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.