Book description
'What spectacle is more august than that of a great king in exile? Who
is more worthy of respect than a brave man in misfortune?' When
"Henry Esmond" appeared in 1852, noted writers and critics of
the time acclaimed it as the best historical novel ever written. Set in
the reign of Queen Anne, the story follows the troubled progress of a
gentleman and an officer in Marlborough's army, as he painfully wrestles
with an emotional allegiance to the old Tory-Catholic England until,
disillusioned, he comes to terms of a kind with the Whiggish-Protestant
future. This change also entails a very uncomfortable switch in his
affections. The love story of Henry Esmond is charged with sombre,
unconscious emotions, yet is skilfully embedded into historical events
which are convincing but never too prominent.
William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811, but sent to
England at the age of six. He was educated at Charterhouse and at
Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1833 he settled in Paris, after a major
financial loss, and tried a career as a painter. It was here he met
nineteen-year-old Isabella Shawe, upon whom he based many of his
virtuous but weak heroines, and whom he married in 1836. A year later
they settled in London, where Thackeray turned seriously to journalism.
His writing for periodicals included The Yellowplush Correspondence,
which appeared first in Fraser's Magazine and then in 1841 in book
form. Around this time personal and domestic pressures caused the
already helpless Isabella to subside into a state of complete and
permanent mental collapse and the subsequent breakdown of the marriage
formed a central part of Thackeray's consciousness. His early work
centred around rogues and villains, most famously in The Luck of Barry
Lyndon (1844; revised as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. in 1856),
and in his masterpiece, Vanity Fair, which appeared in monthly parts
in 1847-8 and which most clearly reveals his socially satirical edge.
The Book of Snobs, which originally appeared as a series in Punch,
also attacks Victorian society with vicious wit. Thackeray's later
novels include The History of Pendennis, (1848-50); The History of
Henry Esmond, Esq. (1852); The Newcomes (1853-5); The Virginians,
(1857-9), which is a sequel to Henry Esmond; and The Adventures of
Philip (1860-62). He also wrote a series of lectures, The English
Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853), and numerous reviews,
articles and sketches, usually in the comic vein. From 1860 to 1862 he
also edited the Cornhill magazine. Thackeray died suddenly on
Christmas Eve, 1863.
