The Slum has 23 chapters and about 81 thousand words, which comes to around 270 pages, varying with the format and typography of each edition.
The novel has no parts and no chapter titles, only numbers from I to XXIII. The chapters are uneven: the shortest, XVII, has about 1.2 thousand words, and the longest, X, about 6.7 thousand. The average comes to around 3.5 thousand words per chapter.
The book opens with the shopkeeper João Romão, a clerk in a tavern, and closes with him having the abolitionists who come to the door shown into the drawing room.