The central character, Hamer Shawcross, starts as a studious boy in an aspirational
working-class family in
Ancoats,
Manchester; he becomes a socialist activist and soon a
career politician, who eventually is absorbed by the
upper classes he had begun by combating. In fact the story is rather subtler than this summary sounds, despite the fact that the author's sympathies obviously lie with Shawcross's friends and associates who remain faithful to the cause; however, many of the
middle class and
aristocratic characters are portrayed fairly sympathetically, and one character whose career parallels that of Shawcross in his rise from poverty to eminence is a market-boy who becomes a major
capitalist. The book also gives a fair impression of the growth particularly of the
Labour Party in Britain; historical characters, such as
Keir Hardie, occasionally appear, and part of the book is taken up with the hardships of life for
coal mining communities in
South Wales at the turn of the 20th century. The treatment of the militant
women's suffrage movement is especially detailed—there are graphic descriptions of imprisonment and forcible feeding of
hunger strikers. Hamer Shawcross is often taken to be based on
Ramsay MacDonald; though there are similarities in their careers, there are as many differences in their personalities. ==Adaptations==