Brenan summarizes the limitations of the Liberal policy of disentallment, limitations which Galdós must have ben acutely aware of during the period he wrote El abuelo:

[...] the number of the large estates increased until the greater part of the land in Spain had passed into the possession of a class of nouveaux riches who worked it with a sharper eye to profit than the feudal landlords had done... (The reform) broke up the stagnation of Spanish rural life and brought with it a degree of prosperity that had not been known before, (but) it also led to greater inequality in its distribution and to a destruction of those safeguards (among which must be numbered the power and wealth of the Church) that the poor had before possessed.

Ibid., p. 109.

Sigurd Burckhardt, «How not to Murder Ceasar», Centennial Review, XI, Spring, 1967, p. 147. Gonzalo Sobejano notes the sense in which Galdós' drama of the late period as a whole is focused «contra el fanatismo y la hipocresía de la España inmovilizada en sus sueños de grandeza, contra la exaltación fratricida de las dos Españas, contra la avaricia ruin que trata de detener la ambición moralmente generosa...» «Razón y suceso de la dramática galdosiana», Anales Galdosianos, V, 1970, p. 45.

K. Marx and F. Engels, Works (Moscow: Gospolitizat, 1958), X, 448.

Marx and Engels, X, p. 344.

Marx and Engels, X, 322.

Marx and Engels, X, 483.

V. 1. Lenin, Works, XVIII, 545.

Marx and Engels, XVIII, 43.

Marx and Engels, XII, 47.

100

Marx and Engels, XII, 49.