Robert Tressell

Robert Tressell was born Robert Croker in Dublin in 1870, the illegitimate son of a retired magistrate and a Catholic mother. He rejected his father's landlord income at sixteen, renamed himself after his mother, and lived as a painter, signwriter and labour organizer from Liverpool to Johannesburg. In Hastings he wrote The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, a brutal comic novel about men whose only choices are charity, workhouse or grave. He died in Liverpool in 1911 at forty, leaving behind a book that still makes powerful people uneasy.