Yes to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a book as instrumental in social change as anything Dickens wrote. I read it on the recommendation of my Chemistry teacher when I was 15, though quite what it has to do with chemistry, I'm still not sure! As for desert island books, Les Miserables, War and Peace, Anna Karenin, David Copperfield, Wuthering Heights, Return Of The Native and Wind In The Willows which I've read at least once a year since I was 10. That'd do for starters, though I'd bead a regular resupply ship I think 🤣