A financier of enormous credit slips on a piece of orange peel on London Bridge, and the fall — social, marital, mental — takes the rest of the book. The marriage at the center of his fortune was never legal, and everyone he entertains knows it. Meredith wrote for years as a publisher's reader, keeping other men's novels out, and his own late style here is compressed to the point of puzzle. Fifty-five plates by painters such as John Atkinson Grimshaw and James Tissot follow the novel's London of moonlit Thames crossings, processions, and drawing rooms from 1807 to 1911.
