The Nether World

The Nether World In his novel "The Nether World", George Gissing offers an unsentimental, grim, and uncompromising portrayal of life in the London slums in the last third of the nineteenth century. Gissing (1853 -- 1903) was a late Victorian English novelist who deserves to be better known. As a prom......more

A brilliant, brilliant read - one of the best and most-underrated Victorian novels. Although a bleak story, it examines the lives of the urban poor in 1870s London so brilliantly and paints such real portraits its characters that I can't help but adore this book.......more

14th book of 2023. 3.5. This is what I wanted from Dickens's Hard Times, funnily enough. In fact, this novel could easily be called Hard Times and not The Nether World. Gissing's chosen title sits more in line with some Dantean vision of those who struggled in late Victorian England to work and suppo......more

Read this with The Obscure Reading Group and it has turned out to be a surprisingly good experience. Very Victorian in its portrait of the lower class of workers, of people, in England, more specifically London, in the late 19th century. This is the “nether world” of which Gissing writes, a world of......more

This evocation of the poorest people in the poorest parts of Victorian London does of course bring Dickens to mind. Yet this has none of young Charles’s sentimentality – we have little hope and no happy ending forced upon the characters. This probably comes from the differing biographies of the auth......more