Two households a hundred yards apart in Kensington: cultivated people who write books about the poor, and the poor, who model for them. Galsworthy trained as a barrister, never practiced, and was told to write by Joseph Conrad; this 1909 novel is the sharpest thing he did about his own class — the shadow of the title falls between people who mean well and people who need bread. Fifty-nine plates, among them Luke Fildes and Henry Wallis, gather the Victorian portrait and London scene that give Galsworthy's divided Kensington its faces.
