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The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
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Eve Nichol Blog
Eve Nichol - 8th October 2011
Robert Tressell's classic novel of Socialism in times of poverty and exploitation in Edwardian England was first adapted for the stage by writer Stephen Lowe back in the late 1970s. The enduring appeal of the story of a band of painters and labourers eking out a living - or not - under the oppressive rule of the greedy bosses Messers Sweater, Grinder and Hunter, meant that the 5-night run by Townsend Productions (and again penned by Lowe) at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre was sold out.
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Morning Star Online
Dan Glazebrook - 13th February 2012
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is the classic novel of English working-class life, based on Robert Tressell's experience as a painter and decorator in Edwardian Hastings. Now legendary, and deemed by some to have been responsible for Labour's 1945 election victory as soldiers and sailors eagerly absorbed its socialist message, the novel has seen a number of adaptations for the stage.
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Remotegoat
Arthur Duncan - 7th October 2011
Perhaps Tressell's story was the first novel to depart from bourgois representations of "real life" as offered to middle-class readers in the Edwardian belle epoch of a hundred years ago. It certainly complimented the plays of G. B. Shaw that so delighted the free-thinking intelligentsia of that era by humorously 'cocking snooks' at the establishment and self-styled 'superior persons.'
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Source Unknown
Marinanne Gunn - 7th October 2011
IT is 100 years since his death and Robert Tressell’s co-operative socialist tract is still scarily relevant and lyrically resonant for the working man and woman. As a signwriter and house painter himself, Tressell was all too well aware of the plight of rising unemployment in times of economic depression.