'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' is a semi-autobiographical novel by Irish house painter and sign writer Robert Noonan, who wrote the book in his spare time under the pen name Robert Tressell. It is considered to be the first important working-class novel in English literature.
Published in 1914 after Tressell's death from tuberculosis in 1911, the novel follows a socialist house painter, Frank Owen's efforts to find work in the fictional English town of Mugsborough (based on the coastal town of Hastings) to stave off the workhouse for himself, his wife and his son.
Owen gives lectures to his fellow workers about poverty, socialism and capitalism, the most memorable one being where he explains that “Money is the real cause of poverty”. To prove this, he shows them “how the Great Money Trick is worked”.
The original title page of the 1914 version carried the subtitle: "Being the story of twelve months in Hell, told by one of the damned, and written down by Robert Tressell."
Tressell states in the preface, “There are no scenes or incidents in the story that I have not either witnessed myself or had conclusive evidence of.”
The initial 1914 version was heavily edited and abridged and was reprinted often, with the full version only finally published in 1955.
