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Benito Perez Galdos is often called the Spanish Charles Dickens or the Spanish Balzac, and is one of the great European nineteenth-century novelists.
Misericordia (1897) is set among the Madrid poor, and to give his novel authenticity Galdos spent many months studying the lives of the destitute and of professional beggars. The theme of the novel is the problem of goodness, embodied in the servant Benina, whose entire life is a struggle to keep the middle-class family she works for from sliding into poverty.
"Crushed by poverty or the weight of their pretensions, the high and low life of 19th century Madrid provides the cast for this enjoyably bleak portrait of a family's decline, fall and recovery. The widow Dona Francisca, reduced from salon to slum, is protected by her servant Benita, who begs and barters in a daily battle with starvation and her mistress's pride. When a sudden inheritance enriches the old crow, Benita is cast aside. Galdos's Spain teems with saints and sinners, corrupted as much by poverty as by wealth." --
The Sunday Times
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Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920) is Spain's greatest nineteenth century realist novelist. He was born in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria where there is now a Galdos Museum.He was a prolific writer, publishing 31 novels, 46 Episodios Nacionales ( a series of historical novels outlining the major events in Spanish history from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 to his own times.), 23 plays, and the equivalent of 20 volumes of shorter fiction, journalism and other writings. He was a great admirer of Dickens and translated Pickwick Papers into Spanish in 1868.
