He hated and despised them because they calmly saw their children condemned to hard labour and poverty for life, and deliberately refused to make any effort to secure for them better conditions than those they had themselves." A 6 x 60-minute radio adaptation was transmitted as a "Classic Serial" on BBC Radio 4 in 1989. It starred Sean Barrett, Brian Glover and Peter Vaughan. It was produced by Michael Bakewell and dramatised by Gregory Evans. 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. 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).

Illustrated The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Calton

Most of these people!' cried Owen, his usually pale face flushing red and his eyes shining with sudden anger, 'most of these people do not deserve to be called human beings at all! They're devils! They know that whilst they are indulging in pleasures of every kind--all around them men and women and little children are existing in want or dying of hunger!" I first came across this while reading the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole - a "sacred text" of mine when I was about 12. Adrian, wanting to be an intellectual, had got hold of the book but - I think - wasn´t sure he wanted to read a book about badly dressed stamp collectors. Now this book itself has become something of a sacred text to a lot of people and - finally getting around to reading it at 44 years young - I can see why. Tressell create 's a book that isn't as popular today because it has been forgotten about and is not on the school corclica or I never hear of it been televised which I can't see it been popular. An adaptation was made by Above the Title Productions for BBC radio in 2008, produced by Rebecca Pinfield and Johnny Vegas, and directed by Dirk Maggs. Three 60-minute episodes were broadcast as the Classic Serial on Radio 4. Actors included Andrew Lincoln (Owen), Johnny Vegas (Easton), Timothy Spall (Crass), Paul Whitehouse (Old Misery), John Prescott (Policeman), Bill Bailey (Rushton), Kevin Eldon (Slyme), and Tony Haygarth (Philpot). This adaptation was nominated for a Sony Radio Drama Award in 2009. [14] I’ve certainly read my fair share of gritty and depressing literature in my time, yet I found myself quite unprepared for the bleak and desolate nature of Robert Tresswell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – number 72 in the BBC’s Big Read.

The book provides a comprehensive picture of social, political, economic and cultural life in Britain at a time when socialism was beginning to gain ground. It was around that time that the Labour Party was founded and began to win seats in the House of Commons. The workers at Rushton & Co were typical of the firms employing labour at that time. Rushton was the boss, whilst Hunter (also known as Nimrod or Misery) was the foreman, but both these men put the fear of God into the workers, because the actual fact of being watched or the fear of being watched loomed large. Within the group were the painters, decorators, boy apprentices, as well as people like Owen who could turn his hand to more intricate drawing and painting. Their wives and children shared their misery, with women doing sewing, cleaning or washing whilst their betters were seen in carriages and big hats. The novel exposed the raw competition, not just between the different building companies or the classes, but also between workers at every level with the employers always trying to cut the cost of the job by taking the wages down from seven pence an hour to five pence halfpenny, with everybody pitched against each other. Even families wouldn’t help in the support of their mother and father who lived with their daughter-in-law. Confront the spectre of failure, the wraith of social media, and other supernatural enemies of the author Writing in the Manchester Evening News in April 1946 George Orwell praised the book's ability to convey "[w]ithout sensationalism and almost without plot... 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". He considered it "a book that everyone should read" and a piece of social history that left one "with the feeling that a considerable novelist was lost in this young working-man whom society could not bother to keep alive". [4]

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists - Wikipedia

With ingenuity, and in the mode of tragedy, we are shown in a hundred different and nasty ways, how man abuses his fellow man. Thankfully we are also shown how alternatives to this dystopia might be possible. 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. Your question has really nothing to do with the subject we are discussing: we are only trying to find out why the majority of people have to go short of the benefits of civilization. One of the causes is--the majority of the population are engaged in work that does not produce those things; and most of what IS produced is appropriated and wasted by those who have no right to it." 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 today, 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. [11] Critical reception [ edit ]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. According to George Orwell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a book everyone should read. It is often named by people on the left as the book which has had the greatest influence on their politics.