The inscription reads, ‘Robert with love from Elizabeth[?] Wyatt’ and ‘Coates’ has been added in pencil after ‘Robert’. If the attribution is correct, this is likely to be the American novelist Robert M. Coates (1897-1973) best known for the experimental novel The Eater of Darkness (1926) and for his long association with The New Yorker. Farewell Victoria follows the life of Mundy, a groom, soldier (in the Zulu Wars) and cab driver from mid-Victorian childhood to his death in the early 1930s.