#thackeray_william

British novelist (1812-1870)

In his early 20s Dickens worked as a journalist, writing reports of law court proceedings and Parliamentary debates, and short essays on the life and manners of the time (later collected as Sketches by Boz). It was not until the success of his first novel Pickwick Papers, when he was 25, that he made writing a full-time career. He composed large parts of his novels in dialogue, and was proud of his gift for showing character through speech alone; he also gave his minor characters (pot-boys, shop-customers, carters, oystermen, toddlers) turns of speech or physical eccentricities to make them instantly memorable -- another theatrical technique. This character-vividness is matched by a sustained commentary on human nature and society: Dickens consistently savaged the humbug and petty-mindedness of the middle classes who bought his books, and said that human happiness comes not from law, religion, politics or social structures but from gratuitous, individual acts of kindness. In his later books, notably Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, savagery predominated over sentimentality to an extent rivalled only in Zola.

DAVID COPPERFIELD  (1849) Dickens' own favourite among his novels, this tells the story (in the first person, as if an autobiography) of a boy growing up: his unhappy childhood and adolescence, his first jobs and first loveaffair, and the way he finally transmutes his experience into fiction and becomes a writer. As often in Dickens' books, subsidiary characters seem to steal the show: the grim Murdstones, the optimistic Micawbers, salt-of-the-earth Peggotty, feckless Steerforth and above all the viperish hypocrite Uriah Heep. But the book's chief interest is the developing character of Copperfield himself. Apparently passive, at other people's mercy, he learns and grows by each experience, maturing before our eyes.

Dickens' novels, in order of publication, are Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood. His shorter works include A Christmas Carol, A Child's History of England and three collections of articles, Sketches by Boz, American Notes and The Uncommercial Traveller.

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Nicholas Nickleby

Oliver Twist

To David Copperfield : see also pathway

Novels of 'growing up', using a biographical framework to give a picture (documentary, satirical or both at once) of society : Henry Fielding, Tom Jones James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

To Dickens' more savage social novels : Mrs Gaskell, North and South John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot

To his more relaxed tableaux of human life : H.G. Wells, Kipps Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis Tobias Smollett , The Adventures of Roderick Random George Gissing, The Nether World

British novelist and journalist (1811-1863)

Until the success of Vanity Fair, when he was 36, Thackeray earned his living as a journalist and cartoonist (especially for Punch magazine) and as a humorous lecturer. His first intention in his novels was to write satirical biographies', letting the reader discover the follies of the world at the same time as his naive young heroes and heroines. But the characters took over, and his books now seem more genial and affectionate than barbed. He invented characters as grotesque as Dickens, caricatures of human viciousness or folly, but he wrote of them with a kind of disapproving sympathy, a fellowfeeling for their humanity, which Dickens lacks. Humbug, ambition and the seven deadly sins are Thackeray's subjects -- and so are friendship, kindness and warm-heartedness. At a time when many English novels were more like sermons, clamorous for reform, he wrote moral comedies, showing us what fools we are.

VANITY FAIR  (1847) The book interweaves the lives of two friends, gentle Amelia and calculating, brilliant Becky Sharp. Becky is an impoverished orphan determined to make her fortune; Amelia believes in love, marriage and family life. Each of them marries; Amelia's husband has an affair with Becky, and dies at Waterloo with her name on his lips; Becky's husband finds her entertaining a rich, elderly admirer and abandons her. In the end, each girl gets what she longed for, but not in the way she hoped. Amelia, after ten years pining for her dead husband, is cruelly told by Becky of his infidelity, and turns for comfort to a kind man who has worshipped her from afar, and who now offers her marriage, a home and all the comforts of obscurity. Becky's son inherits his father's money and gives her an annuity on condition that she never speaks to him again; we see her at the end of the book, queening it in Bath, an idle, rich member of the society she has always aspired to join and whose values Thackeray sums up in the title of the book.

Thackeray's other books include Pendennis (the story of a selfish young man, spoilt by his mother, who goes to London to make his fortune as a writer) and its sequel The Newcomes, Henry Esmond and its sequel The Virginians, and a number of shorter tales and stories including Barry Lyndon, The Great Hoggarty, Diamond and the spoof fairy-tale The Rose and the Ring.

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Pendennis

Jane Austen, Emma Arnold Bennett, The Card Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay Eudora Welty, The Ponder Heart