The Nether World (Oxford World's Classics) [Paperback]

George Gissing (Author), Stephen Gill (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Oxford World's Classics | Publication Date: October 7, 1999

The Nether World (1889), generally regarded as the finest of Gissing's early novels, is a highly dramatic, sometimes violent tale of man's caustic vision shaped by the bitter personal experience of poverty. This tale of intrigue depicts life among the artisans, factory-girls, and slum-dwellers, documenting an inescapable world devoid of sentimentality and steeped with people scheming and struggling to survive. With Zolaesque intensity and relentlessness, Gissing lays bare the economic forces which determine the aspirations and expectations of those born to a life of labor.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Stephen Gill is at Oxford University and Fellow of Lincoln College.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 7, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192837672
• ISBN-13: 978-0192837677
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,085,486 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another True Glimpse at Victorian Times, May 22, 2004

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T. George "anne-with-an-e" (An American city) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nether World (Everyman's Library) (Hardcover)

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 impoverished among us today

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A noble heart sheltered by ignorance, January 23, 2011

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H. Schneider "Hamlet" (Pandistan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Nether World (The World's Classics) (Paperback)

Gissing's novel about working class life, bleak and angry, published in 1889, shares a main plot element with Dickens' Great Expectations: an expected inheritance, here from a returner from down-under. There was a trend in Victorian fiction to write about the `condition of England'. Gissing was one of the bleakest contributors: he offered no optimism, no way out, no reason for optimism. His endings were of the kind that we saw recently in the movie Winter's Bone: deceptive little meaningless pseudo triumphs, not more than moments of rest. People don't rise from the nether world. Upper and nether worlds don't have any permeable interfaces.

Central hero of this decently depressing master piece is a qualified worker in the jewelry industry, with some lost illusions about talent in art and with a failed young love.
While still a young man, `he reached the stage of confident and aspiring radicalism, believing in the perfectibility of man, in human brotherhood, in anything you like that is the outcome of a noble heart sheltered by ignorance'. That stage was gone now, `to give place to nothing very satisfactory'. The man tries to stay decent, to have friendships, to help people worse off than he is himself...

Gissing's Pip-equivalent is young Jane, the grandchild of the old man who came back from Ossiland and who is expected to leave something to her. At the outset of the novel she is 13 and she is for all practical purposes a domestic slave in a boarding house, mistreated by a sadistic tyrant of a teenage daughter of the owner.
We get to meet rather many un-nice people down here in the nether world. Poverty is not conducive to social graces, and decency is challenged hard under miserable conditions.
Gissing was not much of a sympathizer with the 'low classes', nor was he a 'radical', nor was he a modernizer of literature. What he brought to his subject here is detailed knowledge based on own experience as well as on meticulous research. The Oxford World Classics edition that I have gives us excerpts from Gissing's note books in the appendix, where he wrote down the facts of life for use in the book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Nether World, October 16, 2010

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Nether World (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

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 promising young student, Gissing fell in love with and stole to support a prostitute, Helen Harrison ("Nell").After a prison term and a subsequent stay in the United States, Gissing returned to England and married Nell in what proved to be a stormy and unhappy relationship for both parties. Nell died in 1888 after she and Gissing had been separated for six years. When Gissing saw the conditions of the foul room in which Nell lived, he vowed to write a book in her memory to expose the abysmal character of London slum life. The result was "The Nether World" (1889). It is Gissing's seventh novel and his fifth and final book set in the London slums. Together with "New Grub Street", "The Odd Women", and "Born in Exile" it is among Gissing's best novels. Unlike most of Gissing's books, it is generally in print and accessible.

Although Nell's death moved Gissing to write this novel, little in it is autobiographical. Gissing had lived in the slums of London he describes after his return from the United States. He was a compulsive and inveterate walker of city streets and a detailed observer of what he saw. He also did a great deal of reading, both of novels and of studies of the urban poor, that found its way into "The Nether World."

The book is lengthy and densely plotted. It is set in its entirety in a small area called Clerkenwell with few scenes of life outside the slum. On first blush, the novel can be read as a series of scenes and episodes of slum life and of characterizations of the varied residents of Clerkenwell. The elaborate plot initially appears hazy but emerges as the book proceeds. The novel includes an extended group of characters who are carefully dilineated. The novel centers on a young man, Sidney Kirkwood and a younger woman, Jane Snowdon. As with other Gissing male lead characters, Kirkwood has a degree of artistic and intellectual interests that makes him restless. He has a steady job setting jewelry which places him on the higher levels of the nether world. Jane Snowdon is a young girl of 13 when the story begins and suffers from abusive treatment from the owners of a cheap rooming house, Clem Peckover and Clem's mother. Jane is rescued from the worst of the abuse by John Hewitt, an aging and struggling worker who rooms with his large family in the Peckover house.

The plot centers upon the appearance of an aged man, Jane's grandfather, Michael Snowdon, and separately upon the appearance of Jane's father, John Snowdon, a wastrel who abandoned Jane when she was young to the cruelties of the Peckovers for whom she works as a scullion. Michael Snowdon has lived in Australia and rumors, which prove to be well-founded, circulate throughout the nether world that he has become wealthy. The plot revolves around Michael's wealth and his will, as John Snowdon and the Peckovers scheme, together and against one another, to take the old man's money upon his death. Their attempts are vicious and low in the extreme. As Jane reaches the age of 16-17, she and Kirkwood fall in love. Kirkwood plans to marry her but backs off because he does not wish to be seen as scheming for Michael's money and because Michael has planned to use his money for charitable purposes only to be administered by Jane and by Sidney. Sidney marries the daughter of John Hewitt, Clara who had spurned him years earlier. Talented, ambitious, and selfish, Clara had run off from Clerkenwell in the hopes of becoming an actress. A rival had thrown acid in Clara's face permanently disfiguring her, and Clara had returned to her father in Clerkenwell because she had no other place to go. Largely out of a sense of duty, Sidney marries Clara in a relationship that proves depressingly unhappy.

Scenes of Clerkenwell, the streets, the garment factories, the fetid, crowded and unsanitary dwellings, the criminality, the hopelessness, and the venality of the residents are tightly drawn without hint of sentimentality or idealism, unlike, for example, Dickens. The descriptive scenes of the novel include a chapter called "Io Saturnalia!", which is a description of the poor masses during a bank holiday. Another chapter "The Soup Kitchen" describes the response of the Clerkenwell residents to attempted charity.

Among the many characters in the novel is a young woman named Pennyloaf Candy who marries Bob Hewitt, the rootless and ultimately criminal son of John. Pennyloadf is subjected to endless abuse which she endures unstintingly. Another figure from Clerkenwell is Mad Jack who functions as a prophetic figure. In a chapter "Mad Jack's dream" late in the book, Mad Jack exclaims:" This life you are now leading is that of the dammed; this place to which you are confined is Hell! There is no escape for you! From poor you shall become poorer; the older you grow, the lower shall you sink in want and misery; at the end there is waiting for you, one and all, a death in abandonment and despair. This is Hell -- Hell-Hell!"

Gissing's portrayal of the nether world is bleak and grim. From this novel, he sees no hope of redemption, either in the form of education, charity, or social change. His attitude towards his characters is a difficult mixture of sympathy and hopelessness. "The Nether World" is Gissing at his harshest and most pessimistic. A difficult novel, "The Nether World" succeeds in capturing the world of a woman Gissing loved, Nell Harrison.

Robin Friedman