Burlesques, from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, Including Juvenilia

William Makepeace Thackeray

nov 2005 · Cosimo, Inc.

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Having examined the wounds in his side, legs, head, and throat, the old hermit (a skilful leech) knelt down by the side of the vanquished one and said, 'Sir Knight, it is my painful duty to state to you that you are in exceedingly dangerous condition, and will not probably survive.'-from "A Legend of the Rhine"Thackeray was one of the most popular writers of fiction of his time, but few readers are familiar with works beyond his 1847 novel Vanity Fair. This omnibus volume collects some of his lesser-known but equally vivid and delightfully caustic writing, including comic short novels sending up chivalrous romances, humorous poetry tweaking popular verse of the era, and a selection of letters and other writings from before his work as a professional man of letters. Complete with whimsical illustrations, some by the author, this is essential reading for lovers of 19th-century British literature.British journalist and novelist WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-1863) was a regular contributor to some of the most prominent periodicals of his day, including Punch, where his satires of English snobbery attracted public attention and acclaim.

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William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India, where his father was in service to the East India Company. After the death of his father in 1816, he was sent to England to attend school. Upon reaching college age, Thackeray attended Trinity College, Cambridge, but he left before completing his degree. Instead, he devoted his time to traveling and journalism. Generally considered the most effective satirist and humorist of the mid-nineteenth century, Thackeray moved from humorous journalism to successful fiction with a facility that was partially the result of a genial fictional persona and a graceful, relaxed style. At his best, he held up a mirror to Victorian manners and morals, gently satirizing, with a tone of sophisticated acceptance, the inevitable failure of the individual and of society. He took up the popular fictional situation of the young person of talent who must make his way in the world and dramatized it with satiric directness in The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), with the highest fictional skill and appreciation of complexities inherent within the satiric vision in his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847), and with a great subtlety of point of view and background in his one historical novel, Henry Esmond (1852). Vanity Fair, a complex interweaving in a vast historical panorama of a large number of characters, derives its title from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and attempts to invert for satirical purposes, the traditional Christian image of the City of God. Vanity Fair, the corrupt City of Man, remains Thackeray's most appreciated and widely read novel. It contrasts the lives of two boarding-school friends, Becky Sharp and Amelia Smedley. Constantly attuned to the demands of incidental journalism and his sense of professionalism in his relationship with his public, Thackeray wrote entertaining sketches and children's stories and published his humorous lectures on eighteenth-century life and literature. His own fiction shows the influence of his dedication to such eighteenth-century models as Henry Fielding, particularly in his satire, which accepts human nature rather than condemns it and takes quite seriously the applicability of the true English gentleman as a model for moral behavior. Thackeray requested that no authorized biography of him should ever be written, but members of his family did write about him, and these accounts were subsequently published.