Ambientes madrileños en las novelas contemporáneas de Benito Pérez Galdós
Madrid’s Environments in the Benito Pérez Galdós’s Contemporary Novels

Summary/Abstract: Many years have passed since the death of Benito Pérez Galdós; yet, he is still a very appreciated and popular author. His works of fiction have not lost their significance or the ability to fascinate the reader, since they represent great historical documents, due to the writer’ extraordinary skills to depict in his novels historical, political and anthropological elements, and thus to portray with great accuracy the life of his contemporary Spanish people. For Benito Pérez Galdós, the novel is “the image of life”, as he pointed out during an acceptance speech at the Royal Spanish Academy. The “Contemporary Spanish Novels” (“Novelas Españolas Contemporáneas”), as Galdós himself titled them, represent a group of twenty novels that describe the Spanish society of that time. The collection was compared to Balzac’s The Human’s Comedy.The importance of the surrounding space has been closely analysed and examined since the beginning of literature. In the contemporary novels, set in Madrid, the city becomes an actual character, as the author is very committed to depicting in detail the streets, the public buildings or living spaces, the shops, churches, cafés, parks, squares, monuments and so forth; open spaces as well as closed spaces. Galdós gives special attention to closed spaces, since, like other realist writers, the author believes that the environment can be perfectly used as a tool to define the characters. Therefore, the novelist carefully and neatly presents the houses where the protagonists live and the environments where the action takes place.

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