Social deviancy is a crucial aspect of Galdós’s work, yet one that has been largely ignored by critics. Although several have addressed the subject of the working classes in Galdós’s novels, no major study has been devoted to the wider issue of social deviancy and its various forms or, it follows, to the strategies and techniques designed to control it. This study examines notions of deviancy and social control in a series of Galdós’s novels of the 1880s and 1890s. Deviancy is defined here as behaviour that is seen to be diverging, or deviating, from the accepted social norm and...

From the perspective of contemporary images of the poor and attitudes towards poverty and charity, ‘Una visita al Cuarto Estado’¹ is one of the most significant and illustrative chapters inFortunata y Jacinta. During the second half of the nineteenth century in Spain, the incipient process of industrialization and urbanization brought with it not only a change in the concepts of poverty and charity as they had been traditionally understood by the wealthier classes but also new ways of dealing with the needy. In particular, a new system of philanthropy gained ground over old charitable practices. To understand how new...

This chapter analyses how attitudes towards prostitution, and the images of filth that were generated around it particularly in the last third of the century, are dramatized inFortunata y Jacintaand, to an extent, inNazarín. Galdós’s reproduction of contemporary perceptions of prostitution and filth is examined in the context of the ‘regulatory’ cultural debates on public health, class and gender that emerged in Restoration Spain, as elsewhere at the time. Prostitution was perceived, during this period, as a threat to public health. In public health discourses, prostitutes became associated with filth and decomposing organic waste. Like dirt and...

Concerns about the social effects of drink during the nineteenth century, especially in its closing decades, need to be examined against the backdrop of changing attitudes to poverty that occurred a result of the processes of industrialization, urbanization and population growth.¹ At a time when a threatening working class had began to emerge, drinking, particularly excessive drinking, came to be seen as a vice associated with the undeserving working classes and their undisciplined and ungovernable behaviour. The perception of drunkenness as a major threat to social stability led to its being described as the major cause of poverty and its...

There has been a tendency to regard the novels discussed in this chapter as the product of Galdós’s search for the spiritual. As seen in the previous chapter, Angel Guerra’s charitable mission has been analysed from the perspective of Angel’s Tolstoyan religiosity. Similarly, the other three novels under consideration –Nazarín,HalmaandMisericordia– have traditionally been seen as a reflection of Galdós’s spiritual dimension, and often as forming part of a trilogy.¹ (Although in this chapter each section discusses a particular novel, where relevant, reference is at times also made to other novels.) On the other hand, little attention has...

In the decade covered by the novels analysed in this book – fromFortunata y Jacinta(1886–87) toMisericordia(1897) – Galdós’s position remained consistent with regard to those groups of the population categorized as ‘deviant’ and perceived as social and moral ‘filth’ by many of his contemporaries. In the discussion of ‘Una visita al Cuarto Estado’, inFortunata y Jacinta, we saw how Galdós distances himself from his bourgeois characters and the bourgeois narrator, avoiding complicity with a bourgeois system of categorization and control that associates the lower classes with immorality and filth. This position is maintained in all the...