The Strength of the Strong

London's socialist fables: a tribe that invents property, a general strike that starves out the rich, a professor who leads a second life as a union man, the Unparalleled Invasion in which the West solves China by germ warfare — written in 1910 and unbearable to read now for the right reasons. He had been an oyster pirate, a hobo, a seal hunter and a prospector before twenty-four, and he wrote these as arguments, not entertainments. Fifty-six plates by painters including Munch and Gilman, spanning 1812 to 1928, set beside these fables the way a hard century of labour and upheaval looks back at them.