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Flowers on the dunghill in The Nether World (1).(analysis of novel by George Gissing)

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From: Victorian Newsletter
Date: 20020922
Author:Harsh, Constance

George Gissing's The Nether World (1889) is one of the gloomiest of nineteenth-century English novels. Its uncompromising depiction of the lives of the London poor reveals squalor and depravity in unflinching detail. Yet it is not alone the conditions of living for the working class that account for the grim atmosphere of this book. As many readers have recognized, the extraordinary quality of The Nether World is the absence of any hope for change. As David Grylls has observed, "In contrast with Gissing's earliest novels, no substantial initiatives for social reform are anywhere ...

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