Aladdin of London

Max Pemberton set this 1907 novel in the London of 1903, moving between the crowded lanes of the East End and the moneyed calm of Hampstead and the West End. Alban Kennedy, the orphaned son of a poor East End parson, is educated but penniless and living among the Whitechapel poor when he is abruptly taken up by Richard Gessner, a wealthy Polish banker who insists the young man has a rightful claim to a place in his household yet refuses to say why. Around that riddle Pemberton gathers Polish revolutionary exiles, a stolen furnace invention, an old betrayal, and a romance between Alban and Lois Boriskoff that crosses the class divide. It works as both a thriller and a study of wealth, poverty, and hidden obligation.