Publications
Mugsborough Revisited: Author Robert Tressell and the setting of his famous book, 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists', by Steve Peak, published 1 January 2011 (54 pp., Hastings: SpeaksBooks) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/501550] & East Sussex Libraries
Abstract:Mugsborough was the setting for Britain's most influential working class novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell. He describes how ordinary people were forced to lead lives of poverty, exploitation and misery in a typical provincial English town in the early 1900s.
The book was first published in 1914, and was so moving and horrifying that it helped shape the welfare state set up after the Second World War and inspired much militancy in the Labour movement through to the 1990s.
But Mugsborough was not a fictional town. It was the depression-hit seaside resort of Hastings and St Leonards in East Sussex, as seen though the eyes of an Irish-born painter and decorator who moved to the town by chance in 1901/02. He worked for many local builders over the next eight years, and recorded the destitution and hardship that he and his workmates suffered. In 1910 he finished the manuscript of his story and tried to emigrate to Canada, but he died of tuberculosis on the way, at Liverpool on 3 February 1911.
Mugsborough Revisited chronicles in detail the life of Robert Tressell, and explains how his novel was in many ways a factual record of real places, people and events in a deprived and badly-run town.
The book was first published in 1914, and was so moving and horrifying that it helped shape the welfare state set up after the Second World War and inspired much militancy in the Labour movement through to the 1990s.
But Mugsborough was not a fictional town. It was the depression-hit seaside resort of Hastings and St Leonards in East Sussex, as seen though the eyes of an Irish-born painter and decorator who moved to the town by chance in 1901/02. He worked for many local builders over the next eight years, and recorded the destitution and hardship that he and his workmates suffered. In 1910 he finished the manuscript of his story and tried to emigrate to Canada, but he died of tuberculosis on the way, at Liverpool on 3 February 1911.
Mugsborough Revisited chronicles in detail the life of Robert Tressell, and explains how his novel was in many ways a factual record of real places, people and events in a deprived and badly-run town.