A working-class London radical unexpectedly inherits a Midlands ironmaster's fortune and land, and tries to build a socialist industrial community on it while his own vanity, an unhappy marriage of convenience, and old class loyalties corrode the project from within; his sudden violent death hands the estate back to the dispossessed gentry heir, who quietly undoes the socialist scheme and wins the woman his rival had married for status.
Books mentioned in Demos (2)
Das Kapital by Karl Marx: “I am translating the great treatise of Marx, “Das capital.” It occurs to me that a chapter now and then might see the light in the “Fiery Cross.””
Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri: “When he came to read the 'Vita Nuova,' it was of Adela expressly that he thought.”
Books that mention Demos (1)
The Common Reader: Second Series by Virginia Woolf: “...we feel that we are filling in a design which we began to trace out when we read Demos and New Grub Street and The Nether World.”