William Makepeace Thackeray, página 4 de 11

This is Thackerays first full-length novel, which appeared in serialised instalments in Frasers Magazine between May 1839 and February 1840. The story of Catherine was written by Mr. Thackeray, under the name of Ikey Solomons, Jun., to counteract the injurious influence of some popular fictions of that day, which made heroes of highwaymen and burglars, and created a false sympathy for the vicious and criminal.With this purpose, the author chose for the subject of his story a woman named Catherine Hayes, who was burned at Tyburn, in 1726, for the deliberate murder of her husband, under very revolting circumstances. Mr. Thackerays aim obviously was to describe the career of this wretched woman and her associates with such fidelity to truth as to exhibit the danger and folly of investing such persons with heroic and romantic qualities.

VANITY FAIR, Thackeray's panoramic, satirical saga of corruption at all levels of English society, was published in 1847 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. It chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family. Becky's fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelia's dissolute husband; when he is killed at Waterloo, Amelia and her child are left penniless, while Becky and her husband Rawdon Crawley rise in the world, managing to lead a high life in London solely on the basis of their shrewdness. (The chapter entitled "How to Live on Nothing" is a classic.) Thackeray's subtitle, "A Novel Without a Hero," is understating the case; his view of humanity in this novel is distinctly bleak and deliberately antiheroic. Critics of the time misunderstood the book, decrying it as (among other things) vicious, vile, and odious. But VANITY FAIR has endured as one of the great comic novels of all time, and a landmark in the history of realism in fiction.

A Novel Without a Hero is an unparalleled satire of 19th Century British Society, written by William Makepeace Thackeray and originally published in serial format from 1847 to 1848. Meet the charming and cunning Becky Sharp, insinuating upward through the social ranks with the fervor of Napoleon plowing through Europe, and the subtlety of a butterfly. More so than any other picaresque character, Becky Sharp's name has become synonymous with a gold-digging, amoral, opportunistic social charmer who is also shrewd and strong - a portrait of a complex woman of her time. She is the anti-heroine you love to hate, and yet at the same time cannot help but secretly admire her methods.

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A large portion of the public, and especially that smaller section of the community, the readers of books, will not easily forget the shock, as universal as it was unexpected, which was produced at Christmas, 1863, by the almost incredible intelligence of the death of William Makepeace Thackeray. The mournful news was repeated at many a Christmas table, that he, who had led the simple Colonel Newcome to his solemn and touching end, would write no more. The circumstance was so startling from the suddenness of the great loss which society at large had sustained, that it was some time before people could realise the dismal truth of the report.It will be easily understood, without elaborating on so saddening a theme, with how much keener a blow this heavy bereavement must have struck the surviving relatives of the great novelist. It does not come within our province to speak of the paralysing effect of such emotion; it is sufficient to recall that Thackerays death, with its viii overwhelming sorrow, left, in the hour of their trial, his two young daughters deprived of the fatherly active mind which had previously shielded from them the graver responsibilities of life, with the additional anxiety of being forced to act in their own interests at the very time such exertions were peculiarly distracting.It may be remembered that the author of Vanity Fair had but recently erected, from his own designs, the costly and handsome mansion in which he anticipated passing the mellower years of his life; a dwelling in every respect suited to the high standing of its owner, and, as has been said by a brother writer, worthy of one who really represented literature in the great world, and who, planting himself on his books, yet sustained the character of his profession with all the dignity of a gentleman....

We know exceedingly little of the genesis and progress of Esmond. "It did not seem to be a part of our lives as Pendennis was," says Lady Ritchie, though she wrote part of it to dictation. She "only heard Esmond spoken of very rarely". Perhaps its state was not the less gracious. The Milton girls found Paradise Lost a very considerable part of their livesand were not the happier.But its parallels are respectable. The greatest things have a way of coming "all so still" into the world. We wranglethat is, those of us who are not content simply not to knowabout the composition of Homer, the purpose of the Divina Commedia, the probable plan of the Canterbury Tales, the Ur-Hamlet. Nobody put preliminary advertisements in the papers, you see, about these things: there was a discreditable neglect of the first requirements of the public. So it is with Esmond. There is, I thought, a reference to it in the Brookfield letters; but in several searches I cannot find it. To his mother he speaks of the book as "grand and melancholy", and to Lady Stanley as of "cut-throat melancholy". It is said to have been sold for a thousand poundsthe same sum that Master Shallow lent Falstaff on probably inferior security. Those who knew thought well of itwhich is not wholly surprising.

The Paris Sketch Book of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh and the Irish Sketch BookSir,It becomes every man in his station to acknowledge and praise virtue wheresoever he may find it, and to point it out for the admiration and example of his fellow-men.Some months since, when you presented to the writer of these pages a small account for coats and pantaloons manufactured by you, and when you were met by a statement from your creditor, that an immediate settlement of your bill would be extremely inconvenient to him, your reply was, Mon Dieu, sir, let not that annoy you; if you want money, as a gentleman often does in a strange country, I have a thousand-franc note at my house which is quite at your service.History or experience, sir, makes us acquainted with so few actions that can be compared to yours,an offer like this from a stranger and a tailor seems to me so astonishing,that you must pardon me for thus making your virtue public, and acquainting the English nation with your merit and your name. Let me add, sir, that you live on the first floor; that your cloths and fit are excellent, and your charges moderate and just; and, as a humble tribute of my admiration, permit me to lay these volumes at your feet.Your obliged, faithful servant,M. A. TITMARSH.ABOUT half of the sketches in these volumes have already appeared in print, in various periodical works. A part of the text of one tale, and the plots of two others, have been borrowed from French originals; the other stories, which are, in the main, true, have been written upon facts and characters, that came within the Authors observation during a residence in Paris.As the remaining papers relate to public events, which occurred during the same period, or to Parisian Art and Literature, he has ventured to give his publication the title which it bears.