Ragged Trousered by Robert Tressell, First Edition (7 results)

Condition: New. 2011. First edition & printing in this form. Paperback. Robert Tressell's pre-First World War account of the working lives of a group of housepainters and decorators has become a classic of working-class literature. Howard Brenton's vivid stage adaptation lays bare the many social injustices perpetrated on these men but captures their individual characters with touching truth to life. Num Pages: 96 pages, illustrations. BIC Classification: DD. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 197 x 130 x 10. Weight in Grams: 124. . . . . .

Paperback. Condition: nrVG. 1st Thus. Cover has small central painting (man on ladder) with grey ground.Book is in near very good condition with minor but just noticeable signs of wear and/or age.

1st edn. thus. 8vo. Original laminated pictorial boards (Fine), no dustwrapper. Pp. 661 (no inscriptions).

1st ed. thus softback with stiff wrappers As New small octavo xxvii + 589pp., b/w pls., New edition of the classic Utopian/Socialist novel. Introduction by Steve Peak. With photographs of social & political life in Hastings, the setting of the novel, contemporary with the text.

Condition: Very Good. First edition. Paperback. 4 episodes in 6 vols. Quartos. Episode 2, 4 (two copies), 5, 6 (two copies). Typed transcripts, printed recto only. Slight wear, creasing and occasional annotation. A 6 part adaptation for Radio 4 in 1989, the cast includes: Brian Glover, Peter Vaughan, Bryan Pringle and Sean Barrett. Episode 2 is signed by Bryan Pringle.

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. Written by Irish painter and decorator Robert Noonan under the pseudonym Robert Tressell (he feared the repercussions of expressing such strong socialist views, and liked the pun on trestle table , a primary tool of his trade), the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a novel of outstanding punch and clarity and was one of the first times such a work by a genuine member of the working class reached a broad audience in Britain. The original, handwritten manuscript was at first rejected by three publishers, leaving the writer depressed and having to be stopped from burning the book. When the rights were finally sold by his daughter (for a mere £25), it received enormous praise from the literary community, including George Orwell, who considered it 'a book that everyone should read' that left one 'with the feeling that a considerable novelist was lost in this young working-man whom society could not be bothered to keep alive.' This is the true UK first edition, extremely scarce in this form and an uncommonly sharp, Fine copy. A literary classic.

12mo. pp. [ix], 385. cloth (bit rubbed, cloth puckered on spine & inner portion of rear cover). First American Edition of a classic of working class literature. The illegitimate son of an inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary, Noonan (who was baptized with the name Croker) spent ten years in South Africa, after which time he settled in Hastings. "Working in the building trade at subsistence wages, he contracted tuberculosis, was influenced by socialist writers such as Robert Blatchford, and became an active member of the unusually large Hastings branch of the Social Democratic Federation, whose banner he painted. He spent his spare time during the last ten years of his life writing by hand the 1800-page manuscript of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which brought posthumous fame" (ODB) On the title-page of the first edition, which was substantially abridged from the original manuscript, his pen-name is incorrectly spelled 'Tressall'. Writing in the Manchester Evening News in April, 1946, George Orwell praised the book's ability to convey without sensationalism "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." He considered it "a book that everyone should read" and a piece of social history that left one "with the feeling that a considerable novelist was lost in this young working-man whom society could not bother to keep alive.".