"The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists" by Robert Tressell

 Set in 'Mugsborough' between 1908 (the author died in 1911; the book mentions a polyphone which was a sort of multiple disc music box which was first distributed in England in 1908) and the First World War, this book chronicles the lives of a group of working men - mostly decorators - as they renovate a house for a local building firm. They are lucky to get the job: many other skilled workmen are unemployed. They work for starvation wages, are immediately dismissed if caught slacking, and are made redundant at the drop of a hat as soon as the contract is finished. With no social security system and no real possibility of saving money when they are employed, they then have to pawn or sell their possessions and exist of tea and bread and margarine. Meanwhile their employers make fat profits, steal from their clients (in part by condoning shoddy workmanship which is deliberately below the priced specifications; in part by removing possessions from the renovated houses) and corruptly conspire to use their places on the local council to benefit themselves.

It's more of a parable than a novel. One of the workmen gives lectures on Socialism (this is pre-Russian revolution) in the lunch breaks and the arguments are quite simplistic (the Money Trick is the Marxist theory of surplus value, the idea that the workmen add value to a product which is greater than the money paid to them by the boss and that this extra value which by rights belongs to them is 'stolen' by the boss). In addition, the criminal schemes of the bosses (who have names such as Starvem and Grinder) are rather transparent and the scenes in church (where the rich are portrayed as hypocrites who have perverted the message of Christ) are caricatures rather than at all realistic. This is less a novel than a tract, preaching it message of socialism.

Selected quotes:

• "People who enjoyed abundance of the things that are made by work, were the people who did Nothing" (Ch 1)
• "Some of you seem to think ... that it was a great mistake on God's part to make so many foreigners." (Ch 1)
• "What is the cause of the life-long poverty of the majority of those who are not drunkards and who do work?" (Ch 1) I enjoyed this point: even today many people suggest that the poor are poor because they are lazy or shiftless and while this may be true for some, there are a huge number who are poor despite working all hours and doing all the things that they 'should' while many of the rich drink vast amounts of alcohol.
• "We do our full share of the work, therefore we should have a full share of the things that are made by work." (Ch 1)
• "All his life it had been the same: incessant work under similar more or less humiliating conditions, and with no more result than being just able to avoid starvation." (Ch 2)
• "Those who worked were looked upon with contempt, and subjected to every possible indignity." (Ch 2)
• "It's not possible for anyone to become rich without cheating other people." (Ch 6)
• "This is an even more unusually dull and uninteresting chapter." (Ch 20)
• "The doctors at the Hospital  made a practice of using the free patients to make experiments upon." (Ch 22)
• "Suppose there was some kind of a God? If there were, it wasn't unreasonable to think that the Being who was capable of creating such a world as this and who seemed so callously indifferent to the unhappiness of His creatures, would also be capable of desiring and creating the other Hell that most people believed in." (Ch 23)
• "The workman scores over both the horse and the slave, inasmuch as he enjoys the priceless blessing of Freedom. If he does not like the hirer's conditions he need not to accept them. He can refuse to work, and he can go and starve. ... He has the right to choose freely which he will do - Submit or Starve." (Ch 25)
• "The producing class ... are supposed to be paid for their work. Their wages are supposed to be equal in value to their work. But it's not so. If it were, by spending all their wages, the producing class would be able to buy back All they had produced." (Ch 25)
• "Thousands of people lacked the necessaries of life. The necessaries of life are all produced by work. The people who lacked begged to be allowed to work and create those things of which they stood in need. But the System prevented them from so doing." (Ch 40)
• "A place that is not fit for the presence of a woman or a child is not fit to exist at all." (Ch 43)
• "They talked vaguely about Re-Afforestation, and Reclaiming of Foreshores, and Sea Walls; but of course there was the question of Cost! that was a difficulty." (Ch 45)
• "It will be necessary to reduce the hours of our workers to four or five hours a day." (Ch 45)

It's rather simplistic but it has some good storylines. It's not as brilliantly written as Hard Times by Charles Dickens, nor as vivid as Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood. The best book in this genre is the non-fiction Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell. And it is immensely long. But nevertheless, I enjoyed it. 

October 2022; 742 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God