Review of "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: A Graphic Novel by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard"

I tried to read the actual book by Robert Tressell a few times, but never got very far. It seemed dauntingly long (though I usually don't mind long books) and a bit dull. So Scarlett and Sophie Rickard have done me a great service. The book is beautiful, and they've brought it to life in a way that (I think) keeps the feel of the original but makes it much more digestible.

That said, I still didn't really enjoy it. Much of the detail about grinding poverty in the Edwardian era seems all too contemporary, with working poor having to decide how to pay their rent to private landlords, while keeping enough back to both heat and eat. I'm sure there must have been times when the book just felt like a period piece, but it doesn't now.

I didn't enjoy the politics all that much. I don't Tresell was ever a Marxist really, and his cod version of the Labour Theory of Value doesn't feel very convincing. It's even less so given that the workers in the book are all painters and decorators, so they really don't fit with the narrative of surplus value that it tries to illustrate. When the book's socialist intellectual tells the workers that they ought to stop voting for Liberals or Tories, and instead "elect revolutionary socialists to the House of Commons" I couldn't help wishing that he'd actually spent a bit more time learning socialist theory.

The old socialist who tells the hero that he's given up, and the toiling masses deserve what's coming to them because they are so stupid...? Hard not to give in to that, particularly in the week of King Charles III's coronation.

And the fairy-tale ending in which one of the painters, George Barrington, turns out to be a socialist rich man temporarily playing at poverty so that he can develop his socialist understanding, and then gives out some big presents for Xmas before he leaves? Well, finger heading for throat.

I read the Wikipedia article about Tressell afterwards, and he's quite a nuanced character, with a bit of a background in the SDF who apparently never joined a union, and may have supported segregated labour markets in South Africa (like much of the rest of the white labour movement there).