Read
Recent Conversations
View allThe Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Tressell
1914
Bread, a pocketknife, and the clearest argument for socialism ever put inside a novel.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Robert Tressell · 1914
Robert Tressell — a house painter writing under a pen name — spent his evenings after a full day's manual labor writing this novel, and died of tuberculosis in 1911 without seeing it published. It follows a year among the painters and decorators of 'Mugsborough,' a thin disguise for Hastings, as Frank Owen tries, chapter after chapter, to convince his co-workers that their poverty is not bad luck but a system — culminating in the famous 'Great Money Trick,' a demonstration performed with bread and pocketknives that remains one of the clearest lay explanations of surplus value ever written into fiction. George Orwell called it one of the few 'proletarian novels' in English that actually rings true, and it has shaped British labor politics for over a century since.
55 chapters · 249,766 words · ~18.9 hr read
Contents
Front Matter
Tressell's own preface, explaining his intention to write a 'faithful picture' of working-class life and to make the case for Socialism inside a readable story.
The Cave
The workmen of Rushton & Co. at their trade — poverty, petty tyranny, and the first attempts by Owen to explain to his skeptical mates why they stay poor.
The Great Money Trick
Council corruption, the Rev. John Starr's charity, and Owen's bread-and-pocketknife demonstration of how wages and profit really work.
Winter of Want
Christmas approaches with work drying up — unemployment, hunger, and the 'Brigands' allegory of a doomed political raiding party.
A Brief Summer
The 'Beano' outing and a municipal election offer fleeting relief, even as illness and hardship keep closing in on the Rushton & Co. men.
The End
Barrington's choice and Owen's fate close out the year among the philanthropists of Mugsborough.