ABSTRACT
It is a tragic, heartbreaking picture, yet not without gleams of hope, which Mr George Gissing paints in his vigorous and realistic story, The Nether World. The world in question is that terrible underworld of London, in which exist abject poverty, dumb, miserable despair, the elements of crime, revolution, all that horde of dreadful possibilities which sometimes flit across the brain ofsociety and terrorise it into
fitful and fruitless charity. Mr Gissing takes his readers to Clerkenwell -that hive of toiling and moiling human beings, where perhaps the strangest paradoxes in all the working world are to be found; where one man deals in diamonds on the first floor, while in the basement another dies of starvation, and overhead young human animals spend the proceeds of labour in bestial drunkenness culminating in brutal violence. We frnd ourselves indeed in a 'nether' world-a world the habits, customs, language, hopes, fears, crimes, of which are all so far removed from the smooth surface of well-bred, well-fed society, that we seem to have been suddenly transported, not to another postal district of the metropolis, but to some horrible region of damned souls, such as a modern Dante might imagine as the final punishment of the most degraded types ofhumanity. We move, shuddering, with the author, through an atmosphere fetid with all the abominations of life in the slums. The writer is sufficiently realistic for us to easily fill in the blanks which he must perforce leave. Yet, terrible as is the picture of depravity which he paints, he gives us also some clever studies which go to prove that even in this 'nether world' pure lives are led, noble ambitions cherished, heroic sacrifices not unknown, obscure martyrdoms bravely borne-by no means rare. The story, although brimful of human interest and possessing an adequate plot, is first and foremost a study-faithful and daringly graphic-of life as it is in a world of which society sometimes hears, but of which it knows perilously little. Mr Gissing's realistic book is one to be read and read again. It contains a terrible warning, but also more than a grain of hope. Its pathos is very true, its tragedy grimmest of the grim, but through its pages run the golden threads of love, purity and nobility of motive, though the lesson of the book will rather be gathered from its pictures ofutter poverty and its consequent temptation, degradation and crime. Society knows something of 'slumming'; let it read Mr Gissing's book and it will learn more of that terrible underworld which has obviously been the subject of the author's close and sympathetic study. John Hewett and his poor, patient wife, Clara Hewett, the ambitious, ill-starred Sidney Kirkwood, sweet Jane Snowdon, Clem Peckover, and 'Pennyloaf', are distinct creatures of which Dickens himselfwould not have been ashamed, and, as with the Master of this school of fiction, broad human charity is the keynote of the book throughout. Mr Gissing's shoulders may yet grow broad enough for the hitherto unappropriated mantle of the great novelist. We shall await his next work with exceptional interest.
