The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in The Morning Star

Graphic novels are a uniquely successful medium for partnerships between writers and artists. Why do you think this is?

SOPHIE RICKARD (SO): It’s fun making things together! Some people are good at drawing, at writing, so combining them is where the magic can happen. We share the workload and the process can be more fruitful as we exchange ideas and respond to one another’s input.

SCARLETT RICKARD (SC): It’s fun to be in a team. I’d send a finished page to Sophie and we’d have a chat and a laugh about it and discuss what to change or improve. If we were doing all that on our own it wouldn’t be as fun.

Which one of you picked Robert Tressell’s novel and why?

SC: It was me. When I read it, I was struck by how much description there is in the book — you could draw all that stuff and make it half the length.

A few years later, during the surge in socialism in the Labour Party, the book kept getting mentioned so I suggested it as a potential project. I can’t quite believe we did it now, it was so ridiculously ambitious.

SO: I could see how Scarlett knew it would make a good graphic novel. By using sequential art to tell the story we’ve been able to bring the detail to life and retain the essential character of the book.

What aspect of the novel appeals to you most?

SO: I love long tragic books and Tressell has this clever technique of explaining some aspect of political theory in a scene where the men discuss it, then showing you the reality of that same idea and the effect it has on the lives of the characters.

He depicts the whole life of a working family – not just men at work but women trying to make ends meet and children growing up in trying circumstances.

SC: I really enjoy drawing real lives — kitchen-sink drama — and it’s great to be able to immerse yourself in every aspect of their daily existence. The book’s hugely influential to thousands of people — it’s never been out of print since 1914 — and we’re really keen to bring it to a new audience.

I was aware that it had the potential to appeal to people who aren’t habitual graphic-novel readers, and felt it was important for the art to be as immersive as possible and not to distract from the storytelling too much.

You live 300 miles apart. How do you arrive at decisions?

SC: We talk pretty much every day. As sisters, we’re very close and rarely disagree and we very rarely do things without consultation. We’re all about collective responsibility, it’s a co-operative.

SO: We work closely together on each aspect of the creative process and it’s easy to defer to each other when a task is clearly in the writing or drawing department. We made a storyboard together, and more editing went on, even after Scarlett had drawn the pages.

Sophie, how difficult was the scriptwriting, given that the narrative is just speech throughout with no descriptive scene-setting?

SO: If you’re using the medium to its full potential, you shouldn’t need to resort to “voice-over” text. The pictures should tell you everything you need to know, so you won’t find “Meanwhile…” or “A week later…” in our work. It’s quite like writing for the telly — you can respect the reader enough to do some of the work themselves.

The dialogue was a separate challenge. It was important to retain the mood and tone of Tressell’s working-class voices but some of his depictions of regional accents are patronising and hard to understand. Some text is very close to the original and some has been made clearer for the modern reader.

Scarlett, your use of light in night-time scenes is breath-taking, and the composition, what you include in each panel and characterisation are exceptional. Was it hard to achieve?

SC: In 1910, you have to consider where the light’s coming from – you can’t just switch it on. You have to think about the characters – how well off are they? Are they candle-burners, or oil-lamp owners, or do they have an account with the Mugsborough Gas Company? Lighting can really affect the mood of a scene, so it’s about storytelling really.

I always wanted to be that person on Coronation Street who decides what ornaments Deirdre Barlow has on her shelves but this is loads more fun — you can have anything you want, as long as you can imagine it, without breaking the budget.

Making comic art is very like making film but we’re the directors, the casting agents, the props department, the actors. We deal with the costume, the camera angles and the locations.

Different angles really help to break things up and change the atmosphere for the reader — as do the panels you use. You can slow them down or speed them up, and change the level of peril! Body language is one of the things I love most — drawing people’s reactions to one another really helps to tell a story.

Who do you see reading this book today?

SO: Everyone. There’s such an appetite among the groundswell of young socialists, as well as people who swear The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists changed their life 50 years ago.

One clear benefit of the graphic novel is how it makes the story accessible to a new audience, including teenagers, people with dyslexia and ADHD, those who speak English as an additional language and people who might be put off by 250,000 dusty old Edwardian words.

Do you think the digital format could be made available to schools on subscription, given that most children do read online and might do so even more, given Covid-19 social restrictions?

SO: Reading the book digitally is a different experience to reading it in print. They’re both just as valid and different formats suit different people.

We agree that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists should be available in schools and prisons and we’re contemplating a scheme where people could “donate” a copy to a sixth-form, college or prison library to help put the book into the hands of the people who might need it most.

If that’s something The Morning Star would like to get involved in, we’d love to work together on it.

What’s next on the agenda?

SC: We’ve always got several books on the boil. We’ve started working on an adaptation of No Surrender by Constance Maud about the women’s suffrage movement.

It’s another book with heightened modern relevance and we think it’ll be a great companion to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.