appeared in 1873. Successive episodes appeared in fits and starts until the forty-sixth and final novel, Cánovas, appeared in 1912. Every so often, Pérez Galdós seemed to grow tired of this project and stated that he would not write another episode. However, the public bought them avidly, despite the criticism that was levelled at his other works, and they remained the basis of his contemporary reputation and income. He conducted an enormous amount of research in the writing of these stories because official reports, newspaper accounts and histories were often rigidly partisan. To achieve balance and a wider perspective, Pérez Galdós 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 is often critical of the official versions of the events he describes and often ran into problems with the Catholic Church, then a dominant force in Spanish cultural life. Other novels Literary critic José Montesinos classified Galdos's 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 probably 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 Pérez Galdós was an enthusiastic traveller. His novels display a detailed knowledge of not only Madrid but many