Getting Graphic with The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a hugely influential book in British political life, and its impact has reached well beyond those shores. It documents the poverty of a group of painter-decorators working on a house in the fictional town of Mugsborough. Set in the early twentieth century, its author Robert Tressell drew extensively from personal experience as a struggling signwriter and decorator in the English seaside town of Hastings.