Books in Everyman's Classics series

When Henry James chose to, as he did in The Princess Casamassima, he could write about the political turbulence of his era with astonishing excitement and directness. The London underworld of terrorist conspiracies that entangles his hero comes alive under his pen with a violence that seems, more than a century later, only too familiar. Young bookbinder Hyacinth Robinson, the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a woman who died in prison after murdering him, has been raised by an impoverished seamstress. Hyacinth has grown up sensitive both to the beauty of the world and to the human suffering caused by social injustice, and when he is drawn into a circle of radicals he promises to commit an act of terror—a vow he comes to regret when the lovely and bored Princess Casamassima takes him under her wing. As Hyacinth travels across Europe and encounters a richly varied cast of characters from all levels of society, he is increasingly racked by his agonizing dilemma—until he resolves it in a shocking action that carries the emotional force of classical tragedy.

Written when Engels was only twenty-four, and inspired in particular by his time living among the poor in Manchester, this forceful polemic explores the staggering human cost of the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England. Engels paints an unforgettable picture of daily life in the new industrial towns, and for miners and agricultural workers—depicting overcrowded housing, abject poverty, child labour, sexual exploitation, dirt and drunkenness—in a savage indictment of the greed of the bourgeoisie. His fascinating later preface, written for the first English edition of 1892 and included here, brought the story up to date in the light of forty years’ further reflection. A masterpiece of committed reporting and an impassioned call to arms, this is one of the great pioneering works of social history. Based on the original translation by Florence Wischnewetzky, this volume is edited by Victor Kiernan, whose foreword considers Engels’s friendship with Marx, and the book’s position as a seminal work of socialism. Also included are notes, a detailed index, new chronology and further reading and a revised forward.

Joseph Conrad possessed a matchless gift for embodying life as it is lived under extreme physical and psychological pressure. Victory, his last masterpiece, tells the story of Axel Heyst, a radically isolated, philosophically minded soul living apart on a remote Pacific island, who performs two acts of instinctive kindness and thereby embroils himself in storms of greed and vengeance, and of love and mercy. When Heyst impulsively rescues a young English musician, Lena, from the predations of a lascivious hotel owner named Schomberg, he cannot know that she will be the means of releasing him from the emotional detachment with which he has long barricaded himself. Their affair does not last long, however, once the enraged Schomberg sends agents of revenge to invade Heyst’s island retreat. Out of the maelstrom of violence and tragedy that ensues, Conrad produces a profound, unflinching meditation on human connection and redemption.