Innocence and art are both desirable and ambiguous (there is a sly nod to Lud-in-the Mist on page 553). So, too, is idealism, which is fraught both with longing and naivety. The novel charts the exhilarating, liberating rise of the New Woman; but also shows emancipation exploited by a loathsome sexual predator, Herbert Metheley, first encountered sun-bathing repellently nude. His quoted fiction — a sadistic boy-fairy skinning a slow-worm alive — is transposed from Hewlett; but his morals (or rather mores — high-minded lectures followed by unscrupulous seduction) are reminiscent of H. G. Wells. And the high-minded ideals of Fabianism lure the young generation — Tom’s cousin Charles — to dangerously revolutionary meetings in Germany.

Every character in this extraordinarily rich book is superbly embedded in the thoughts and beliefs and feelings of the period — and indeed in its interior decor. Furnishings, wallpaper, pottery, clothing are lovingly described. Everything is there. It is sometimes a bit like reading a pre-war Army and Navy Stores catalogue (utterly riveting, if you can find one — usually in the top-floor lavatory of a large country house.)

At times, the impulse toward comprehensiveness does lack balance. There is, perhaps, too much of Olive’s story of ‘Tom-Underground’; the superb descriptions of exhibits in the Grande Exposition Universelle de Paris go on just too long …

But this is ungrateful. We are given characters that live through, without being merely defined by, their times; and engrossing narrative arcs that draw in the reader. The novel has a fairy-tale beginning: a waif is found by Tom and an older companion in the South Kensington Gallery. Philip, a working-class boy, who wants to be a potter, is scooped up by the Wellwoods, and introduced to Bernard Fludd, a potter of genius who lives in squalor near Rye. But fairy tales have their dark side. Is Fludd, with his drifting, distrait wife and weirdly fey daughters, marsh-magician or marsh-monster? There is a locked room in his studio …

The only drawback to this novel is that you may well read it late into the night, and when it eventually falls from your nerveless fingers you will be woken by the thud of 617 pages hitting the floor.

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