Those who worked were looked upon with contempt, and subjected to every possible indignity. Nearly everything they produced was taken away from them and enjoyed by the people who did nothing. And then the workers bowed down and grovelled before those who had robbed them of the fruits of their labour and were childishly grateful to them for leaving anything at all." Unfortunately, not everyone wanted to be saved. Kathleen Noonan once recalled her father's fury at his colleagues' failure to understand their socialist calling. "He would get exasperated when he could make no impression on the workmen when trying to get them to better their conditions. He would say they deserved to suffer." That cold anger towards a working class refusing to appreciate its revolutionary duty suffuses the novel. Owen even says of his fellow workmen: "They were the enemy. Those who not only quietly submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to alter it." Indeed, Owen the elevated intellectual displays more hostility to his myopic comrades ("He hated and despised them...") than to the exploitative boss class. Of course, the real reason for the difficulty is that the raw materials that were created for the use and benefit of all have been stolen by a small number, who refuse to allow them to be used for the purposes for which they were intended. This numerically insignificant minority refuse to allow the majority to work and produce the things they need; and what work they do graciously permit to be done is not done with the object of producing the necessaries of life for those who work, but for the purpose of creating profit for their masters.

THEY WERE THE REAL OPPRESSORS--the men who spoke of themselves as 'The likes of us,' who, having lived in poverty and degradation all their lives considered that what had been good enough for them was good enough for the children they had been the cause of bringing into existence." A 6 x 60-minute radio adaptation was transmitted as a "Classic Serial" on BBC Radio 4 in 1989. It starred Sean Barrett, Brian Glover and Peter Vaughan. It was produced by Michael Bakewell and dramatised by Gregory Evans. Like many a Marxist scholar, Noonan blamed working-class lethargy on the effects of popular culture. The depoliticised world of the pub, organised sport and the yellow press was surreptitiously deadening class loyalties. And so the only real way to achieve political progress was for a properly educated, implicitly middle-class elite - led by the likes of Owen and his wealthy, articulate co-revolutionary Barrington - to drag the blighted working class towards the socialist future. This was the uncomfortable political reality behind Noonan's "working-class classic".Don't be put of by the density and length, it really works in creating a convincing atmosphere of the times and allows room for a rather surprising ending. That’s not my business,’ replied the kind-hearted capitalist. ‘I’ve paid you your wages, and provided you with Plenty of Work for a long time past. I have no more work for you to do at present. Come round again in a few months’ time and I’ll see what I can do for you.’ The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is based on his own experiences of poverty and his terror that he and his daughter whom he was raising alone, would be consigned to the workhouse if he became ill- which he did, Tressel wrote a detailed and scathing analysis of the relationship between working-class people and their employers. The "philanthropists" of the title are the workers who, in his view, acquiesce in their own exploitation in the interests of their bosses. That's for sure, you will know that just by reading the preface: His workmates in Johannesburg remembered Tressell as a ‘wild Irishman’. This is where we get the first sense of his involvement in politics — not in socialism, as such, but Irish republicanism. He is said to have regularly worn the green sash of the United Irishmen, and served on the committee of the Transvaal ’98 Centenary Association which marked the anniversary of their uprising. His membership card — signed ‘RP Noonan’ and bearing the slogan ‘Live Ireland, Perish Tyranny’ — survives in the archives of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in London. It is very funny book, very sad book and very Union book. The sadness part of this book is that it was published in April 1914 to show paint trade was been treat and by end of year it didn't matter because WWI started and the paint was drying in the poppy fields in blood.

Noonan's socialism overshadowed his painting skills and he was progressively impoverished as employers punished his political activism. During the early 1900s depression, the tuberculosis-ridden Noonan and his daughter Kathleen were reduced to living hand to mouth from casual labour. And it was these miserable, grinding days which provided the material for his novel written over 1908-09 in the hope of escaping Hastings. He chose the pseudonym "Tressell" in honour of his sign-writing trade.

This is an ideological book, and it is a work of fiction. Part of me believes that fiction and ideology make bad bedfellows. Part of the reason for that is that fiction nearly always allows (and frequently implies) an ironic reading, and ideology doesn’t really expect that and so is undermined by not seeing the possible ironic reading. But this book is perhaps a little too didactic to allow an ironic reading.