We talk of Dublin as a cradle of famous writers, but in truth only a small, very select handful have made an indelible impact across the globe, writes Dermot Bolger.
How many Dublin-born novelists, for example, have seen their novel sell over a million copies and be reprinted more than 100 times in places as far away as Bulgaria, America, Japan and Russia? How many have seen their novel remain constantly in print for the past 90 years?
I use the phrase "have seen" advisedly, because to this already narrow field of million-selling Dublin authors we can add the following qualification: how many of them never actually lived to see their book in print? Indeed, following several rejections, how many were so utterly convinced of their book being a failure that their daughter had to intervene to stop them burning the only manuscript?
Discerning readers will know that by now that we can be discussing only one Dublin born writer - although, just to confuse matters further, he possessed three different names: Robert Croker, Robert Noonan and Robert Tressell. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists may be the classic English working class novel, but its author, Robert Noonan (who adopted the pen name of Tressell) was born neither in England nor into the working class. His birth was registered in 1870 under the name of his father, a former police inspector called Croker, though he was careful to conceal his origins. He had taken his mother's name of Noonan by the time he followed the diamond rush to South Africa to work as a signwriter/decorative artist.
While there he married, had a daughter, got divorced and became involved in trade union politics. Bringing his child to England, he settled in Hastings (which he rechristened Mugsborough in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists) and lived the impoverished life of a journeyman house painter which he would so brilliantly write about.
Even his burial place (he was interred in a pauper's grave with 12 others in Liverpool in 1911 after dying there of TB) remained so obscure that it was not located until 1970. His granddaughter did unveil a plaque at his birthplace in Dublin's Wexford Street in 1991 and Winslow Terrace in Rathgar and Bessborough Avenue on the North Strand are also associated with him.
It is not only Noonan's confused origins that make him an unlikely focus for cultural tourism as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has never been a comfortable work of respectable literature. Its length, fervently crusading content and deliberate repetition to hammer home its message has meant that, when not being dismissed, it is generally patronised in literary circles.
The book's bizarre publishing history is recounted in Dave Harker's recent book Tressell: The Real Story of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, issued by the small UK publisher Zed Books (www.zedbooks.co.uk). By painstakingly piecing together an account of its many (often bowdlerised) editions and the story of the author and his daughter, Harker shows that few books were as influential in shaping working-class consciousness in the 20th century.
Largely this occurred by the book being passed from hand to hand. The first book that Brendan Behan's father (also a house-painter) would urge anyone to read was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which he called "the painters' bible". Indeed, it was widely believed that a major factor which helped Labour win the 1945 election in Britain was the number of copies circulating among the armed forces which influenced many young soldiers and sailors.
Having spent years working on the book, Robert Noonan died three years before his book was published. Fate must have been doing a FÁS course in cruelty at the time, because his young daughter parted with the manuscript in 1914 for the once-off fee of £25. Publishers made fortunes over the next half-century, while she was utterly forgotten, until in the 1960s one publisher condescended to drop another £25 in the post to her so she could buy a television to watch a BBC dramatisation of her father's words.
It is ironic that a book which warns of the dangers of exploitation should in itself have become such a vehicle of exploitation. Yet the history of the book is filled with ironies, not the least being that the text which passed from hand to hand among soldiers during the second World War was actually a deeply distorted, censored version of Noonan's manuscript. The publisher who purchased the entire rights for all time made it his first task to massively cut down and sanitise Noonan's words.
This is not the only exploitation recounted in Dave Harker's book as he examines how various left-wing political factions were able to use a dead man's book to their advantage and make it mean what they wished. The original manuscript was eventually discovered and the book (still in print from Flamingo and reprinted ten times since 1993) now contains the text that Tressell actually wanted. It remains a novel that demands to be read.
Dublin has been slow to claim Robert Noonan, but April 23rd is the 90th anniversary of his book's first publication.
Perhaps the citizens of Wexford Street, Winslow Terrace and Bessborough Avenue might raise a glass in his honour.