The Crown of Life

A man who hates the arms trade loves the daughter of the man who profits from it, and the courtship runs from a Thames-side suburb to a Russia on the edge of war. Gissing's academic career ended at eighteen when he was caught stealing to support a young prostitute he was trying to save, and he married her; this late novel of 1899 is his most explicit about empire and the coming catastrophe, and he was right about it. Fifty-seven plates by painters from Whistler to Shishkin carry the river, the field and the forge through the London years and the Russian journey.