A young engineer in a Yorkshire cutlery town introduces machinery, and the trade unions warn him, then blow up his workshop — while a doctor's daughter, a flooded reservoir and an old crime run alongside. Reade campaigned in fiction against private asylums, brutal prisons and union violence, and researched this in Sheffield from the actual outrages; the dam-burst at the end is taken from the Sheffield flood, which killed two hundred and forty people. Fifty-four plates of working life and industry, from Menzel's bearded labourer and blacksmith's shop to Sisley's Argenteuil square, give the novel's mills and forges their visual counterpart.
