The Nether World [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Note: Readers who do not wish to know the plot in advance may prefer to read the Introduction after the novel itself. The Nether World is the last of Gissing's novels specifically about the working class and the urban poor, and it is generally judged the best. Workers in the Davon (1880), The Unclassed {1884), Demos (1886), and Thyrza (1887) are intriguing works, which deserve to be better known than they are, but the fact that they are generally treated as if their main interest lies in what they reveal about Gissing at the start of his career indicates that, as novels, they are somewhat raw. The Nether World, by contrast, is a complete artistic success. The vision it projects is a very bleak one (in fairness to a reader new to Gissing, that warning needs to be given at the outset), but it is compellingly realized. It is an angry book, whose intensity of focus and dramatic economy marks it out as the beginning of Gissing's major phase and one of his finest achievements. It is, however, a very discomfiting book, and I want in this introduction to suggest briefly why a reader familiar with other Victorian novels is likely to find it so. The Nether World subverts the established procedures of the genre to which it seems to belong. Consider, as a way into the novel, a chapter which ought to be ending happily, as a newly married couple sink into sleep on their first night together. Chapter xn, in fact, closes as Bob Hewett, stupefied with drink and exhausted from blows taken in a street-fight, falls dead away, 'breathing stertorously'. His wife, Penelope ('Pennyloaf') Candy, her face bloody too, lies awake. Down in the slum court of Shooter's Gardens