The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a book about work and the meaning of life. It is full of metaphor and allegory, and no image demonstrates Tressell’s feelings about the meaning of work more completely than the drawing room at Mr Sweater’s house, which Owen decorates...
Chapter 9 opens with the men bewailing the shoddy, rushed quality of the work they have been forced to do on the house, which is nearly finished. They yearn to work more thoroughly and slowly, both to stave off redundancy and also to allow them...
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a story about a whole community of working class people, not only the waged men. We have written before about the women in the book, and today we’d like to introduce you to the children. Kids suffer the injustices of...
Owen’s practical demonstration of Marx’s theory of surplus economics is possibly the most famous scene in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It is a powerful moment, told with great humour. It laid bare the ‘trick’ that the capitalist class uses to extort labour from the working...
Mr Sweater, the Mayor The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a realistic novel, but at the same time it is an allegory or mythical representation of a wider problem. The town of Mugsborough represents the whole of capitalist democratic society, just as Manor Farm can represent the...
Rev Belcher of the Shining Light This pair of chapters has a focus on the role of religion and the organised church in the life of the working classes. Chapter 6 opens with a wide ranging lunchtime debate in which all the men air their views...
Bert with his heavy cart ‘The Ever Present Danger’ is both the prospect of being laid off and of dying of poverty. The families in our story live hand-to-mouth and can't afford any interruption in their meagre income. Seeing them at work gives us the opportunity...
Pie Shop in the Rain I love Autumn. There is nothing better than feeling cosy at home with a bit of wind and rain buffeting about outside, with the promise of new pencil cases and Cash’s name tapes spread across the kitchen table. Elsie Linden fetching soup This...
While fans of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists tend to enthuse about the political speeches and the workplace scenes, the domestic lives of the working people are an important and powerful part of the story. The next two chapters of our adaptation introduce the reader to...
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell is rightly known as a working class classic. But too often it is described as the story of the political awakening of a group of working men. The most famous passages of the book are the political ‘lectures’...