Harry Richmond grows up between a placid English squire and a magnificent father who may be a prince of the blood or may be a confidence man, and who stages a life of such splendor that the question hardly gets asked. Meredith read manuscripts for a publisher for years, turning down other men's novels; this is his warmest book, and the father is one of the great creations in English — impossible to believe and impossible to give up. Sixty plates, from Gainsborough to Munch, follow the boy through the whole doubtful inheritance.
