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Some recent scholarship disturbs the text’s perceived neatness, pointing out its elitism and middle-class proclivities; and some work recontextualises Tressell’s book, placing it within modernist, Irish, South African, and gendered frameworks. Some of this innovative work is included here.4 The narrative we present is not out of step with the so-called real world; in fact, it engages with popular reception and debates. Readers of TRTP are of all ages, classes, genders, races, and locations. Cooperative women at the turn of the twentieth century cited Tressell’s book as a favourite (Cooperative); Black trade unionists in South Africa have been mobilised through the text (Hyslop 83); political prisoners in Belfast’s Maze Prison have seen their lives reflected there (Scott 1–2); a human rights activist in San Francisco, Roland Sheppard, references the text’s impact in his autobiography, The View from the Painter’s Ladder; and in Japan a worker recently received a “Robert Tressell Award” for surviving and working against the odds (Letter to Reg Johnson Rtfp) The text’s resonance can be measured by a number of striking facts. The book has never been out of print, and it continues to sell in ever increasing numbers. There have been over one hundred and twenty printings worldwide. Five different publishers in the United Kingdom alone have separate editions.5 It has been passed from hand to hand during wars, adapted for the stage over and over again, used as a musical, a comic strip, and has been the focus of a number of television documentaries. The failure to mention the book in a review in the London Review of Books resulted in letters of complaint that continued for some nine weeks (2002). In 2005 nearly three hundred people—men and women, young and old—came to the Guardian Hay Festival at nine o’clock on a very wet morning to learn more about the life of Tressell.