Robert Tressell, the author of the classic socialist novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, was one of the most influential writers in twentieth-century England. Yet, for decades after his death, hardly anyone knew who he was. He died February 3, 1911, in Liverpool Royal Infirmary, and was buried a week later in a pauper’s grave. The book he worked on for the final five years of his life had never been published — and, as far as he knew, it never would be.

Tressell’s resting place was only rediscovered in 1968, an overgrown patch of what is now Walton Park Cemetery. In 1977, Liverpool workers marked his resting place — and those of the dozen buried alongside him — with a gravestone and a William Morris poem, “The Day Is Coming.” But Tressell’s day may never have come, had it not been for the research of Hastings historian Fred Ball, who spent many years on a “bewildering” search uncovering facts about the author’s life.

Before Ball, the only widely known description of Robert Tressell came from the poet Jessie Pope, who had received the manuscript for Ragged from Tressell’s daughter, Kathleen, and arranged for its first publication by Grant Richards in 1914. Tressell, Pope wrote, was “a socialistic working-man” and “a house-painter and sign-writer who recorded his criticism of the present scheme of things until, weary of the struggle, he slipped out of it.”