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David Copperfield: Thackeray

Thackeray began in school-days rather to absorb life than to attain scholarship. He delighted even then to reproduce it in comic verse and caricature. At Cambridge, in Weimar, in Paris art-schools and London law-school, he went gaily on his way indolent in study, but eager in friendship, ardent in life. At twenty-one he owned and managed a London newspaper; at twenty-five he was penniless, after scattering a comfortable fortune. But he had bought experience invaluable to the young journalist, priceless to the novelist.

Thackeray's astonishing versatility was early realized. He aspired to illustrate Dickens's novels; he wrote travel sketches, stories, ballads, and burlesques. "Barry Lyndon," his first notable novel, was the history of a rascal; but in the most fascinating of feminine rascals, Becky Sharp, Thackeray first brilliantly showed himself master in the creation of living characters ("Vanity Fair," 1846-48). "Pendennis" (1849-50) was, like Dickens's "David Copperfield," in essence autobiographical. The need of money drove Thackeray reluctantly to the lecture-field. His course on Eighteenth Century Humorists, popular in England and America (1851), prepared the ground for "Esmond" (1852), his unsurpassed historical novel. "The Newcomes" (1854), "The Virginians" (1859), and the unfinished "Denis Duval," complete the list of his best novels.