The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.- Round About Papers

William Makepeace Thackeray

May 2015 · Read Books Ltd

About this ebook

This vintage book contains William Makepeace Thackeray 1844 picaresque novel, "The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esquire". It is the story of Barry Lydon, a member of the Irish Gentry who attempts to transition to English Aristocracy. The beginning of his life is fraught with duels and wars, and he eventually makes his fortune as a gambler. The character of Barry Lyndon was based on the life and exploits of the Anglo-Irish fortune-hunter Andrew Robinson Stoney. A fantastically clever and often humourous tale, "The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq." constitutes a worthy addition to any bookshelf, and is a veritable must-read for fans of Thackeray's masterful work. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 - 1863) was an esteemed English novelist during the nineteenth century. He became famous for his satirical novels, the most important and influential of which was "Vanity Fair". 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.