My view now is – everything is shit! Hopeless! The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The edifice is too solid to be pulled down; it must be blown up. And it shall be! – August Strindberg, Letter to Jonas Lie, Christmas Eve, 1884 August Strindberg self-identified as ‘the son of a servant’ and his sense of enmity with the Swedish overclass is palpable throughout his oeuvre. Small Catechism for the Underclass exhibits his sense of himself as a ‘one-man fire brigade’. Not beholden to any particular group, movement or sect, Strindberg practiced an extreme form of individualism with his conscience as his only arbiter. The book is exemplary as a vitriolic and iconoclastic attack on everything existing by Sweden’s ‘national author’. It is also remarkably relevant for the present, as inequality is once again a central political issue. Small Catechism for the Underclass was written sometime during 1884 and 1885. The text would go unpublished in Strindberg's lifetime, not appearing until 1913 when his 55-volume complete works were published in Sweden by Bonniers.