The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Wordsworth Classics)

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The hero of the book, Frank Owen, is a socialist who believes that the capitalist system is the real source of the poverty he sees all around him. In vain he tries to convince his fellow workers of his world view, but finds that their education has trained them to distrust their own thoughts and to rely on those of their "betters". Much of the book consists of conversations between Owen and the others, or more often of lectures by Owen in the face of their jeering; this was presumably based on Tressell's own experiences.(Summary by Tadhg) But we ain’t such fools as they thinks, and so they’ll find out next Monday. Most of ’em wants ’angin’, and I wouldn’t mind lendin’ a ’and with the rope myself.” I designed to show the conditions resulting from poverty and unemployment: to expose the futility of the measures taken to deal with them and to indicate what I believe to be the only real remedy, namely - Socialism. I intended to explain what Socialists understand by the word "Poverty"; to define the Socialist theory of the causes of poverty, and to explain how Socialists propose to abolish poverty."

CONTENTS 1 An Imperial Banquet. A Philosophical Discussion. The Mysterious Stranger. Britons Never shall be Slaves Tressell’s attachment to his craft can be gleaned from his chosen pen name, a reference to a painter’s trestle table. It was more than a means to earn a living, or a mere functional task — it was a vocation. As the 1920s Painters’ Journal article remarked, Many people have praised the Authenticity of the novel. In his preface to the novel Robert Tressell says In writing this book my intention was to present, in the form of an interesting story, a faithful picture of working class life…The work possesses at least one merit – that of being true. I have invented nothing. There are no scenes or incidents in the story that I have not either witnessed myself or had conclusive evidence of.

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The story of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is in large part the story of its author, Robert Noonan. Born in 1870 the illegitimate son of an inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary, Noonan ended up as a decorator and lone parent in Hastings. A craftsman who shared Ruskin's belief in the dignity of labour, he was a gifted autodidact familiar with the radical canon from Shakespeare to William Morris. THEY WERE THE ENEMY. Those who not only quietly submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to alter it." After a while the rest of the crowd began to laugh, and their merriment increased when the kind-hearted capitalist, just after having sold a pound’s worth of necessaries to each of his workers, suddenly took their tools – the Machinery of Production – the knives away from them, and informed them that as owing to Over Production all his store-houses were glutted with the necessaries of life, he had decided to close down the works.

I’ve had a long and somewhat strange relationship with this book. My father asked me to read it when I was about 11 and I started it, but must have only read the first couple of chapters. All the same, and that was over 40 years ago, I remembered bits of it as I read it again this time. Grant Richards Ltd. published about two-thirds of the manuscript in April 1914 after Tressell's daughter, Kathleen Noonan, showed her father's work to her employers. The 1914 edition not only omitted material but also moved text around and gave the novel a depressing ending. Tressell's original manuscript was first published in 1955 by Lawrence and Wishart. [1] Some books seem to batter their way to immortality against all odds, by sheer brute artistic strength, and high up in this curious and honourable company must be counted The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Robert Tressell's unfailing humour mixes with an unfailing rage and the two together make a truly Swiftian impact'We've had Free Trade for the last fifty years and today most people are living in a condition of more or less abject poverty, and thousands are literally starving. When we had Protection things were worse still. Other countries have Protection and yet many of their people are glad to come here and work for starvation wages. The only difference between Free Trade and Protection is that under certain circumstances one might be a little worse that the other, but as remedies for Poverty, neither of them are of any real use whatever, for the simple reason that they do not deal with the real causes of Poverty.' Relief that is, from any illusion that things will probably be ok; that we have learnt from mistakes of the past, and that we are at the dawn of some enlightened benevolent age. The media still tends to warn us not to get carried away by those who campaign for peace and justice, and to spread the idea that such changes cannot be achieved because we should distrust all those who advocate them. Don't be put of by the density and length, it really works in creating a convincing atmosphere of the times and allows room for a rather surprising ending.