The Turn of the Balance

A judge, a manufacturer and a young workman in an American city, and a legal system that grinds each of them by its own rules. Brand Whitlock was mayor of Toledo and a working reformer, and wrote this in 1907 out of the courts and prisons he dealt with daily. The execution scene was written to change the law, and it is still hard to read. Fifty-five plates, from Delacroix and Winslow Homer to Whistler, gather the courtroom, the crowd and the wider American scene that Whitlock's novel weighs.