George Gissing’s The Nether World and Clerkenwell : The Barren Ways and Phantom-Haunted Refuges of the Nether World

Hutcheon, Rebecca (2018) George Gissing’s The Nether World and Clerkenwell : The Barren Ways and Phantom-Haunted Refuges of the Nether World. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies :. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783319625928

Abstract

The Nether World (1889) is Gissing’s fifth London novel. It sits alongside New Grub Street (1891), Born in Exile (1892) and The Whirlpool (1897) as one of the few novels whose titles are spatial rather than, as is the case with the other twenty, temporal or character-based. The ‘nether world’ is a metaphor for Clerkenwell. It draws a figurative connection between the self-contained London district and hellish underworld.