TRESSELL, Robert. [pseud. Robert Noonan] The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

TRESSELL, Robert. [pseud. Robert Noonan] The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. London: Grant Richards Ltd.1914.

8vo. Original blue cloth, upper board and spine lettered in gilt, pp [iv], 391; spine ends chipped with loss to head, small marginal wormhole to first 23 ff. a little browning to endpapers, otherwise very good.

First edition of this groundbreaking, semi-autobiographical novel by the Irish socialist writer Robert Croker (later Noonan), following the fortunes of the working class in Hastings, notable for its introduction of the working-class voice into mainstream British fiction.

The work had a difficult gestation. The manuscript, originally entitled 'The Ragged Arsed Philanthropists', was rejected by three publishers. After his death in 1911, his daughter kept it in a metal box beneath her bed until her friend, the writer, Jessie Pope, recommended it to her publisher. It was finally published in 1914 under the name Robert Tressall; the surname would not be rendered as Tressell until the full manuscript was published in 1955.

The author adopted the pseudonym ‘Tressell’ partly to protect his identity, fearful that the novel’s socialist politics would get him blacklisted from his day job as a painter and decorator, and partly as a play on 'trestle', a symbol of his trade. The character of Frank Owen, a socialist decorator who attempts to persuade his fellow workers that capitalism is the root cause of their poverty, and their lack of education prevents them from overcoming it, serves as a thinly veiled self-portrait of Robert Noonan.

A seminal novel of the British socialist movement. George Orwell described it as a ‘book that everyone should read’, praising its unsensationalist depiction ‘of 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’ (Manchester Evening News, April 1946).

SKU: 2122765