Misericordia

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 slid...