and Reg, at 78, is still poor. Yet he spends
£1,000 a year of his state pension running the Robert Tressell
Foundation and its scores of feet of archive shelving at his home
in East Grinstead, West Sussex.

Yesterday at the Guardian Hay book festival, Reg Johnson and his
supporters opened a campaign to explore whether they can fund the
foundation's work by tapping some of the possibly hundreds of
thousands of pounds in royalties which are still being made from
worldwide sales by HarperCollins of his grandfather-in-law's
book.

They see it as ironic that Tressell's story of a group of Kent
housepainters is most famous as the first working-class account
published in Britain of Karl Marx's theory of surplus value. This
is that capitalism has ways, often devious, of de­ frauding
workers of most of the fruits of their labour.

This, as they see it, is what has somehow happened to the family
of a man who had to be buried in a pauper's grave. "The family,
like the characters in the novel, has paid the price," Mr Johnson
said.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has run through at least 111
editions since it was published in 1914, three years after
Tressell's death.

Eight stage adaptations have been made. Yet the family has
received only the £25 originally paid to the author's daughter
Kathleen by the publisher Grant Richards after he discovered that
she kept the manuscript under her bed.

Kathleen Noonan (Tressell's real surname) received no contract
but signed a letter written by Richards which made her say: "You
hand over all rights".

This copyright covered heavily cut editions published until 1955,
including several from the then British Communist party
publishers Lawrence and Wishart. The TUC thought so highly of the
novel that in 1914 it appealed to people to leave copies at local
post offices to be sent to troops in France.

In 1955 Lawrence and Wishart published the first unabridged text,
most of it put together by Kathleen, Joan and their supporters.
In 1964 the Grant Richards copyright expired, giving the family a
chance, which they did notice at the time, of arguing legally
that the unabridged edition constituted a new copyright in which
they should have a share.

Reg Johnson was alerted by discovering that a grand-daughter of
the late Martin Secker, the publisher, was receiving royalties
paid by HarperCollins to the Secker estate. One of Secker's
connections to Tressell is that he was a director of Grant
Richards's company.

"I am campaigning for the modern copyright background to be
explored further, in the hope that the foundation is entitled to
royalties to help it continue promoting Robert's work," he said
yesterday.

"I am certain there are over a million copies of The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists in circulation. This money should have
been accruing to the family. There have been 48 paperback
editions. If Kathleen had had a contract, the royalties could be
up to half a million pounds."

Mr Johnson has already appealed to the Society of Authors, which
is adept at unravelling­ complex trails of copyright. A society
spokeswoman said it would try to help but would need to see
detailed correspondence.

At yesterday's session the message from two foundation
supporters, Tressell's biographer, Dave Harker, and Marion Walls,
an Essex University teacher, was that the writers' message is
alive and relevant.

Harker said that the book pointed to a highly modern message for
the Labour left: "Winning an intellectual argument does not
necessarily win the vote ? and winning elections does not mean
that reforms are irreversible."



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