All Sorts and Conditions of Men

I suspect students would have a hard time wrapping their heads around the politics of Walter Besant's thesis novel, All Sorts and Conditions of Men. Like Charles Dickens' Hard Times, ASaCoM holds that the people must be amused; unlike Hard Times, however, it also holds that the people must be amused in order to make them "discontented." Such discontent, the novel holds, is the true prerequisite for social change: once "awakened" to all the available goods of civilization, the people will demand access to those goods. There's a very strong self-help streak to all of this, accompanied by an equally strong disdain for centralized government--enough to warm the hearts of any libertarian. And Besant's characters have no patience with traditional charities of any sort, Christian or otherwise; charity, as opposed to access to the means of self-betterment, degrades the poor. But Thomas Carlyle's contempt for laissez-faire capitalism peeps through as well. The novel dismisses political economy as pure nonsense, choosing instead Carlyle's model of the "noble master," who rates profits beneath the welfare of his (or, in this case, her) workers. Besant's call for worker self-determination, however, isn't Carlylean at all: if upper-crust heiress Angela Marsden Messenger and the poor-boy-educated-as-a-gentleman Harry Goslett are needed to get ideas going, it's Goslett's working-class cousin who is likely to take over as a genuine leader.

The novel did, in fact, lead to the building of Besant's imagined "Palace of Delight." In real life, it was the People's Palace (1887), although Besant's vision of a vast hall for ennobling entertainment and sports never really took off.

Incidentally, I suspect that PZ Myers will recognize this type:

The learned Daniel Fagg, rapt always in contemplation, was among them but not of them. He was lately arrived from Australia, bringing with him a Discovery which took away the breath of those who heard it, and filled all the scholars and learned men of Europe with envy and hatred, so that they combined and formed a general conspiracy to keep him down, and to prevent the publication of his great book, lest the world should point the finger of scorn at them, and laugh at the blindness of its great ones. Daniel himself said so, and an oppressed man generally knows his oppressor. (32)