Book Description
First published in 1844, this is Thackeray's earliest substantial work of fiction and perhaps his most original. The text is that of Saintbury's 1908 Oxford edition which incorporates Thackeray's revisions.Download Description
Barry Lyndon - far from the best known, but by some critics acclaimed as the finest, of Thackeray's works - appeared originally as a serial a few years before VANITY FAIR was written; yet it was not published in book form, and then not by itself, until after the publication of VANITY FAIR, PENDENNIS, ESMOND and THE NEWCOMES had placed its author in the forefront of the literary men of the day. So many years after the event we cannot help wondering why the story was not earlier put in book form; for in its delineation of the character of an adventurer it is as great as VANITY FAIR, while for the local colour of history, if I may put it so, it is no undistinguished precursor of ESMOND. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A Victorian faces the XVIIIth. Century.
When one is about to take the big plunge and give oneself the trouble of making what is always -in our age of lighter reading, of course - the strenuous effort of reading a XIXth. Century novelist, one - at least me - must make the following question: What was this author's particular attitude, as a man (or woman) of the most bourgeois of all centuries, towards his/her preceding century, the most aristocratic and un-bourgeois XVIIIth. Century? If s/he scorns the XVIIIth. Century, or is indifferent to it, it's quite likely that the author in question is a bourgeois philistine regarding Victorian times as the undisputed acme of human civilization. If s/he is an admirer, than s/he is obviously starting out of a clear sense of alienation from his/her own society, and one should expect at least for this XIXth. Century _avis rara_, genuine sense of humor. Thackeray was one of such Victorians who realized the philisteism of his own society;Eça de Queiroz, his Portuguese disciple (who seems to have learned a lot from reading him) was another. Therefore: Read this book, QED.

A Satirical novel about a rascal's rise and fall.
Having seen the movie "Barry Lyndon" by Stanley Kubrick years ago, I was taken aback by this book which is so markedly different than the 1975 film. In the book, Lord Bullingdon is actually the hero, where Kubrickpresented him merely as a cowardly cad. Redmond Barry (later as BarryLyndon)deserves all the evils that befall him and his first personnarrative is quite humorous especially when blaming everyone for his ownshortcomings.Unfortunately, the ending leaves one a bit unsatisfied,quite like the dismal end of Mr.Lyndon himself.This novel is not on thelevel of Thackeray's "Vanity Fair", but fun to read nonetheless.

A Satirical novel about a rascal's rise and fall.
Having seen the movie "Barry Lyndon" by Stanley Kubrick years ago, I was taken aback by this book which is so markedly different than the 1975 film. In the book, Lord Bullingdon is actually the hero, where Kubrickpresented him merely as a cowardly cad. Redmond Barry (later as BarryLyndon)deserves all the evils that befall him and his first personnarrative is quite humorous especially when blaming everyone for his ownshortcomings.Unfortunately, the ending leaves one a bit unsatisfied,quite like the dismal end of Mr.Lyndon himself.This novel is not on thelevel of Thackeray's "Vanity Fair", but fun to read nonetheless.

An excellent book on one man's rise and fall.
Here, in this relatively obscure work, Thackeray is at his ironic and satiric best.Modern critics lightly dismiss the book as a piece of journalistic hack work, but it is much more than that.Redmond Barry, later Barry Lyndon, chronicles in a fairly sophistocated and always lighthearted manner his rise from a poor Irish country boy to the astral heights of polite English society from 1750-1820.Mr. Barry is always Machievellian in his way, and is quick and efficient with his sword.He is Odysseus, Holden Caulfield, Don Juan, and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert merged.In a word, he is very, very entertaining and very, very good.The book's only glaring flaw is it's belabored and uninspired ending.But it is much worth reading to watch Redmond Barry when young ... Read more

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This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program. ... Read more

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This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1872 edition by Smith, Elder & Co., London. ... Read more

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Edited by John Carey. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (32)

Immerse Yourself in Superb Writing
Reading "Vanity Fair," as long as it runs (800 pp. in this edition), is like floating down a slow river on a beautiful summer day, where you take in the scenery in all its rich texture, splendor and variation. Thackeray is a master of dialog, narrative flow, characterization (his insights into womens' characters is amazing) and plot timing. His satire of British (particularly English) social mores of the time is as biting as it is subtle. You can see and hear in the novel the inspiration for Henry James, Wilde, Waugh and Forrester.There are laugh out loud lines (English humor kind of sneaks up on you), and passages that are written so well as to take your breath away.

You can read about the plot and the cast of characters in this "Novel Without a Hero" in other reviews. If there is any flaw in the book, it is the somewhat two-dimensional aspect of most of the characters, Becky Sharp and William Dobbin being the exceptions. But much of Thackeray's intent was satire, which requires that characters be "of a type" to get the broader commentary or point across. Frankly, I found even the "flattest" of the most minor characters entirely convincing and appropriate in their places in the story.

My praise for this book lies in its stylistic brilliance and masterful execution.Dickens (Thackeray's more or less contemporary)was a great writer. In fact, Vanity Fair reminded me in places of the hilarious The Pickwick Papers. But at times Dickens plods through a story - e.g., Bleak House. Dickens was a novelist; Thackery was a story-teller, an omniscient director of a theatrical "production" that is a both drama and comedy. From time to time Thackeray deliberately "intrudes" into the story to take you into the author's confidence with gentle and usually humorous asides and observations about the action or the characters. But this device enhances rather than detracts from the story.

This particular edition has Professor(Oxford)John Carey's fine introduction (read it AFTER you've read the book or it will spoil the plot). Carey's extensive end notes- where he explains many of the English colloquialisms and slang of the period and various historical and other literary allusions - are both valuable and entertaining.

Vanity Fair is a great example of why we study the Humanities -- not only for what they tell us about ourselves but for the sheer delight of the experience.

Vanity Fair is Thackeray's masterpiece and one of England's greatest novels
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was born in Calcutta, educated in England and died on Christmas Eve 1863. Along the way he was an illustrator, lecturer, journalist, editor and most notably a great novelist. During his lifetime Mr. Thackeray's works ran second only to the immortal Boz Charles Dickens in popularity and copies sold. His masterpiece is "Vanity Fair."
The title is taken from Puritan John Bunyan's "Pilgrims Progress".Thackeray used it to as the ttle of his 800 page behemoth of a Victorian three-decker. Vanity Fair examines with irony, wit and realism life in Napoleonic Europe. The vast panoramic work has countless character but the main ones are:
1. Becky Sharp-one of the greatest bad girls in all of fiction who inspired Margaret Mitchell's Scarlet O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. Becky is the daughter of an impecunious painter and a French show girl. Her father dies and Becky must be sharp in intellect to survive. Becky is a shrewd baggage of lies, deceptions and intrigue who also is charming, talented in music and art.She beguiles the reader.Becky leaves Miss Pinkerton's Academy by tossing out the coach window Dr Johnson's dictionary symbolizing her earthy awareness of life as it is lived. She is a rebel and lives today as she did in 1848 when Thackeray created her.
2. Amelia Sedley will remind you of Melanie in GWTW. Her father loses his fortune and she marries the playboy idiot George Osborne. George is killed at Waterloo so Amelia is forced to raise their son Georgy in poverty. Amelia is an innocent ninny who lacks intelligence though her motherly love is commendable. The reader wants to smack her for her refusal to have sense enough to know that William Dobbin is madly in love with her!
She has a stupid brother Jos Sedley who becomes the love slave of Becky. He spends years in India and grows wealthy, fat and dumb.
3. George Osborne weds Amelia but at the Duchess of Richmond's Ball in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo he writes a love note to Becky. George is spoiled by his rich family. He is egotistical and greedy.
4. William Dobbin is the best friend of George and is in love with Amelia. He is a faithful and loving friend who is always there to help Amelia when she is in in a jam. Life a faithful old horse who might be named Dobbin he is a man with a good heart and mind. His love for a married woman is based on Thackeray's own infatuation with a married woman Jane Brookfield.
5. Rawdon Crawley is a British officer who is the son of the old rogue Sir Pitt Crawley of Queen's Crawley estate. He loves gambling, girls, drink and Becky Sharp. Becky will have a stormy marriage which will founder on her affair with Lord Steyne. Rawdon's borther is Pitt Crawley Jr. who inherits the estate and weds a good woman named Jane Sheepshanks.
Thackeray's work will hold your attention despite its great length. His account of the civilian experience of the battle of Waterloo is superb. Thackeray has humor, pathos, sadness and joy within these pages. To fully enjoy Vanity Fair you need to read it rather than watch it on a DVD! Victorian novels are often long due to the fact they were published serially in magazines.

Universal
The book is really good, even though it is really long, it is not boring. So many characters and things going on. And it still surprises me after all those years relationships have still the same tricks. The human physiology never changes.

Great...Great...Great...
I picked up this book, and groaned at the sight. 700 pages of dense small text?! Numerous minor characters to remember? Arghhh...

But then, when I finally got enough time to read it, it is brilliant. Thackeray is a great social critic-and many of his criticisms of the upper class could be applied to high school and situations today. The novel is an epic, a journey to be sure, and is better than a current day soap opera, as some of the reviewers said. I thought it was more like Jane Austen - romance + criticism + 5 more families + many more minor relationships.

I'm definitely looking forward to rereading this book again (maybe not for a while though-it's a LONG book!) when I'm older

Uncanny!
I had this book on my shelf unread for years, thinking it was tedious and boring, but what a revelation when I picked it up after seeing the movie. The note of the other reviewer re C.L.R. James, the left-wing Trinidadian author and historian, was apt, and uncanny, as I found this book could have easily be called "Westmoorings", an area in Trinidad populated by people of the exact mindset (and indeed I have heard many times the very same spoken words as the characters). Indeed, there are many places in the Caribbean, or world, populated by people like this. I see why this book is historically taught in literature in high school in the US but not in the Caribbean. ... Read more

Book Description
A collection of verse from Dickens, English novelist, and considered by many to be the greatest of his country, known for his works that indicted society's mistreatment and abuse of the poor, especially children; and Thackeray, English novelist and satirist, best remembered for his satirical and moralistic studies of upper and middle-class English life. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing. ... Read more

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Published in 1853, William Thackeray's novel is set in the reign of Queen Anne and follows the troubled progress of a gentleman and an officer in Marlborough's army as he wrestles with his allegiance to the old Tory-Catholic England until, disillusioned, he comes to terms of a kind with the Whiggish-Protestant future.

Orphaned in the England of the later Stuarts, Henry Esmond is raised by his aristocratic, Jacobite relatives the Castlewoods.As a young man he falls in love with both Lady Castlewood and Beatrix, her beautiful, headstrong daughter, and is inspired to join the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to reinstate James Stuart to the throne. The book is written in the form of memoirs of Henry Esmond who was an settler of Virginia in the early 1700's.

Thackeray valued Henry Esmond more than any of his other novels and it displays many of his own memories and emotions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Esmond Confesses: He Could Not Help Outshining All Those About Him
This is a rich, complex, but ultimately unsatisfying novel about a young man of principle making his way in the corrupt and luxurious world of the 1700's English aristocracy.

Henry Esmond narrates the story of his own life, and the thing that sinks the novel is that he's always just a little too aware of his own virtue. He shows how venal, corrupt, and selfish all the other characters are, while refusing to admit he's secretly very impressed with his own demure Victorian primness. He's really Thackeray, the moralist with a guilty conscience, pretending to be shocked by the salacious 18th century, but all the time pandering to his own prurient desires.

The other characters in this novel all exist merely as foils for Esmond's virtues. His cousin Beatrice, as witty and seductive as Becky Sharp, is never given a fair break. Thackeray's man Esmond, while pretending to sing her praisies, actually hits her with every cliche known to man. Because she's clever, she must be evil. Because she's beautiful, she must be vain, and because she's vain she must be cruel. Because she has ambitions, she must be selfish. Never once does Esmond say anything good about her -- but supposedly he's heart broken when she rejects him time and again. It's more like, he hates her guts and revels in snitching her out behind her back. Esmond is supposed to be like loyal and loving Gatsby, and Trixie is his unattainable Daisy. But he writes about her like he's Nick Carraway sneering at Myrtle Wilson. It's not pretty.

Meanwhile, Esmond is debating whether to remain loyal to his family's heritage, and support the claim of exiled prince James Stuart to the English throne, or choose the winning side and support King George I. It would be a good dilemna, but Thackeray cops out by presenting the doomed and royal Stuart prince (who in real life was brave, generous, religious, and fair-minded) as some sort of creepy sexual pervert. Again, the Victorian Thackeray thinks he's being heroic by finding dirtiness in everyone and everything.

This book would have been so much better if it had been written by Sir Walter Scott fifty years before. Then Trixie would have been a real damsel, Esmond would have been a noble knight, and James Stuart would have been doomed but noble and good. Thackeray subverts the romance of Sir Walter Scott's historical fictions, but only in the meanest, most cynical way. HENRY ESMOND has less in common with IVANHOE and more in common with LESS THAN ZERO.

A very agreeable novel
This book has been called the greatest historical novel ever and I would agree that it is a really good book. The writing is clear, lively and beautiful, full of color. This is the first time I've read Thackeray and I really admire his prose.Like all novels that are close to 515 pages, the novel has some slow points, such as during some of the the military battles Esmond is involved in; or in the last part of the conflict between Francis Esmond the edler and Lord Mohun which is rather melodramatic. Sometimes the prose does get slightly unclear. The first few pages of the novel are rather unintelligible; I think Thackeray here was trying to make fun of the vapidly pompous storytelling of other writers of his age. Thackeray then indulges in some very confusing discussion of the family tree of Henry Esmond, but after this the story overall is pretty easy to follow and is full of some very interesting characters, Henry Esmond most of all. Don't worry about trying to grasp the particulars about who is related to who.

Thackeray throws at the reader a great deal of names and aristocratic titles and it might be hard for the reader to understand exactly who is who. Perhaps an introduction attached to the book would be useful for the reader to give a basic history of the noblemen and kings and princes whom this story portrays from late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Englund. This would have made the reading for me a little bit easier. The central event driving the turmoil described in this book was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when one Dutch Protestant faction of the British royal family invaded and overthrew James II who had given legal equality to the Catholic religion (or something).

But overall the story of this book flows very nicely and gives the reader a more realistic look than others might of British aristocrats during the period. A great many of the aristocrats portrayed here aredissolute, irresponsible and even brutish. John Churchill AKA the Duke of Marlborough is portrayed as somebody who while very brave in battle, will screw anyone high and low to advance his own material resources and has ever changing loyalty to anyone who will give him such resources, no matter what different political party or even enemy of Britain that might be. Esmond while engaging in pious rhetoric about military valor, mentions his disgust and alienation from the jingoist spirit in that that the battles in France and Germany he was involved in, usually ended with British troops engaging in rape and pillage, burning whole villages and crops, terrorizing helpless women and children, etc. One of the elector princes hanging out in France, was in line to become James III (or whatever number it was) if his sister Queen Anne would make peace with him and designate him as her successor. The whole Esmond family piously worships this elector but finds out when they smuggle him back into England that he is really a rather disgusting, vapid fellow.

Esmond's young lord Frank Esmond like his father is also a rather dissolute character. I enjoyed the blatant irony Esmond used in describing Frank telling his mother that he was very busy with harsh military engagements on the European mainland, thus he could not visit her back home in Englund. Frank was indeed trying to nock down fortifications in France and Belguim, but only the fortifications of hot young aristocratic ladies.

One can pick at little things in the novel--lack of clarity in some places, the lack of clarity of and the amount of time it takes the narrator to inform the reader of the exact nature of the secret told by the elderLord Frank Esmond on his death bed to Henry--but I finished it with a great feeling of satisfaction.

All the good ones seem to be out of print
The History of Henry Esmond begins with the sweet Lady Castlewood stumbling upon the lonely abandoned Henry as she tours her new home.Her husband has inherited the estate and his illegitimate 11-year old cousin Henry, is fearful of the reception he will receive from the new owners.Will they throw him out?Treat him like a servant?When they instead embrace him into their family (which includes their daughter Beatrix and son Frank) he is overjoyed.What he slowly begins to realize (as he first becomes their almost-son, and later the de facto head of the household) is that this blessing is more complex than it first appears.

Throughout the book, Henry longs for a family, and although he is a part of the Castlewood's, he is also always an outsider.They come to rely on him because they know he will sacrifice more for them then any real son or brother ever would.With every page, the Castlewood family becomes increasingly complex - some relationships are strengthened and some are slowly destroyed in such subtle ways that when a catastrophe comes, it seems inevitable, and at the same time, surprising.True motives are hidden and twisted and everybody longs for a kind of love not given.Through it all, we have Henry's narration (although he speaks of himself in the third person), which casts a lonely and reflective tone over all the events.A beautiful book.

One of the most intersting novels in English I've ever read.
I believe that penchant for the moralistic (and add here more than a snipett of post-modern political corectness)from English-speaking readers has slighted judgements about this novel, which is a novel about people with sloppy morals in a time of sloppy political intrigue and sloppy moral standards offering a contrast with the philistine ambience of Thackeray's own age. I found the novel simply _lush_, and think that Hollywood has in it a treat in store for any filmmaker of genius who wants to emulate Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Get ahold of a copy and enjoy!

A Masterpiece
Although for some reason forgotten by the US public, "The History of Henry Esmond" is one of the finest books ever written in English language. May be it has lost its luster because it offers no excess ofblood-spilling and sexual adventures, but instead finds its way to describethe deepest and most vulnerable chambers of the human heart. I have read ahandful of books, be it in English, French, German or Russian, thatdescribed the human strengths and weaknesses while tying them to acharacter one can relate to with such skill. People who do not like it, itseems, are just shamed by the morals offered in such a book, and are quickto forget it.I read "Henry Esmond" when I was a young boy, andnow, half a century later, it hasn't lost a beat. ... Read more

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

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“The Paris Sketch Book” is a look at France shortly after the time of Napoleon. The author William Makepeace Thackeray is famous for his dry witt and for his other classic books “Vanity Fair” and “Barry Lyndon”. He is also credited with inventing a new word ‘snob’ in his novel “The Book of Snobs, by One of Themselves” ... Read more

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In a remarkable piece of literary detective work, Mr. Spielmann has given a detailed exposition of Thackeray's contributions to the English magazine "Punch". An extremely important study for students of English literature and literary journalism. Valuable for the delineation of the Victorian era.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY:Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. ... Read more