Social deviancy is a crucial aspect of Galdós's work, yet one that has been largely ignored by critics. Although several have addressed the subject of the working classes in Galdós's novels, no major study has been devoted to the wider issue of social deviancy and its various forms or, it follows, to the strategies and techniques designed to control it. This study examines notions of deviancy and social control in a series of Galdós's novels of the 1880s and 1890s. Deviancy is defined here as behaviour that is seen to be diverging, or deviating, from the accepted social norm and is therefore considered to be in need of regulation or control – deviancy and control being inevitably intertwined. In addition, I also explore the associations of deviancy with ‘filth’, a conceptualization arising from the images of dirt and disease generated by social abnormality. Attention is focused in this study on several deviant groups much publicized by Galdós: prostitutes, drunkards, beggars and vagrants. Analysis of these categories necessarily requires discussion of ideas on, and attitudes to, poverty and the working classes especially the working-class groups considered less deserving or less respectable.

The first novel I analyse, Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87), has received considerable critical attention in respect of social class. Studies have tended to concentrate on the working-class figure of Fortunata and her relationship with the bourgeois world. Less has been written about other working-class characters in the novel, especially those at the very bottom of the social scale, generally associated with dissolute and debauched behaviour. Those studies that do exist do not relate their discussion of working-class characters in the novel to contemporary perceptions of deviancy and to the associated notion of filth.1 The other four novels I analyse – Angel Guerra (1890–91), Nazarín (1895), Halma (1895) and Misericordia (1897) – have tended to be seen as novels belonging to Galdós's ‘spiritual period’, dealing less with social than with non-material matters. Nazarín, Halma and Misericordia have often been regarded as forming an organic whole, and analysed in relation to one another. I argue that there is much common ground in all four novels, and that rather than being a product of Galdós's ‘spiritual’ tendencies they are firmly grounded in the social context in which they were produced.