In All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) Besant vividly portrays the poverty and deprivation of London's East End in a story about transformations and crossings of class-boundaries.
Simultaneously a ‘condition of England' novel, New Woman fiction, romance, comedy, satire and crime story, All Sorts and Conditions of Men has strong roots in the politics of nineteenth-century reform. Determined to use her inherited wealth benevolently, Angela Messenger, a young idealistic Cambridge graduate, changes her name and takes lodgings in a Stepney boarding-house to observe and gain understanding of the East End. Young aristocrat Harry Le Breton also haunts the area, discovering his origins, and a new sense of kinship. Consistently setting itself against the cheerless evangelical strain in Victorian philanthropy, All Sorts and Conditions of Men offers a blueprint for the cultural regeneration of Britain's proletariat as Angela and Harry plan a ‘Palace of Delight' to provide ‘a little more of the pleasures and graces of life' for the East Enders they have come to know. Indeed, five years after the book's publication, Besant's ‘generous and glowing imagination' was praised as the inspiration for the real-life ‘The People's Palace' on the Mile End Road, and All Sorts and Conditions of Men became that rare thing, a work of fiction which made something happen.
