Thackeray: A Collection of Critical Essays

William Makepeace Thackeray, author of The Book of Snobs, Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond, and The Newcomes, was a controversial figure even at the height of his popularity. Critics responded to him with hostility or high esteem, never indifference. In the 1850's, for example, Henry James, Sr., argued that Thackeray had "no ideas," and was "merely a sounding-board against which his experiences thump and resound." Yet George Eliot called Thackeray "the most powerful of living novelists," and author G.K. Chesterton, a contributor to this volume, notes that "Thackeray is always interesting; even in the passages which are bad." As the essays in this book show, Thackeray was a brilliant master of language whose "chaotic" narrative structure and neoclassical conventions are only imperfectly understood. The contributors present the modern issues surrounding this defiant, often self-conscious prose artist who once wrote of himself: "I take a sort of pleasure in saying destructive things...in a good humoured jolly way."