All Sorts And Conditions Of Men: An Impossible Story: An Impossible Story (1910)

In All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) Besant vividly portrays the poverty and deprivation of Londons 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 idealisticCambridge 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 cheerlessevangelical strain in Victorian philanthropy All Sorts and Conditions of Men offers a blueprint for the cultural regeneration of Britains 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 toknow. Indeed five years after the books publication Besants generous and glowing imagination was praised as the inspiration for the real-life The Peoples Palace on the Mile End Road and All Sorts and Conditions of Men became that rare thing a work of fiction which made somethinghappen.