ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the George Gissing's The Nether World, a novel that focuses on London's poverty problem. In his 1889 novel, The Nether World, George Gissing focuses on the poverty of Londoners and attempts to lift the curtain that hides through misrepresentation lie lives of the London poor. By using a specific London location with real street names in his novel, Gissing evokes the Boothian investigative method. Set almost entirely in Clerkenwell, The Nether World tells the story of Jane Snowdon, a pathetic creature described by the narrator as the "thrall of thralls". Because of the constellation of changing historical circumstances, The Nether World's narrator was not only an expression of Gissing's conscious and unconscious attitudes towards social class and poverty, but embodied to a great extent the new view of social class which became possible in late-Victorian society itself.
