The Nether World was published by Smith, Elder in three volumes in 1889, and it is Gissing’s most sustained work of social naturalism — a novel set entirely among the working poor of Clerkenwell, the district in east-central London where watch-making, printing, and metalwork sustained a community that hovered permanently on the edge of destitution. The title is literal: this is the underworld, the world beneath the comfortable surface of Victorian prosperity, where the majority of London’s population lived.
The plot follows two families connected by the legacy of Michael Snowdon, an old man who has returned from Australia with a small fortune and a granddaughter, Jane, whom he hopes to train as an angel of philanthropy — a woman who will use his money to relieve the suffering around her. The plan founders on the realities that Gissing knows too well: the money attracts predators, Jane is too gentle and unworldly for the role her grandfather envisions, and the nether world grinds on regardless, absorbing and destroying the naive hopes of those who try to change it.
The novel’s power comes from its accumulation of detail. Gissing describes the slum workshops where artificial flowers are made by women working eighteen-hour days; the penny-gaff theatres where the poor find their entertainment; the pubs where wages are drunk away on Saturday night; the gin palaces, the pawnshops, the workhouses. He is not a romantic about poverty — there is no noble suffering here, no picturesque squalor, no consolation of community spirit. The poor in this novel are as capable of cruelty, selfishness, and stupidity as the rich, and Gissing refuses to idealize them.
The novel has been compared to Zola’s L’Assommoir and Dickens’s darker social novels, but it differs from both in its refusal of dramatic extremity. There are no melodramatic villains, no spectacular rescues, no deathbed conversions. The suffering is ordinary, cumulative, and relentless, and the novel’s quiet despair is more devastating than any amount of dramatic heightening.
Collecting The Nether World
First edition (Smith, Elder, London, 1889): Three volumes, dark blue cloth.
Market values:
- Three-volume first edition: $1,000–$4,000
- One-volume reprint: $60–$150
- Later editions: $5–$15