Thackeray the Writer

In Thackeray the Writer: From Journalism to 'Vanity Fair' Edgar Harden traced the emergence of Thackeray's writing career from its early roots in journalism to the magnificent achievement of Vanity Fair. In this the sequel volume, Edgar Harden conveys Thackeray's continuing development as a novelist, lecturer in Great Britain and the United States, familiar essayist, and shaper of cultural awareness as editor of a major new journal. He shows how this new phase in Thackeray's career grew out of the achievement of Vanity Fair, where he has so powerfully articulated the comical and absurd system of forces defining the human existence that he and his readers shared. Articulating the connections among Thackeray's varied works and activities, Harden reveals the broadening imaginative growth and deepening understanding of a supremely insightful observer and critic of human life. Emphasizing the indeterminacy of human awareness, especially through his use of narrators who are unable to achieve full understanding - often comically so - Thackeray also amusingly and profoundly plays off the contemporary against the historical, revealing how the passage of time can both illuminate the significance of human behaviour as well as call it into question. With continued comic exuberance as well as sympathetic understanding, in the works after Vanity Fair Thackeray continues his brilliant success as a masterful articulator of the ambiguity of our motives, and of their archetypal re-enactment in human history.