num_pages: 404
description: 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.
language: English
title: The Nether World
publisher: Oxford University Press