Preface
Back to the Future? Rereading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Jeremy Hawthorn
When I read Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in 1965, there can have been very few who shared my experience of having first encountered it as a set text on a university literature course. As an MA student at the University of Leeds, I was taking a course on the twentieth-century novel, offered by Arnold Kettle, and the set texts included Tressell’s book.