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The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists: Tressell’s timelessness by Jonathan Edwards
On the 100th anniversary of its publication The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists still remains an essential read for progressives everywhere, writes JONATHAN EDWARDS

This is a year of centenaries. The birth of Dylan Thomas. The start of the Great War. But among 2014 milestones, there’s one anniversary which is going, it seems to me, under-celebrated. 

It’s a hundred years this year since the first publication of Robert Tressell’s big, important, rambunctious and utterly brilliant novel, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.

The novel is about the lives of a group of Edwardian house painters — their work, their leisure, their children, their deaths. Most importantly, their struggle against profit-seeking bosses who consider them only in terms of how much they can be exploited. 

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