William Makepeace Thackeray

Felix Charlemont fights in the Napoleonic wars, and one battle scene verbally prefigures Thackeray 's account of Waterloo in Vanity Fair: The roar of artillery and musketry continued long after Charlemont fell; at length...

The paired heroines of The Lady's Mile each tread close to being seduced across that camouflaged barrier after each has, for quite different reasons, entered a loveless marriage. The beautiful, aristocratic, and noble but impoverished...

Pearl Richards (later JOH ) read widely as a child and adolescent, and her parents' liberal views (and considerable fortune) meant that she could pursue her tastes in both the lending libraries and the less...

The title of the Blackstick Papers alludes to the character of the Fairy Blackstick from her father 's Rose and the Ring: she places her essays under the kindly tutelage of this spirit...

The protagonist is called Becky Sharp, a name which interestingly combines a clue as to self-portraiture with homage to Thackeray 's equally intelligent though less sensitive and feeling heroine. This Becky is a child who...

EG attended the opening of the Manchester Free Library , the first major, free public lending library in England, at which speakers included Charles Dickens , Edward Bulwer Lytton and William Makepeace Thackeray .

John Blackwood was in general delighted with the manuscript of Amos Barton. Thackeray , too, read it and was impressed. Blackwood 's few criticisms (particularly of the ending, which he found comparatively feeble) appalled...

Among five favourable reviews later quoted, the Daily Telegraph offered an apparently enthusiastic plot-summary. The Liverpool Daily Post likened the work to Thackeray 's Henry Esmond, 1852.

Harriet Martineau , finding the work attributed to herself even by members of her own family, felt that the unknown author must know not only my books but myself very well. . . . With...

Two things about this novel gave offence initially and had a long-term effect on its reputation: its treating the nasty topic of deformity, and its involving the hero emotionally with three women (his mother as...

Lady Charlotte Guest , who was first married ten years before this book appeared, received a copy of it as a gift from her husband and read it at his behest. It was after...

CB was stung by Elizabeth Rigby 's attack on the second edition in the Quarterly, which entered the debate over governesses by reviewing the novel alongside Thackeray 's Vanity Fair and the Report of...

The Westminster Review said this novel was in itself a London Directory, which could have brought its author sponsorship from shopkeepers mentioned, and ought in turn to pay advertising tax.Thackeray picked...

Savkar Altinel in the Times Literary Supplement was highly critical of this novel, but the following year Patricia Craig , in the same journal, was more appreciative, crediting ZF with a sure touch with...

Mary Russell Mitford spoke for the more conventional side of early nineteenth-century opinion when she wrote that in spite of her terrible coarseness, [she] has certainly done two or three marvelously clever things.