In November 1871, Mary Elizabeth Braddon published an up-andcoming thinker, Walter Besant, in her magazine Belgravia. Besant's essay, ‘The Value of Fiction’, inquires ‘what is likely to be the real gain from reading or writing works of fiction’ (Besant 1871: 48). He answers in accordance with an ethics of care: ‘the chief gain is, that it is good at times to get our minds away from ourselves’ (48). If a fictional text accurately depicts others’ lives, it enables readers to ‘share in sorrows and joy alien to [their] own experiences’ (48–9). To step outside one's self and to share in others’ experiences, even secondhand, should be enough to inspire one to social action. The strength of fiction is that it enables one to sympathise with individuals one would otherwise never encounter:

Besant celebrates representations of suffering and sorrow that have roots in lived experience. If a novelist can sit among the bodies and materiality they describe, they can to some degree bring those bodies to life.

This is a lesson that Besant himself learned in his own career as a novelist. Empathy drives Besant's model of social reform, catalysed by intimate, physical experience. The novel that this chapter explores, Children of Gibeon, is the spiritual successor of Besant's first social reform novel, All Sorts and Conditions of Men. In fact, their plots are so similar, their politics so mirrored, that one might read Children as a second draft of All Sorts and Conditions. Why the rewrite? Besant himself says that Children ‘touch[es] a note of deeper resonance’, and is ‘the most truthful of anything that I have ever written’ (Besant 1902: 247). The key difference between the composition of the two novels, Besant writes, is that before he wrote Children, he immersed himself in the East End: ‘I knew every street in Hoxton … I had been about among the people day after day and week after week’ (248).