Robert Tressell

"What we call civilisation—the accumulation of knowledge which has come down to us from our forefathers—is the fruit of thousands of years of human thought and toil. It is not the result of the labour of the ancestors of any separate class of people who exist to-day, and therefore it is by right the common heritage of all. Every little child that is born into the world, no matter whether he is clever or dull, whether he is physically perfect or lame, or blind, no matter how much he may excel or fall short of his fellows in other respects, in one thing at least he is their equal—he is one of the heirs of all the ages that have gone before."

"What I actually lent him was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. This is the one work of genius which Socialism has produced, and about which our Tory press, well-bred and aloof when it suits them, has maintained a conspiracy of silence. It represents Capital as putting its foot on the face of Labour, and stabbing it in the guts to make sure. It is by a house-painter who made a first-hand indictment of the state of affairs on the lowest rung of the ladder, and died. It is quite unanswerable, and for that reason has never been answered."

"There is the most remarkable of all books about working-class life, Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It too is written from the inside — "Hell, by One of the Damned". Like Jack London's work, it has been immensely popular among working men. Its failing is that Tressell was not a writer; he did not know how to select, to do away with the superfluous and make his material work to its best effect."

"This novel ought to be read by all social reformers, and even more so by those who cannot be so classed."

"Tressell's artful depiction of the sheer physical privation and terror of what it is like to work too long, too hard, with too little food in your stomach will bring a chill to the heart of anyone who has ever been in a remotely similar situation. In such a setting we might expect to see a group of sub-human automatons stumbling about “the Cave.” Such a presentation would meet current artistic standards and we might pass them on the street with just such thoughts. Tressell knows better. He knows his men from the inside. Novels live or die by the amount of life in the people in them. Tressell's housepainters are as rich and juicily human a collection of people as has been seen in an English novel since the days of Charles Dickens."

"I'm reading Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists for the umpteenth time. And not just because I am going to record it as an audiobook. It was the first novel to encourage me in the working-class fight. It's an encapsulation of what's endemic in capitalism and the nobility of struggle for socialism."

"Almost the last book he Hubert Parry] read, in August 1918, was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressall, which greatly moved and impressed him."

"The secret of the book's endurance is its art and truth. Noonan was a master of working men's speech. Writing about his own environment to the extent that much of the feeling of his book is clearly autobiographical, he never lets passion or indignation mislead his ear. In his preface he takes the trouble to declare that the purpose of his novel is to proclaim socialism. That need not put the reader off. From the moment, on the first page, when you join the gang of builders and decorators who are renovating the three-storyed house "The Cave" you enter a world which though now largely past is vivid and real. It is a world of cut-throat wages, of fear and hatred of the foreman (himself terrified of his boss), of the spectre of unemployment, which rules almost all the men's actions and is the real villain. There are also vestiges of Dickensian kindness, a human comradeship among the working men, a Samaritan attitude to the families of each other... The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists rings far more true than many of the better known "condition of the people" novels of its day. That is why it has lasted."

"The best British working-class novel, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists."

"I fear that if I say what I think it may appear extravagant; while if I moderate my words I shall feel that I am doing scant justice to what has seemed to me the most remarkable human document that has appeared in my time. It is a masterpiece of realism. The work of a craftsman, it is true, unerring and pitiless in its delineation of men and life. Were Zola and Tolstoi living, I am sure they would look upon this common house-painter with envy, as one whose novice hand had outdone them. I am sure that Gorky and Jack London would confess frankly that the work of Robert Tressall surpasses theirs. Certainly, London's The Call of the Wild cannot be as true to life as these ragged philanthropists."

"Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, one of the most moving stories ever told of the plight of the working class in Britain."

"The book [The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists] is a realistic description of the building trade in the early years of this century and a powerful exposition of socialist ideas, written by a working-man, Bob Noonan, under the pen-name of Robert Tressell. In my youth it was passed from hand to hand among people in the Labour movement and had a remarkable effect on our thinking."

"Just as the place of Chartist literature within the cultural heritage was never defined, the reasons for the great success of Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists were never laid bare. This is even more surprising in view of the fact that this novel, which was reprinted twice in the Thirties, had, in its adaptation for the stage, already been a major success of the Workers' Theatre Movement, was read by workers and sold during the first forty years of its 'censored' publication more than 100,000 copies – an almost unbelievable figure, if one considers that the average edition of a working-class novel in the Thirties was 1,500 copies, of which less than two-thirds were sold."

"The proletarian life which is described in the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists—the most authentic novel ever written about British workers—is the same that George Lansbury knew in Poplar. The Mugsborough builders were half-starved, swindled by their employers and by the authorities, the prey of charity-mongers, narks and even their fellow-workers, corrupted and brutalised by the conditions of Edwardian employment."

"I am afraid that this bald summary may create the impression that the book is simply a Socialist tract, a flagrant instance, that is to say, of the appropriation of a specific form of literary activity for the purposes of propaganda. That would be grossly unfair to the author and his work, which is not a treatise, but a pungent, intimate, scaring and profoundly realistic study of the lives, the environment, the opinions and outlook of the working-classes. The book does not step beyond the building trade, of which Tressall obviously possessed a meticulous knowledge, but the portrait of the builders is the portrait in miniature of the English working-classes. And the last thing in the world that Tressall did was to idealise them. The book is in fact a fierce, almost a savage attack upon their apathy, their shoddiness, their servility, their hopeless inadequacy to emancipate themselves from their wretched conditions, their willingness to perpetuate a system which degrades their class as a whole to the level of beasts of burden. And with what extraordinary insight and power of presenting and individualising his characters he does it! He simply lets them speak for themselves, as, at the dinner hour, they discuss politics, unemployment and poverty. There is no extenuation, no compromise, no romancing. These men are not abstractions or personifications of their creator's ideals or antipathies. They are the living human material of to-day, so debased by the squalor, futility, waste and despair of their lives, that they will ridicule any effort to make new and finer ones."

"Tressell's statement in his preface to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists that his book "is not a treatise or essay, but a novel", the main object being "to write a readable story full of human interest and based on the happiness of everyday life", represents nothing less than an aesthetic revolution in the proletarian-revolutionary novel."

"A less sane man would—as many men, indeed, have done—have set out to harass us, and laid the horror and the sentiment on so thick that the reader would have revolted against the misrepresentation of life. Tressall, on the other hand, sticks—as far as his workmen are concerned—to the facts; does not sentimentalise over his characters; and succeeds, consequently, in "getting there." We recommend the book to everyone, and it will do especial good to those who have an inadequate conception of what workmen in general and men in the building trade in particular have to put up with (a) when employed and (b) when unemployed. But it should be avoided by all those innocent journalists who seem to hold that the word Mr. Shaw uses in Pygmalion should be reserved for the private use of themselves and their friends."

"It was at the turn of the century that Robert Tressall, a house-painter, wrote the story of working-class life which he called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Since that time much paint has been spilled and grumbled over. But Tressall's evocation of the talk of a gang of Cockney workers is as intimate, as amusing—and as touching—as it was then. Nor has there been anything else quite like it, though perhaps Mr. Maugham came nearest in some passages of Liza of Lambeth."

"It was a big step forward when the facts of working-class life were first got on to paper. I think it has done something to push fiction back towards realities and away from the over-civilised stuff that Galsworthy and so forth used to write. I think possibly the first book that did this was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, which has always seemed to me a wonderful book, although it is very clumsily written. It recorded things that were everyday experience but which simply had not been noticed before."

"Without sensationalism and almost without plot it sets to record the actual detail of manual work and the tiny things almost unimaginable to any comfortably situated person which make life a misery when one's income drops below a certain level... It is a book that everyone should read. Quite apart from its value as a piece of social history it leaves one with the feeling that a considerable novelist was lost in this young working-man whom society could not bother to keep alive."

"The action takes place during one year in the lives of a group of working men in the town of Mugsborough, and the novel is a bitter but spirited attack on the greed, dishonesty, and gullibility of employers and workers alike, and on the social conditions that gave rise to these vices. Debates on socialism, competition, employment, and capitalism are skilfully interwoven with a realistic and knowledgeable portrayal of skilled and unskilled labour in the decorating and undertaking business, and with the human stories of the families of the workers... the book has become a classic text of the Labour movement. The ironically named "philanthropists" of the title are the workers who for pitiful wages "toil and sweat at their noble and unselfish task of making money" for their employers, while making no effort to understand or better their lot."

"I remember one in particular whose title, because it looked so strange and terrifying, nearly gave me nightmares just to look at it. It was called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's strange that when I did come to read it, much later in life, it knocked me sideways. I've never read a book, before or since, which made such a profound impression on me, and I still think it's one of the greatest books that's ever been written."

"The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a book to be read by any who want an insight into the conditions of working-class life as its average, with its virtues, its vices, its courage, its intolerable piteous anxieties."

"The bitterness of mood in which such a book must have been written by a man who saw so intelligently the stupidities of the life around him and yet was completely unable to find any other milieu, produces fierce touches of satire. But like all good satire, its exaggerations are really searing truths. Neither his irony, nor his bitterness blinded the writer to seeing the world as it really was. That the book is veracious in atmosphere and expression, no one who has seen the deplorable frowziness of English proletarian life, or tasted that peculiar quality which makes British squalor the filthiest in the world, can doubt. This is no book for the squeamish. And yet the coarseness of British working-class life is sketched in broad strokes and outlines, rather than plastered on the canvas in the manner of a Zola; and there is a British silence as to sexuality."

"If the book is not for the squeamish, it is not for the tender-hearted either. From an artistic standpoint or view, the absence of sentimentality is one of the most admirable features, but those who are accustomed to have their literature of poverty and misfortune sugared with pity and sentiment will find this unadorned veracity repulsive. The book must therefore depress and then outrage our comfortable classes. We are not accustomed to see the life of the workingman from his own point of view. Our literature is carefully insulated from the economic interpretation of life, with its sense of the bestial struggle for existence and its slow and interminable fight against filth and disease. It must make our comfortable class uneasy to see the whole remorseless mechanism of shoddy capitalism so unsparingly revealed, and to see men so palpably the victims of economic forces. Even the most woolen-headed of our reactionaries can hardly fail to feel the ironic sting of the phrase, "ragged-trousered philanthropists." Such a story is a scathing critique of the whole of British civilization, and incidentally of our own individualistic and plutocratic democracy. He must indeed be a tough Englishman who can eat a good dinner after finishing it."

"I read Jack London and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Those were the books that formed my political opinions."

"I have been an English artisan, engaged in the building trades, too, and I know that the book does not exaggerate in the least."

"My favourite book, which I buy and give away quite often, is The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, a pseudonym for a fella called Robert Noonan. The book is about the building trade at the turn of the century and is a classic... In this book he tells the story of a group of artisans and their struggle against low wages and appalling working conditions. It is a really vivid portrayal of the contradictions of capitalism. When I was in Leicester prison in 1974 following the builders' strike during which I led the pickets, the governor of the prison, who was once a bricklayer, asked me if I had read it and when I said no, gave it to me. I have always had a copy since."

"Tressell's strength is not in the conscious exposition (its problems of identity and relationship are in fact unresolved). His strength is in the anonymous, collective, popular idiom through which a working world is strongly, closely, ironically seen. What is then interesting is that despite this vigour the final judgment is ironical: the ragged-trousered philanthropists—those who in the end accept exploitation; the inhabitants of Mugsborough. It is a generous irony, from within the working class, and as such humane."

"Those who wish to live in imagination through the daily round of the unorganised worker and the casual labourer, to share its racking anxieties, its bitter humiliations, its joyless excitements, should turn from statistics and sociological generalisations to the poignant self-revelation of one of their own members. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressall, house-painter and sign-writer, is not only a precise and careful record, written with a realism and a firmness of touch that are almost French, of a certain section of working-class life, but it also enables the thinking reader to form some conception of the immense revolution which the war must have caused in thousands of working class minds and households."