[6] Based on his own experiences of poverty and exploitation, and his terror that he and his daughter, Kathleen — whom he was raising alone — would be consigned to the workhouse if he fell ill, Noonan embarked on a detailed and scathing analysis of the relationship between working-class people and their employers.

[9] Clearly frustrated at the refusal of his contemporaries to recognise the inequity and iniquity of society, Tressell's cast of hypocritical Christians, exploitative capitalists and corrupt councillors provide a backdrop for his main target: the workers who think that a better life is "not for the likes of them".

One of the characters, Frank Owen, is a socialist who tries to convince his fellow workers that capitalism is the real source of the poverty he sees all around him, but their education has trained them to distrust their own thoughts and to rely on those of their "betters".

Owen 'employs' his workmates cutting up the bread to illustrate that the employer, who does not work, generates personal wealth while the workers effectively remain no better off than when they began, endlessly swapping coins back and forth for food and wages.

The three-storeyed house that is under renovation in the book, referred to frequently as the "job", is known by the workmen as "The Cave": "There were, altogether, about twenty-five men working there, carpenters, plumbers, plasterers, bricklayers and painters, besides several unskilled labourers ...

In Plato's work, the underlying narrative suggests that in the absence of an alternative, human beings will submit to their present condition and consider it normal, no matter how contrived the circumstances.

[11]Writing in the Manchester Evening News in April 1946 George Orwell praised the book's ability to convey "[w]ithout sensationalism and almost without plot ... the actual detail of manual work and the tiny things almost unimaginable to any comfortably situated person which make life a misery when one's income drops below a certain level".

[4] In 1979 Jonah Raskin described The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists as "a classic of modern British literature, that ought to rank with the work of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, and yet is largely unknown ... Tressell's bitterness and anger are mixed with compassion, sympathy and a sharp sense of humour.

"[12] According to David Harker, by 2003 the book had sold over a million copies, and had been printed five times in Germany, four in Russia, three in the United States, and two in Australia and Canada; it had also been published in Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch and Japanese.

[3] A television adaptation in the Theatre 625 series was transmitted on BBC2 on 29 May 1967, starring Edward Fox as Barrington and Alan Wade as Bert the barrow boy, who feature on the front cover of the contemporary paperback.