Raqs Media Collective

This is from a novel, "The Ragged Trousered Phillanthropists" by Robert Tressel. First published in Great Britain by Grant Richards, 1914, and Lawrence & Wishart, 1955. Tressel is his pen name, from the trestle table, part of the basic equipment of house painters and sign writers. It's a novel which is introduced with Tressel's lines: "this work which must be done or I will die in the work house". He submitted it to several publishers, but because it was handwritten, the publishers returned it without reading it. The book wasn't published till three years after his death - he died at 40 of tuberculosis - but hasn't been out of print since.

The novel is about a group of painters and decorators, and their families, in Hastings (Mugsborough), around 1906.

This extract is from page 46.

[thanks to Shveta for finding and sharing it.]

to think about past and future: (reminding of angels and farces)

McLuhan quotation:

"The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look
at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land."

(The Medium is the Massage, 1967)