Catherine

William Makepeace Thackeray

Nov 2015 · Read Books Ltd

About this ebook

This vintage book contains William Thackeray's 1840 novel, "Catherine". Originally serialized in Fraser's Magazine between 1839 and 1840, it is an example of Thackeray's attempts to criticize the Newgate school of crime fiction, which Thackeray believed championed and glorified criminality. So strong did he feel about this, that he even criticized Dickens for his various portrayals of good-hearted streetwalkers and charming pickpockets. A masterfully-written and brutally gritty novel, Catherine is recommended for fans of crime fiction, and is not to be missed by fans of Thackeray's seminal work. The chapters of this volume include: "Introducing to the Reader the chief Personage of this Narrative", "In Which are Depicted the Pleasure of a Sentimental Attachment", "In Which a Narcotic is Administered, and a Great Deal of Genteel Society Depicted", "In Which Mrs. Catherine Becomes an Honest Woman Again", etcetera. Many antiquarian texts such as this are increasingly hard to come by and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

About the author

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.