Benito María de los Dolores Pérez Galdós (Spanish pronunciation: [beˈnito ˈpeɾeθ ɣalˈðos]; 10 May 1843 – 4 January 1920) was a Spanish realist novelist and politician. He was a leading literary figure in 19th-century Spain, and some scholars consider him second only to Miguel de Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist.
Pérez Galdós was a prolific writer, publishing 31 major novels, 46 historical novels in five series, 23 plays, and the equivalent of 20 volumes of shorter fiction, journalism and other writings. He remains popular in Spain, and is considered equal to Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac and Leo Tolstoy. He is less well known in Anglophone countries, but some of his works have now been translated into English. His play Realidad (1892) is important in the history of realism in the Spanish theatre. The Pérez Galdós museum in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria features a portrait of the writer by Joaquín Sorolla.
Pérez Galdós was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912, but his opposition to religious authorities led him to be boycotted by conservative sectors of Spanish society, and traditionalist Catholics, who did not recognize his literary merit.
Galdós was interested in politics, although he did not consider himself a politician. His political beginnings were liberal, and he later embraced republicanism and then socialism, under Pablo Iglesias Posse. Early on he joined the Sagasta Progressive Party and in 1886 became a deputy for Guayama, Puerto Rico. At the beginning of the 20th century he joined the Republican Party and was elected deputy to the Madrid cortes for the Republican–Socialist Conjunction in the legislatures of 1907 and 1910. In 1914 he was elected deputy for Las Palmas.
Pérez Galdós was born on 10 May 1843 in Calle Cano in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in a house that is now the Casa-Museo of Pérez Galdós. He was the tenth and last son of lieutenant colonel Don Sebastián Pérez and Doña Dolores Galdós. He was baptised Benito María de los Dolores at the church of San Francisco de Asís, (es) two days after his birth.
Pérez Galdós studied at San Agustín school, where he was taught by teachers trained in the principles of the enlightenment. In 1862, after completing his secondary studies, he travelled to Tenerife to obtain his certificate in bachillerato in arts. That same year he moved to Madrid to start a law degree, which he did not complete.
While at university, Pérez Galdós frequented the Ateneo of Madrid and other gatherings of intellectuals and artists. He became acquainted with life in Madrid and witnessed the political and historical events of the time, which were reflected in his journalistic works and in his early novels, The Golden Fountain Café (La Fontana de oro) (1870) and El audaz (1871).
Pérez Galdós led a comfortable life, living first with two of his sisters and then at the home of his nephew, José Hurtado de Mendoza. He got up at sunrise and wrote regularly until ten o'clock in the morning, in pencil, because he considered the use of a pen a waste of time. He would then go for walks in Madrid to eavesdrop on other people's conversations and to gather details for his novels. He did not drink, but smoked leaf cigars incessantly. In the afternoons he read in Spanish, English or French; he preferred the classics, including Shakespeare, Dickens, Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Euripides. In later years, he began to read Leo Tolstoy. In the evenings he would return to his walks, unless there was a concert, for he adored music. He went to bed early and almost never went to the theater.
According to Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Pérez Galdós dressed casually, using sombre tones to go unnoticed. In winter he would wear a white woollen scarf wrapped around his neck, with a half-smoked cigar in his hand and, when seated, his German shepherd dog beside him. He was in the habit of wearing his hair cropped "al rape" and, apparently, suffered from severe migraines.
By 1865, he was publishing articles in La Nación on literature, art, music, and politics. He completed three plays between 1861 and 1867, but none were published at the time. In 1868, Pérez Galdós' translation of Pickwick Papers introduced Dickens' work to the Spanish public. In 1870, Pérez Galdós was appointed editor of La Revista de España and began to express his opinions on a wide range of topics from history and culture, to politics and literature. Between 1867 and 1868, he wrote his first novel, La Fontana de Oro, a historical work set in the period 1820–1823. With the help of money from his sister-in-law, it was published privately in 1870. Critical reaction was slow, but this was eventually hailed as the beginning of a new phase in Spanish fiction, and was highly praised for its literary quality as well as for its social and moral purpose.
Pérez Galdós next developed the outline of a major project, the Episodios Nacionales: a series of historical novels outlining the major events in Spanish history starting from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The Mexican-Spanish writer Max Aub said:
"If all the historical material of those years (19th century) were lost, saving the work of Galdós, it would not matter. There is complete, alive, real life of the nation during the hundred years that covered the author's claw. There are, forever, its hundreds and hundreds of historical and imagined characters, as true one as the other (...) Only the greatest in the world, and there are enough fingers to count them, achieved as much. And even more: I would leave him in the novel glory of his time hand in hand with Tolstoy, because, besides giving life to beings forever present, they knew how to bring to light the genius of their homeland through its struggles, glories and misfortunes (...) Galdós has done more for the knowledge of Spain by the Spaniards (...) than all the historians together".
The first volume was called Trafalgar and appeared in 1873. Successive volumes appeared irregularly, until the forty-sixth and final novel, Cánovas, was published in 1912. These historical novels sold well, and they remained the basis of Pérez Galdós' contemporary reputation and income. He used careful research to write these stories, and to achieve balance and wider perspectives, Pérez Galdós often sought out survivors and eyewitnesses to the actual events – such as an old man who had been a cabin boy aboard the ship Santísima Trinidad at Trafalgar, who became the central figure of that book. Pérez Galdós was often critical of the official versions of the events he described, and often ran into problems with the Catholic Church, then a dominant force in Spanish cultural life.
Literary critic José Montesinos classified Pérez Galdós' other novels into the following groups:
The early works from La Fontana de Oro up to La familia de León Roch (1878). The best known of these is Doña Perfecta (1876), which describes the impact made by the arrival of a young radical on a stiflingly clerical town. In Marianela (1878) a young man regains his eyesight after a life of blindness and rejects his best friend Marianela for her ugliness.
The novelas españolas contemporáneas, from La desheredada (1881) to Angel Guerra (1891), a loosely related series of 22 novels which are the author's major claim to literary distinction, including his masterpiece Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87). They are bound together by the device of recurring characters, borrowed from Balzac's La Comédie humaine. Fortunata y Jacinta is almost as long as War and Peace. It concerns the fortunes of four characters: a young man-about-town, his wife, his lower-class mistress, and her husband. The character of Fortunata is based on a real girl whom Pérez Galdós first saw in a tenement building in Madrid, drinking a raw egg – which is the way in which the fictional characters come to meet.
The later novels of psychological investigation, many of which are in dialogue form.
Influences and characteristics