Robert Tressell

Robert Tressell was the pen name of Robert Philippe Noonan, born in Dublin in 1870. The details of his early life remain somewhat obscure, but he spent time in South Africa before settling in Hastings, England, where he worked as a house painter and sign writer. His experiences in the building trade, enduring the low wages, unsafe conditions, and employer exploitation common to Edwardian manual laborers, provided the raw material for his only novel. He wrote The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in his spare time between 1906 and 1910, often working on it during his lunch breaks. Suffering from tuberculosis exacerbated by years of poverty and physical labor, he attempted to emigrate to Canada in 1910 but made it only as far as Liverpool, where he died in a workhouse infirmary in 1911 at the age of forty. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.