Determined to use her inherited wealth benevolently, Angela Messenger, an idealistic Cambridge graduate, changes her name and takes lodgings in a Stepney boarding-house, seeking to understand the East End and its people. The young and aristocratic Harry Le Breton also haunts the area, discovering his origins and a new sense of kinship. 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.