Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Although the complete, unexpurgated version wasn’t published until 1955, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist made an impression when it first surfaced in 1914, influencing George Orwell and others. Scarlett and Sophie Rickard distilled and transformed this work by Anglo-Irish socialist Robert Tressell into a graphic novel. Retaining the Edwardian setting, they render characters with Dickensian names (Slyme, Grindes, Didlum) into believable images in a story of hard-pressed working poor, distracted by true crime accounts and complaining of job-stealing immigrants. Their source of misinformation is a publication called The Obscurer. Will the workers wise up and break their chains? Does any of this sound familiar?
