synopsis:

'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' focuses on the lives of a group of painters and decorators who live in Hastings (Mugsborough) around 1906. It considers the hardship of their lives, the structure of the system that creates those hardships and calls for all workers to vote and work for a better future based on socialist principles. It also exposes self serving local councillors and the hypocrisy of Christians who take no heed of the central core of Christ's teachings; that all should treated as equals and brothers and that no one should exploit others for their own gain.

It is an accurate historical account of the lives of working people, and more, a condemnation of the horrors of capitalism, a comprehensive explanation of how the system works, and the need for a socialist alternative.

Robert Tressell speaks through the 'hero' Owen, a building worker, describing incidents and characters that any worker could relate to today. The "Philanthropists" are the workers willing to work for the "good cause" of giving their unpaid labour to the "masters" - the bosses' profits.

Casualisation, bullying bosses, low pay, poor housing, debt, unemployment, and the regular humiliations endured by working people throughout their lives, are all graphically depicted by tressell.

on this book:

'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' is an influential classic of working class literature. The overwhelming impression is of a book written by, not just a well-placed observer, but as Noonan puts it "the story of twelve months in Hell told by one of the damned".tressell WROTE his novel between 1905 and 1908 but despaired of having it printed as publisher after publisher rejected the manuscript. After tressell's death his daughter Kathleen managed to sell the manuscript, for £25, to its first publisher, Grant Richards, who described it thus: "The book was damnably subversive but it was extremely real". the first edition, 1914, and in subsequent editions, the novel was much hacked about and shortened, and given a depressing ending with Owen contemplating the killing of his family and his own suicide. Fred C. Ball, tressell's biographer, tracked down the original manuscript and eventually, in 1955, the first unabridged edition came off the presses and with tressell's uplifting final chapter restored.

One charge sometimes laid against the book is of being biased to men and their workplaces, that the women receive a lesser treatment. also The "Philanthropists" lack feelings of class solidarity and the novel is hazy about how they may attain class consciousness to forward the struggle for socialism. Occasionally the idea of the impoverished masses driven by their wretched conditions to overthrow the capitalists in a bloody uprising is proffered, at others an appeal to "reason", to vote for Revolutionary Socialists. Owen's 'lectures' of course mirror the socialism of his day, a convincing analysis of capitalism coupled to the drawing of a wonderful vision of a socialist future, but somewhat vague as regards the transition between.