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The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell.

All books should be read with care, no matter how the sentiments expressed by the author may chime with one's own political views and it is necessary, when reading this book, to remember that Tressell may well have had 'more than one axe to grind'. According to the adumbrated biography contained in the introduction, written by Tristram Hunt, to the Penguin Modern Classics edition (2004) he was born in Dublin in 1870 and went, as a young man, to South Africa, where he became involved with pro Boer elements of the Irish nationalist contingent there. It can safely be presumed that he was not a loyal subject of the empire yet, like so many of his ilk, he was happy enough to make use of the opportunities that it afforded and made his way back to England in 1901. He died in Liverpool, in 1911, en-route to Canada, where he intended to settle. During those ten years he wrote a finely observed and biting critique of the social and cultural destruction wrought by the industrial revolution. Although the protagonist is clearly the author's alter ego some of the caricatures seem at times so exaggerated, even allowing for the grotesque distortions required by the libel laws of the day, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Tressell (or Noonan as he was actually known) hated them not just as members of a class such as could be found in any country but as English subjects of The King Emperor, for Tressell was himself middle class.

That notwithstanding, it's a good read and demonstrates that the essential 'Master and servant' relationship of paid employment, what is not unreasonably described as wage slavery, has not changed in a hundred years. On the contrary, the last thirty years have seen a deliberate return to the relationship between employer and employee, with emasculated and compliant trade unions and consequent low wages, long hours and tenurial insecurity, that obtained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's a situation I know well: Like Tressell I can make a justified claim to be considered well educated by the standards of the day, yet I seem incapable of obtaining a living by any means more satisfying than a succession of temporary jobs, as an agency worker, interspersed with periods of unemployment, for which I do not claim benefits. My sympathy for the work, however, is tempered by the suspicion that as much as I have in common with Tressell he would have held against me that I am, however poor, an Englishman, and those, it seems, he despised as much as the bourgeoisie.