The novel caused scandal both to Jewish readers, who judged it anti-semitic, and to gentile readers, who found its treatment of sex outside marriage too outspoken.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Stephen Lock
suggests in his introduction to the 1989 reprint that this novel is à clef: that JF
's Phillips (whose name, before the publisher suggested a change, was Dr Abrams) was modelled on Ernest Abraham Hart
