Description
The Luck of Barry Lyndon was first published as a serial in Fraser’s Magazine, then later as a complete volume entitled The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.—a title Thackeray disliked, but that was selected by his publisher. Thackeray had great difficulty composing the novel, and found himself frequently frustrated in his attempts to get Barry out of yet another jam. Ultimately he was displeased with his work, and considered it one of his lesser novels.
Despite Thackeray’s neglect, Barry Lyndon is a bright satire filled with many genuinely funny moments. Barry is the quintessential unreliable narrator, and through his outrageous boasts and tall tales he becomes not just the target of the satire, but its very agent as well. Fortunately modern critics have viewed Barry Lyndon in a much more favorable light than Thackeray’s contemporaries, and even Thackeray himself: today it’s considered by some critics as one of his finest works.
Description
Vanity Fair is perhaps Thackeray’s most famous novel. First serialized over the course of 19 volumes in Punch Magazine and first printed as a single volume in 1849, the novel cemented Thackeray’s literary fame and kept him busy with frequent revisions and even lecture circuits.
The story is framed as a puppet play, narrated by an unreliable narrator, that presents the story of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley and the people in their lives as they struggle through the Napoleonic Wars. The story itself, like many other Thackeray novels, is a satire of the lives of the Victorian English of a certain class. Thackeray packed the novel with allusions, many of which were difficult even for his contemporary readers; part of the heavy revisions he later made were making the allusions more accessible to his evolving audience.
As part of his satirical bent, Thackeray made a point to make each character flawed, so that there are no “heroes” in the book—hence the subtitle “A Novel Without a Hero.” Thackeray’s goal was not only to entertain, but to instruct; to that end, he wanted the reader to look within themselves after finishing the unhappy conclusion, in which there’s no hint as to how society might be able to improve on the evils shadowed in the events of novel.
Vanity Fair received glowing praise by its critical contemporaries, and remains a popular book well into modern times, having been adapted repeatedly for film, radio, and television.