The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

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A very beautiful, engaging and easy to read graphic novel. It also gives a nicely accessible bit of social history and a clear illustration (literally :) ) of some key principles of socialist thought. Really a great introduction to the basics if you don't have time to read Capital, or even the original Tressell novel. One character asks 'Why are we poor?' and another character explains it - educational! (Spoiler alert: because of capitalism). A searing insider's account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament from Rory Stewart, former Cabinet minister and co-presenter of breakout hit podcast The Rest Is Politics Over-population!' cried Owen, 'when there's thousands of acres of uncultivated land in England without a house or human being to be seen. Is over-population the cause of poverty in France? Is over-population the cause of poverty in Ireland? Within the last fifty years the population of Ireland has been reduced by more than half. Four millions of people have been exterminated by famine or got rid of by emigration, but they haven't got rid of poverty. P'raps you think that half the people in this country ought to be exterminated as well."

Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Review: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert

This book, as well as being a socialist's bible, is a gripping commentary on the social conditions of the time...a detailed and scathing Marxist analysis of the relationship between the working class people and their employers. The "philanthropists" of the title are the workers who, in Noonan 's view, acquiesce in their own exploitation in the interests of their bosses. Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.K. Pound Amount, 1270 to present". MeasuringWorth, 2022. 14 December 2022 . Retrieved 14 December 2022. Confront the spectre of failure, the wraith of social media, and other supernatural enemies of the author William Morris said that we should have nothing in our homes that is not either useful or beautiful. As this book is both beautiful and useful, I’d suggest that every home should have one. And not just every home, but every school, college and prison library. To this end, the #RaggedEducation project allows readers to donate a copy and make the book available in all these places. Helping young people to think about the economic system which now blights our world, and which may be having a very negative impact on their own wellbeing and life chances, seems to be a very worthwhile thing to do.Robert Tressell was the pen name of Robert Noonan, a house painter. The illegitimate son of Mary Ann Noonan and Samuel Croker (a retired magistrate), he was born in Dublin in 1870 and settled in England in 1901 after a short spell living and working in South Africa. [5] He chose the pen name Tressell in reference to the trestle table, an important part of his kit as a painter and decorator. [6] Inspiring hope for the future but so depressing that so many working class people remain so ignorant.

SelfMadeHero | The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

An explicitly political work, the novel is widely regarded as a classic of working-class literature. My father was a house painter – and this is set amongst a group of house painters. I worked with my father for a couple of years while I was finishing my first degree. I’ve never really had a head for heights, and so that made a lot of the job an exercise in terror for me. But one of the things that painting does, that most of the other jobs I’ve done since don’t do, is it allows you to see a job finished. So much work today is task based and all part of an extreme division of labour, such that nothing one does ever really feels like it was you that did it. Painting isn’t like that. Although, oddly enough, it is here in this book, because of the forced cutting of corners the bosses require.

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Thorpe, Vanessa (2 May 2009). "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists leads surge in popularity for leftwing books". The Guardian. Set in the still shabby seaside town of Hastings, and dealing with a bunch of painters and decorators trying to earn a living working for a penny-pinching firm, it reads like the bastard son of Hard Times. There are some great character names of the Bodgit and Scarper type, while most of the characters labour under a pernicious philosophy that keeps people down. The use of pieces of bread to demonstrate why the hero's co-workers are, and will remain, the eponymous ragged trousered philanthropists is alone worth the cover price of the book so you are really in for a bargain if you've borrowed this from your library instead.

Rickard Sisters – Rickard Sisters

The sisters have distilled the story and the arguments of the original book into an enjoyable, entertaining and thoroughly readable format. The characters are sensitively drawn, with a mix of vulnerability and nobility which makes their situations even more poignant. The book is a real work of art, and the illustrations vividly convey the society, the period and the community in which the story is set. Perhaps that is the book's secret strength. It is not a picture of extreme hardship but it's working class characters are boxed in a trap from which there will only be one escape (or two if you include socialism so only one escape then - one involving a wooden box just to be clear). A stage adaptation, written by Howard Brenton and directed by Christopher Morahan, opened at the Liverpool Everyman on 17 June 2010 and subsequently transferred to co-producer the Minerva Theatre in Chichester on 15 July. Anyway, you get the idea, his views on Christians are, if anything, worse. I could list those but the more I think about these things the more tired I get of thinking of these things. I will say though if the workers, bosses, and Christians really acted in Tressill's time the way they do in the book, no wonder he wrote Owen the way he did. When Owen wasn't giving us another one of his speeches I could have liked the book. There were many interesting characters, and most of them had interesting names such as Mr. Grinder, the green grocer; Mr. Sweater the draper; Mrs. Starvem, Mr. Hunter, Mr. Belcher, Rev. Bosher, and Mr. Rushton who owns both Rushton & Co., Builders and Decorators, and the funeral parlor. Which got me wondering what building and funerals could have in common, and that got me thinking of my childhood when there were three funeral homes in the valley that were also furniture stores. I think they've all dropped the furniture by now, but what was the link I wonder, in the first place? Anyway, some of the workers are, Slyme, Joe Philpot, who indulges freely, and Crass; then there's the Besotted Wretch and the Semi-drunk, if they had other names I never saw it. Graphic Policy believes in journalistic integrity and transparency. We will disclose when a product has been given for free for review and/or when no cost has been incurred to the staff so that you may be able to make a fully informed decision as to the opinions provided.And what is particularly interesting about this book is that all of the excuses and explanations and victimisations and lies that were told then to justify why we have poverty and unemployment and hardship are exactly the same ones that are used today. For this alone, it is worth reading this book. Set in Yorkshire in the late 1980s, The Way the Day Breaks is a novel about family, love and mental illness. The drawings are beautifully clean (almost 'clair ligne' like Tintin, the choice of using banners for chapter headings was inspired, and each character easy to distinguish. Set in the fictitious town of Mugsborough, based on Hastings, where Tressell lived and worked as a sign writer and decorator. Hastings is also our adoptive hometown on the south coast in East Sussex, England. Sadly, our copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists disappeared in our moves between Hastings and the USA.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

The remedy was so simple, the evil so great and so glaringly evident that the only possible explanation of its continued existence was that the majority of his fellow workers were devoid of the power of reasoning. If these people were not mentally deficient they would of their own accord have swept this silly system away long ago. It would not have been necessary for anyone to teach them that it was wrong." In 1979 Jonah Raskin described The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists as "a classic of modern British literature, that ought to rank with the work of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, and yet is largely unknown... Tressell's bitterness and anger are mixed with compassion, sympathy and a sharp sense of humour." [12] According to David Harker, by 2003 the book had sold over a million copies, and had been printed five times in Germany, four in Russia, three in the United States, and two in Australia and Canada; it had also been published in Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch and Japanese. [3] Adaptations [ edit ] A colorful adaptation of a book I probably would never have read otherwise. Don't know how well its polemic force compares to the novel, but neither the story nor the characters were very interesting, and it made for unconvincing proselytizing. The Man Who Laughs – Hugo’s Novel Brought to Macabre Life by Gosh! Comics/Broken Frontier Drink and Draw Guest Creators Hine and Stafford 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."A Very British Coup – the book can be seen being read by the former girlfriend of the British Prime Minister Charmingly Creepy Overlapping Worlds Slip Off Rachael Ball’s Pencil into Your Hands in the Form of Childhood Grief Fable ‘Wolf’– We Talk to Her about Her New Graphic Novel from SelfMadeHero One of the characters, Frank Owen, is a socialist who tries to convince his fellow workers that capitalism is the real source of the poverty he sees all around him, but 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.