Benito Perez Galdos was born at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, May 10, 1845.  The details of his early life are entirely unknown except to himself, his invincible modesty denying them even to personal friends like the writer of the only biography of him (a meagre one) that has appeared, Leopoldo Alas.  He studied in the local Instituto, and must have profited by his opportunities, for the literary attainments shown in his novels can have resulted only from persistent labor from youth up.  In 1863 he went to Madrid to study law in the University, but with little eagerness for his future profession.  He already dreamed of a literary career, and tried the hand of an apprentice at journalism and at pieces for the theatre, none of which, happily, as he has since said, was represented.  In 1867, his mind being engaged at once by the revolutionary agitation of his own time, and by the similar interest of the still more violent upheaval in Spain in the first years of the century, he began a kind of historical novel, La Fontana de Oro, in which he undertook to study the inner motives and history of that period, so all-important for modern Spanish history, and to illustrate the detestable character of Ferdinand VII as it appeared in one of his most disgraceful moments.  It was four years, however, before the book was completed and published.  During this time Galdos had visited France and had returned to Madrid by way of Barcelona, where he was when the Revolution of 1868, which deprived Queen Isabel of her throne, broke out.  This he greeted with delight, believing the realization of his conservatively radical political views to be at hand; but he speedily found himself sadly disillusioned.  In 1871 his novel appeared, making no sensation, but attracting the favorable attention of a few competent judges.  The road was at last opened before him, and he pressed steadily on in it.

His imagination had now become deeply stirred by both the political and the social aspects of the great period of the awakening of Spain, when, to begin with, she freed herself by heroic efforts from the Napoleonic tyranny, and then made her incipient advances towards modernity in the face of the opposition of the representatives of her traditional religion and of her outworn social order.  In 1872 he had completed a second novel, El Audaz, in which a phase of the struggle earlier than that studied in La Fontana de Oro, was his theme.  Then, taking a suggestion perhaps from the success of the historical novels of Erckmann-Chatrian, he began a succession of consecutive tales, Episodios Nacionales, as he called them, which, in two series, cover the whole agitated time from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 down to the death of Ferdinand VII in 1833.  Each series has its hero, whose fortunes afford a slender thread binding the tales together, and whose participation in the successive events or crises of the War of Independence and of the reign of Ferdinand