Title: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Author: Tressell, Robert
Published by: Oxford University Press
Year: 2008
Date reviewed: 06.15
ISBN: 978-0-19-953747-1

What can I say about this seminal book that hasn’t already been said? It’s one of the founding texts of socialism, describing the plight of the working classes in the early 20th century when having a job meant you could just about exist at subsistence level, and any misfortune meant starvation and the workhouse. Seen through the eyes of a motley group of painters and decorators the workings of capitalism are picked apart and laid bare, set in the context of a small town complete with its exploitative and corrupt councillors, merchants and businessmen.

This recent OUP edition has a comprehensive introduction setting out the complex history of the book through its various incarnations which helps understand the disjunctions in the narrative. The whole has many faults and cannot be described as an accomplished literary work, but that’s hardly the point.

If you want to understand the roots of the modern financial system and how and why wealth concentrates in the hands of the wealthy, forget the dry economics textbooks and read this book and the novel Stone’s Fall. They tell you all you need to know.