The Nether World

In "The Nether World," Gissing gives you another one of his hard, realistic looks at life in London in Victorian times. This time he focuses on the poorest of the poor in the Clerkenwell area of London. These are people whom England's infantile labor laws generally can't help. If/When they can find work, they often work 16 hours per day all week, and the wages they earn hardly cover rent for a very small room in disreputable housing. It's a world where unwanted children multiply like rabbits, and the death of any family member is usually seen as a relief of one less mouth to feed. For all these reasons, this world - this nether world - is a world about which the upper and middle classes are happily ignorant. Those born into these lowest levels of humanity often rail about the injustice of being born into such circumstances. However, their cries for social reform, their desperate attempts to better themselves, and their pitiful needs for simple pennies are never really heard or understood by those more comfortably off. Within this novel, then, Gissing explores the lives of a range of characters as they deal with being born in the nether world. While he focuses on the heart-warming characters of Jane Snowdon and Sidney Kirkwood, Gissing competently develops the storyline of a large number of other Clerkenwell characters whose lives intertwine with Jane's and Sidney's. In his distinct manner, Gissing is mercilessly honest and yet generally compassionate with the characters whose lives he examines. Thus, he offers a glimpse of the slums - full of love, ambition, corruption, greed, and despair - in a manner that many of us would never know otherwise.Many compare or try to compare this kind of honest look at the rougher side of London with Dickens. However, it is important to note that Dickens tended to idealize poverty and always brought things to a hopeful, positive ending. Gissing does no such thing. Though an educated man, Gissing himself suffered cruelly from poverty and mixed with these classes as he struggled to support himself as an author (see "New Grub Street"). Thus, he has no idealist views of poverty and simplistic lives. Additionally, Gissing has a penchant for realistic storylines. It is unnerving to read his books, actually, because you can't rest on the fact that he will work everything out nicely in the end. In fact, he usually doesn't. He is courageous enough to write true-to-life outcomes to very frustrating, dispiriting circumstances. It is probably why he never became a popular author as readers often want happy endings - with a Ghost of Christmas Past if necessary - in order to relieve their consciences. All in all, another great work by Gissing. He does get a bit preachy (even as he reveals the preachiness of others as futile), but that is easily overlooked. The accurate historical glimpse of London that he gives is invaluable. And I imagine that his brutally honest portrayal of life might speak to the im