Published in 1914 and unpublished in our country, The Philanthropists in Rags is an explicitly political novel, considered a classic of working-class literature of all time. It offers a global view of England's social, political, economic and cultural life at a time when socialism was beginning to gain ground. George Orwell praised his ability to seamlessly convey the real detail of manual work. He considered it a work that everyone should read, a piece of 20th-century social history.
Clearly frustrated by his contemporaries' refusal to recognize the injustice and inequity of society, Tressell elaborates a whole mosaic of hypocritical Christians, capitalist exploiters and corrupt councillors who provide a backdrop for their main goal: to showcase the lives of workers, who he considers "philanthropists," who are rushing to work with poverty wages in order to generate benefits fo...read more
