Abstract
Abstract: By critiquing how realism usually depicts the slums, Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) makes room for an alternative mode of perceiving slums and slum dwellers. This mode, I argue, fuses realism and utopianism, as it revises realist images of the working class as bleak and monotonous to represent this demographic as happy, pleasurable, and life-affirming. This article departs from previous scholarship that tends to read Besant's aesthetic hybridity as a failure of realism or overly idealistic politics. In upending realist expectations about the slums, the novel challenges what has been deemed politically possible, thereby demonstrating the inextricability of politics and aesthetics.
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