An African Millionaire

Sir Charles Vandrift, South African millionaire, is fleeced twelve times by the same man — Colonel Clay, master of disguise — and each time he is quite certain it cannot happen again. Allen wrote popular Darwinism for a living and detonated a scandal with The Woman Who Did; this 1897 book was one of the first to make a swindler the hero of a series, and the joke is that the millionaire made his money by methods no better than Clay's. Fifty-four plates of portraiture and society scenes by painters including Giovanni Boldini and James Tissot, spanning 1811 to 1916, match the book's gallery of masks, manners and the well-dressed swindler.