"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."