From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood

This essay traces the shifting frameworks of affective reform proposed by Walter Besant in two of his novels about the East End, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and Children of Gibeon (1886). While the cultivation of individual happiness based on bourgeois domesticity offers a strategy for reorienting working-class values in the former novel, the latter promotes a pursuit of communitarian values rooted in universal sisterhood, which supersedes familial bonds and class distinctions. Reading these two novels in conversation with each other reveals a narrative critique of rights-based individualism along the lines of revisionist liberal thought, and redirects affective attention toward fostering kinship associations for communal mutuality.

Altruism and the Monks of Thelema

The central concerns of Besant’s philanthropic novels of the 1880s were anticipated in 1878’s The Monks of Thelema: An Invention, his first sustained foray into social commentary. Although largely neglected by scholars, the novel is an intriguing satire that is rich with contemporary insights. In addressing the dilemmas of philanthropic activism, Besant mocks the naïve idealism associated with Oxford thinkers and undergraduates while finding positive value in their reformist schemes of liberal education for the emerging mass democracy. With the French humanist François Rabelais supplying a model for progressive liberal humanism, amid the satire Besant’s fiction develops a positive ideal of association and moral perfectibility that foreshadows his later, more celebrated work in philanthropy and social reform.

‘Another like me’

During the first ten years of his career as a novelist Walter Besant wrote fiction collaboratively with James Rice, in an unusual partnership that only ended with Rice’s death in 1882. This essay examines the nine Besant and Rice novels and what is known about the partnership that produced them, including what is suggested by the intriguing portrait of the two authors painted around the time of Rice’s death. The Besant and Rice novels are often regarded as insignificant compared to Besant’s later solo work, but this essay argues that they should be considered as integral to Besant’s oeuvre and as essential for understanding of the key themes of his later work, such as social reform and authorship.

Introduction: Walter Besant Now

In the 1880s and 1890s Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Today he is one of the least read Victorian fiction writers of comparable standing. In addition to outlining the contents of this volume, the introduction provides an overview of Besant’s life and career.

The Ethics of Perception and the Politics of Recognition

In All Sorts and Conditions of Men Walter Besant focuses his novelistic gaze on what he perceived as the neglected “romance” and “possibilities” of the East End of London (as opposed to its more horrific and tragic realities), and famously forwarded a utopian, “cultural solution” to the apparently mind-numbing monotony of East End existence. What is generally missed in the critical approaches to All Sorts and Conditions of Men are the subtle ways in which Besant’s socio-cultural “focus” (the respectable, but dull and neglected East End) and “solution” (cultural philanthropy and paternalistic economic relations) reflect Besant’s attempt to work through and elaborate a kind of relational and perspectival ethics through the generic hybridity (and perhaps, ultimately, limitations) of an “urban romance.”

Besant, Chatto, and Watt

Walter Besant was a very successful novelist in the late nineteenth century but his income never quite matched his popularity, which rose in the 1880s and slowly fell thereafter. He did not use the royalty system in his contracts but instead sold his copyrights either outright or for a limited term to book, magazine, and newspaper publishers. This was probably an expression of his doubts about the longer-term success of his work. He was one of the earliest significant novelists to use the services of A. P. Watt, the first formal literary agent in the UK. Watt was able to farm Besant’s literary property by splitting it into UK book rights (usually sold to Chatto and Windus), foreign book rights, first serialisation rights, second serialisation rights, and syndication in various newspaper and magazine markets in the USA, Europe, and British Empire. In the 1890s Besant earned an average of £1,750 for each of his major novels. Besant claimed that Watt had increased his income significantly. There is evidence that Watt did have an effect, but that Besant becoming a solo writer after 1881 – and gaining securer income in the USA from the Chace Act (1891) – were the more important factors.

‘I have altered nothing’

After Walter Besant completed Wilkie Collins’s unfinished novel, Blind Love (with Collins’s authorization and elaborately detailed instructions), Besant emphatically declared that he had “altered nothing” in the final version. A comparison of the published novel with Collins’s notebook, however, reveals that Besant’s declaration was somewhat disingenuous. In addition to making several significant alternations to Collins’s original plot, the more conservative Besant incorporated both anti-Irish and anti-feminist themes, thus undercutting the more socially progressive narrative originally intended by the deceased author.

Moral Perfectionism, Optatives, and the Inky Line in Besant’s All in a Garden Fair and Gissing’s New Grub Street

This chapter argues for the importance of moral perfectionism to the life of writing depicted in Besant’s All in a Garden Fair (1883) and Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). Scholarship by Andrew H. Miller has identified our desire to improve as ‘a defining aspect of modernity’. Miller’s terms explain a good deal about these novels, in both of which characters routinely (aspire to) improve themselves by means of comparing themselves with others. In All in a Garden Fair, for example, Claire rejects Allen by imagining untoward future outcomes, prospects cancelled by their decisions in the present. Meanwhile, New Grub Street opens with Milvain referring to a man who is being executed: his self-conceptualization arises out of an understanding of who he is not, or at least not yet. My aim, in the first half of this essay, is to show how the two works articulate a larger, Victorian conversation regarding moral perfectionism. In the second half, I concentrate on Besant’s and Andrew Lang’s conversation about New Grub Street in the Author, and Gissing’s responses, revealing how they reenact some of the novels’ debates.

Walter Besant

This chapter discusses the extent of Walter Besant’s indebtedness to Charles Dickens’s oeuvre. It advances the thesis that of all Victorian novelists Dickens exerted a major influence not only on Besant’s literary development, but also on his social ideas and literary technique. In a way, Besant shared Dickens’s belief that benevolence and good-heartedness may help overcome social ills and contribute to cross-class co-operation and solidarity. The mark of Dickens’s style can be seen in many novels written by Besant in collaboration with James Rice or alone, particularly in his slum novels. Besant, now almost forgotten and neglected, was a literary giant of his day, who, like a latter-day Dickens, rendered a harsh indictment of his compatriot’s treatment of the poor.

Workers as Artists

Walter Besant denied that there was any necessary connection between the literary and the commercial value of any given literary work, but in his fiction and nonfiction he acknowledges that literary and commercial experiences often overlap. Besant’s advocacy for professional authorship in The Autobiography and The Pen and the Book and his call for a Palace of Delight in All Sorts and Conditions of Men foreground the intertwining of commerce, utility, and production with art, literature and taste. Both Besant’s fiction and his nonfiction reveal that the presence of the economic in aesthetic experiences is both necessary and productive.