THE ROSE AND THE RING

William Makepeace Thackeray

Feb 2019 · YouHui Culture Publishing Company

About this ebook

The Rose and the Ring

by William Makepeace Thackeray

PRELUDE

It happened that the undersigned spent the last Christmas season

in a foreign city where there were many English children.

In that city, if you wanted to give a child's party, you could

not even get a magic-lantern or buy Twelfth-Night

characters--those funny painted pictures of the King, the Queen,

the Lover, the Lady, the Dandy, the Captain, and so on-- with

which our young ones are wont to recreate themselves at this

festive time.

My friend Miss Bunch, who was governess of a large family that

lived in the Piano Nobile of the house inhabited by myself and my

young charges (it was the Palazzo Poniatowski at Rome, and

Messrs. Spillmann, two of the best pastrycooks in Christendom,

have their shop on the ground floor): Miss Bunch, I say, begged

me to draw a set of Twelfth-Night characters for the amusement of

our young people.

She is a lady of great fancy and droll imagination, and having

looked at the characters, she and I composed a history about

them, which was recited to the little folks at night, and served

as our FIRESIDE PANTOMIME.

Our juvenile audience was amused by the adventures of Giglio and

Bulbo, Rosalba and Angelica. I am bound to say the fate of the

Hall Porter created a considerable sensation; and the wrath of

Countess Gruffanuff was received with extreme pleasure.

If these children are pleased, thought I, why should not others

be amused also? In a few days Dr. Birch's young friends will be

expected to reassemble at Rodwell Regis, where they will learn

everything that is useful, and under the eyes of careful ushers

continue the business of their little lives.

But, in the meanwhile, and for a brief holiday, let us laugh and

be as pleasant as we can. And you elder folk--a little joking,

and dancing, and fooling will do even you no harm. The author

wishes you a merry Christmas, and welcomes you to the Fireside

Pantomime.

W. M. THACKERAY. December 1854.

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.