An anthropologist from the twenty-fifth century arrives in a London suburb to study the taboos of the natives - money, marriage, property, rank - and reports on them exactly as an Englishman would report on Polynesians. Allen wrote popular Darwinism for a living and detonated a scandal with The Woman Who Did; this 1895 satire got him attacked from the same pulpits, and the joke has not blunted at all. Forty-nine plates of Victorian and Edwardian painting, from Tissot to Sickert, capture the suburban manners, money, and leisure that Allen's anthropologist studies as tribal custom.