One of the great
authors of the turn of the
19th/
20th Centuries, Robert Tressell tends to get
overlooked
compared to many of his better-known
contemporaries, and to
this day is pretty much unknown outside
Britain.
He was born in Dublin in 1870 into a comfortable middle-class family: his
father was an inspector with the Royal Irish Constabulary. His father died while
he was still a young child which seriously disrupted his life and meant that
he never completed his education. In his early 20s he moved to South Africa
and became involved with the Irish Brigade, a militant anti-British group of
Irish who fought on the side of the Boers. Many members of the Irish Brigade
later returned to Ireland and were involved with demands for
independence and the 1916 uprising, and this is probably where Tressell
first came into contact with organised left-wing and revolutionary ideas.
in 1901 Tressell returned to the UK, settling in Hastings on the English
south coast. After having used up his remaining finances he took a job as an
interior decorator -- at that time a highly-skilled and comparatively
well-paid job. This however brought him into direct contact with less skilled
workers and general labourers, and finding himself utterly shocked at the
appalling conditions in which many of them spent their entire lives, he formed
many of the opinions and ideas which he would later employ in his novel
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
His left-wing ideals and beliefs solidifed during this period, and he was a founding
member of the Hastings branch of the newly-formed Social Democratic Federaion,
a group allied to the also-recently-born Labour Party. The rise of socialist ideas
in Britain in this period meant that a strong and vehement anti-socialist
current was pushed forward by both the local and national press, and Tressell
often found himself on the receiving end of the police violently breaking up
meetings.
Tressell's health started to worsen in 1910 and in early 1911 he died. However
he left behind one great legacy, the handwritten manuscript for a book
entitled The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, more information about which
can be found at the relevant writeup.