George Orwell on Robert Tressell
← Back to George Orwell ProfileIn a 1946 review, George Orwell praises *The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists* for its unsentimental depiction of working-class hardship and laments the societal loss of a promising novelist.
“Without sensationalism and almost without plot it sets to record the actual detail of manual work and the tiny things almost unimaginable to any comfortably situated person which make life a misery when one's income drops below a certain level... It is a book that everyone should read. Quite apart from its value as a piece of social history it leaves one with the feeling that a considerable novelist was lost in this young working-man whom society could not bother to keep alive”
Writing in 1940, George Orwell champions the importance of working-class narratives in literature, praising *The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists* for its groundbreaking portrayal of overlooked realities.
“It was a big step forward when the facts of working-class life were first got on to paper. I think it has done something to push fiction back towards realities and away from the over-civilised stuff that Galsworthy and so forth used to write. I think possibly the first book that did this was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, which has always seemed to me a wonderful book, although it is very clumsily written. It recorded things that were everyday experience but which simply had not been noticed before.”