The psychologically charged affairs between residents and servants on a posh London street escalate to violence involving a handsome valet who is sleeping with a lord's wife and daughter, an au pair who aids her mistress's affair, and a disturbed gardener.

Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...