I have read Fortunata y Jacinta, and it is indeed very Dickensian, and very good. Interested readers would probably be better advised to try it rather than the newly translated Tristana:
Benito Pérez Galdós was born in 1843 and he spent most of his life in Madrid, where he wrote an alarming seventy-seven novels, dozens of plays, and hundreds of stories and pieces of journalism. Tristana was first published in 1892 and belongs in the group of novels from his mature period that were classified as “Novelas Españolas Contemporáneas,” all of which were set in present-day Spain and follow the basic conventions and aesthetics of European realism in the wake of Flaubert, Balzac, and the recently translated Russians. In Galdós’s words: “This is the system I have always adopted, to create a complex, heterogeneous, and extremely varied world, providing a broadly-based picture of society at a particular moment of history.”
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