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It was at this time, influenced by his reading of Zola‘s novels and aware of a new current in the writing of fiction, that Galdós effected a change of direction in his writing that will be described in a following chapter. The new mode, Naturalism, required an unvarnished representation of personal and social problems that had hitherto received only indirect reference. This representation involved a new way of articulating the portrayal of human dilemmas, which owed much to the current ideas in medicine and biology many of which were derived from the theory of degeneration.
4) Galdós’s Madrid
Madrid in the decade before and after the Gloriosa of 1686 was a city of extremes. On the one hand there was spectacular economic growth in the 1860s with major foreign investment, much of it French, especially in banking and in railways (Carr 265, 271). On the other hand, there was terrible urban poverty,
a mass of suffering at the base of urban life: the new immigrants into the city before their absorption, the beggars and street pedlars, were its expression in Spain [...] The new poor lived in their chozas [shacks] 238 that had begun to grow up at the edge of the great cities. Unlike the old urban poor these slumdwellers largely escaped the influence of ecclesiastical charity. They also
earning a living by writing, conceded that, ―tal vez el más popular autor de novelas, Pérez Galdós, cuente con un público de veinte mil lectores en todo el mundo español.‖ (Valera xivxv) 238 chozas (shacks) : Huertas studies the vivienda insalubre that the poor endured in Madrid in his ―Vivir y morir en Madrid : la vivienda como factor determinante del estado de salud de la población madrileña (1874-1923)‖ (Huertas 2002).