This chapter argues that Gissing’s novels offer significant and philosophically sophisticated engagements with the novel of ideas. Gissing’s study of Schopenhauer’s works led him to take a keen interest in post-Kantian idealism and in fundamental questions regarding the irreconcilability of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’. These concerns are reflected in the novels Gissing wrote in the 1880s – these books satirize the idealist pretensions of social reformers, and they demonstrate that the philanthropic ideals of the Settlement Movement were bound to fail when confronted with the complex and harsh reality of London’s East End. Gissing’s novels are animated by a set of questions that bear directly on the history of the novel of ideas: are aspirational ideals necessarily external and alien to the literary work, or is it possible for them to be assimilated into the medium of literary form? Is it possible for these ideals to become artistically productive?

This chapter explores the growing significance of religious affiliation in shaping the identity politics of racialised minorities. Specifically, the chapter addresses the growing significance of Islam in shaping both the public reaction to religious diversity andhow the identity politics of Islamic faith reshaped a very different alternative public sphere. The chapter addresses how intersectionalities of diaspora, race, faith, gender, and geopolitics land in place, in the specific history of the East End of London. The chapter describes how diasporic Bangladeshi politics emerges in a transactional relationship with the local state in the East End. But what it means to be British and Bangladeshi, or white and ‘East Ender’, is subject to significant change at the same time. Racialisation and religion combine to shape both white and British Bangladeshi collective identities in nuanced ways. The chapter argues that what was commonly represented as isolation or withdrawal from the mainstream of political participation by a certain fraction of some minority Bangladeshi demographics was nothing of the sort.