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Thackeray   /θˈækəri/   Listen
Thackeray

noun
1.
English writer (born in India) (1811-1863).  Synonym: William Makepeace Thackeray.






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"Thackeray" Quotes from Famous Books



... character had he reached first power, reached a position where he might be put alongside of other Europeans as a novelist. No Irishman from the time of Scott on, until Mr. George Moore wrote "Esther Waters" (1894), had written a story that might stand the inevitable comparison with the work of Thackeray and Dickens, Meredith and Mr. Hardy. Of Mr. George Moore I have written ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... Thackeray pictures Dryden as sitting in his great chair at Will's Coffee-house, Russell Street, Covent Garden, tobacco-pipe in hand; but there is no evidence that Dryden smoked. The snuff-box was his symbol of authority. Budding wits thought themselves highly distinguished if ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson

... have been traced with a cambric needle, and Thackeray's writing, while marvelously neat and precise, was so small that the best of eyes were needed to read it. Likewise the writing of Captain Marryatt was so microscopic that when he was interrupted in his labors he was ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay

... of the General Theatrical Fund, held at the Freemasons' Tavern, at which Thackeray presided, Mr. ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... blow his nose strenuously whenever he re-read the death of Little Paul, the death of Dora, and some passages about Tiny Tim. There was no dissentient voice as to the death of Colonel Newcome; all admitted the recurrence of that peculiar choking sensation, read they their THACKERAY never so often. Now the Baron differs from Josh Sedley in, as he thinks, many respects, but he is almost as "easily moved to tears" as was that stout hero. Wherefore this preface? Well, 'tis because ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various

... Clay had been a popular belle in Washington in the fifties, and was well acquainted with leading men and women throughout the country. She had heard and met in social circles Charlotte Cushman, Jenny Lind, Thackeray, Lord Napier, and other notabilities. Lanier, eager always to hear of the larger world outside of his own limited life, was much attracted by her reminiscences of well-known men and women. Returning to Suffolk, Va., Clifford Lanier wrote to her: ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... married life, the newly-made brides whose ideal men are realized in their husbands—I am shocking them all! I humbly plead forgiveness. You see, I am not married myself. I can only give my impressions as a looker-on, and, as Thackeray says, "One is bound to speak the truth as far as one knows it, and a deal of disagreeable matter must come out in the course of such ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren

... a good book?" Here were two questions which Mrs. Hilary, in her turn, could not answer. Because most of the books which seemed good to her did not, as she well knew, seem good to Neville, or to any of her children, and she wasn't going to give herself away. She murmured something about Thackeray and Dickens, which Neville ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... a very few years later the sentimental period, in which my unfinished novels assumed a more ambitious form, and were modelled chiefly upon Jane Eyre, with occasional tentative imitations of Thackeray. Stories of gentle hearts that loved in vain, always ending in renunciation. One romance there was, I well remember, begun with resolute purpose, after the first reading of Esmond, and in the endeavour ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various

... "old-fashioned," was not in the remotest degree intended to be modelled upon the diction of Swift, or Pope, or Addison, or Steele, or Dryden, or Defoe, or even Nash or Howel. Such a feat of elegant pedantry has already been accomplished by Mr. Thackeray in his noble story of Esmond; and I had no wish to follow up a dignified imitation by a sorry caricature. I simply endeavoured to make Captain Dangerous express himself as a man of ordinary intelligence and capacity would do who was born in the reign of Queen Anne,—who received ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... generation, whose literary movements he in turn confessedly ignored. He is recognized to-day as an important link in the development of modern fiction, and is even discussed concurrently with Balzac, in the same way that we speak of Dickens and Thackeray, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... the charge of brutality that is often brought against the English, and which is so successfully depicted by Dickens and Thackeray, there is doubtless good ground for it, though I actually saw very little of it during five weeks' residence in London, and I poked about into all the dens and comers I could find, and perambulated the streets at nearly all hours of the night and day. Yet I am persuaded there is a kind of brutality ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... Hence the singular purity of Russian literature in point of style. Dickens needs the dollars, and he therefore spins out his satires to a length of distance to be traversed only by seven-league boots, and in verbosity is equalled only by Thackeray. Gogol, however, not only compresses his chapters, but even burns the whole second part of his masterpiece, "Dead Souls," as unworthy of his best art. George Eliot, writing for a standard which requires three volumes for each novel, must fill her story with all manner of ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... sympathy that no one but Dickens or O. Henry could have given it. If "The Gold-Bug" is a triumph of the analytic intellect, this story is a triumph of the social impulses that make the world better. "It seems to me," said Thackeray, "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness." While writing it Dickens said: "I wept and laughed and wept again." And yet the psychology of the plot is as soundly intellectual as the style is emotional. ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

... more of an antiquary than a man of letters—apart from his work. Can one think of Dickens as a man of letters, as one who cared for books, as one whose notions on literature were worth twopence? And Thackeray's opinions on contemporary and preceding writers condemn him past hope of forgiveness. Thackeray was in Paris during the most productive years of French fiction, the sublime decade of Balzac, Stendhal, and Victor Hugo. And his ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett

... Swift's nature, we must turn to what he tells us in the Journal about Stella herself. The "little language" which Swift used when writing to her was the language he employed when playing with Stella as a little child at Moor Park. Thackeray, who was not much in sympathy with Swift, said that he knew of "nothing more manly, more tender, more exquisitely touching, than some of these notes." Swift says that when he wrote plainly, he felt as if they were no longer alone, but "a bad scrawl is so snug it looks ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... money. When they left their seats they were the men of the ship—in their own estimation; but they had shot their bolt and could go no further, so they settled down in a condition of social decay that became very distressing. This recalls an incident of Thackeray's: he once saw an unimportant looking man strutting along the deck of a steamer. Stepping up ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne

... undesirable applicants, but it could not prevent the going of Miss Perkins at the expense of the deluded, on ships that were common carriers, even though she were a common scold. There she was, portentous as the British Female portrayed by Thackeray. Backed by apparently abundant means and obviously indomitable "gall," she counted on carrying all before her by sheer force of her powers of self-assertion and the name of the Patriotic Daughters of America. But the commanding ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King

... enjoyment of a double identity," so dissociated were the poet and the "member of society." Phillips Brooks, who met Browning in England in 1865-6, was impressed by his fullness of life and said he was "very like some of the best of Thackeray's London men." In public and on ordinary social occasions Browning is said to have been frank, charming, friendly—"more agreeable," Mary Anderson said, "than distinguished." With intimate friends, however, the poet had quite another sort of charm. "To a single listener," says Mr. Gosse, with ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... yours, which we feared was lost, as he saw nothing of it for some days after the mail was in; but he found it at Bath's Hotel. One must make some little allowance for a mother's partiality in your account of B. and H.; I hope your prejudice against novels does not prevent their reading those of Thackeray and Dickens, every one of whose works, especially the former, should be read by them, for they contain some of the best things, both in a moral and literary point of view, that we have in the English language. I shall be more ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills

... Americans, or whether it's just another kind of humour," said the girl. She had a quiet, abstracted way of talking as if she were thinking aloud. "I used to imagine they had less, and yet, when you come to think of it, Dickens and Thackeray and Barrie, and so many other of the humourists we admire most, are Britishers. Besides, I never in all my days heard people laugh so hard as in that London theatre. There was a man behind us, and every time he laughed auntie looked round to see if a door had opened, ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... which we could hardly dispense. M. Sainte-Beuve is never more happy than in dealing with complexities or contradictions, with characters that puzzle the ordinary observer, with harmonies which are hidden in discords. Of women, it has been well said, he writes "as if he were one of them." Like Thackeray, like Balzac, he knows their secret. So, too, the spirit of a particular epoch or a particular school is seized, its successive phases are distinguished, with a nicety defying competition. Especially is this applicable to the developments of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... In his Schweich Lectures on "The Septuagint and Jewish Worship" (for the British Academy, 1921) Mr. St. John Thackeray presents clear evidence from the different vocabularies in the Greek Version that this Version was the work of two translators, the division between whom is at Ch. xxix. verse 7. The dividing line cuts across the Greek ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... of persons like these, partly on the still more tempting and still more treacherous ground of indications drawn from his works, a Fielding of fantasy has been constructed, which in Thackeray's admirable sketch attains real life and immortality as a creature of art, but which possesses rather dubious claims as a historical character. It is astonishing how this Fielding of fantasy sinks and shrivels when ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding

... untranquility of mind which gave his mother anxiety, though his physical strength appears not to have degenerated, for in 1853, at Yarmouth, he rescued a man out of a stormy sea. He was an unpleasant companion for those whom he did not like or could not get on with. Thackeray tried to get up a conversation with him, his final effort being the question, "Have you seen my 'Snob Papers' in 'Punch'?" To which Borrow answered: "In 'Punch'? It is a periodical I never look at." He ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... poems—the reader may guess which—won fair words from Thackeray. The Spectre Pig was a wicked suggestion which came into my head after reading Dana's Buccaneer. Nobody seemed to find it out, and I never mentioned it to the venerable poet, who might not have been pleased with the parody. This is enough to say of these unvalued ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... jokes. It wasn't in the contract. If I were pretty, my ambition would have been to be an adventuress; but an adventuress with no adventures would be a little flat. I might have the worst intentions, but I should never have the chance of carrying them out. So I try to be as much as possible like Thackeray's shabby companion ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson

... surprised, I explained my reason. She seemed very well satisfied with it, but my coadjutrix appeared in an astonishment unequalled, and at dinner, when we necessarily met again, new testimonies of conduct quite without example were exhibited: for when Mrs. Thackeray and Miss Planta were helped, she helped herself, and appeared publicly to send me to Coventry—though the sole provocation was intending to forego her society ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay

... to deal concretely with the passions, it found itself impotent. Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard" rings hollow: it is rhetoric, not poetry. The closing lines of "The Dunciad"—so strangely overpraised by Thackeray—with their metallic clank and grandiose verbiage, are not truly imaginative. The poet is simply working himself up to a climax of the false sublime, as an orator deliberately attaches a sounding peroration to his speech. Pope ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... as it were, with her domestics, delighted the young belle. Vanity of vanities, as Mr. Thackeray and King Solomon cry out in turn. Silver trays and powdered footmen, and Utrecht, velvet upholstery—miserable comforters! What saloon was ever so cheery as this, or flashed all over in so small a light so splendidly, ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... familiar letters of great men which also mirror their times—Horace Walpole, Lord Macaulay, etc.; essays of Bacon, Addison, DeQuincey, Lamb, Irving, Emerson, Lowell, and Holmes; and certain works of fiction which have stood the test of time and criticism, with Dickens and Thackeray heading the list. Indulgence in all the so-called "popular" novels of the day, like any other dissipation, profits nothing, and vitiates one's taste for good literature at the same time. Therefore, hold fast that which is known to be good in novels, ...
— The Complete Home • Various

... called it his study, though it may be doubted if he ever studied anything but his Times, Spectator, and his three favourite authors, Thackeray, Dickens, and Kingsley; but his wife was a great reader, and there were few modern books that she could not discuss ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... were very hard to displace. James II., with the aid of the French, fought hard before the British troops in Ireland broke the backs of both his armies and sent him into exile. Again in 1715—an episode perpetuated in Thackeray's dramatic story of Henry Esmond—came the son of James to take advantage of the vacancy caused by the death of Queen Anne. But it is perhaps to this claimant's son, the last of the militant Stuarts, that more chivalrous feeling has been given than ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... 1882, page 239. ii. "The Action of Carbonate of Ammonia on Chlorophyll-bodies." [Read March 6th, 1882.] Ibid., page 262.) We have had a good many visitors; but none who would have interested you, except perhaps Mrs. Ritchie, the daughter of Thackeray, who is a most amusing and pleasant person. I have not seen Huxley for some time, but my wife heard this morning from Mrs. Huxley, who wrote from her bed, with a bad account of herself and several ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... of the Clough and William of Cloudesle. [Woodcut, with names printed above the figures.] London, Printed by A. M. for W. Thackeray, at the Angel in ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg

... hero-worship. There are more examples than one even in this chapter, for our books may well make out Wallace a better man than he was, as they afterwards assigned to Washington an even better cause than he had. Thackeray smiled at Miss Jane Porter's picture of Wallace, going into war weeping with a cambric pocket-handkerchief; but her attitude was more English and not less accurate. For her idealization was, if anything, nearer the truth than Thackeray's own notion of a mediaevalism of ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton

... literature, are to be permanent, that life must either be treated in the spirit of romance and fantasy as by Balzac and the colossally fantastic Zola; or in the spirit of humor as by Charles de Bernard, Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens. The thrifty plan of giving us sermons, politics, fiction, all in one stodgy sandwich [laughter] produces no permanent literature, produces but temporary "Tracts ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... Bulwer and Forster call, and they discuss Cromwell; Bulwer's play of "Virginius" is in rehearsal; Macready acts Cardinal Wolsey; there is a dinner at Lady Blessington's, where are met Lord Canterbury, Count D'Orsay, Bulwer, Trelawney, and Proctor; there is a call on Miss Martineau, and meetings with Thackeray and Dickens; Kenyon appears in the intersecting circles; Marston (the father of the blind poet) writes his play, "The Patrician's Daughter"; Mr. Longfellow, "a Professor at one of the U. S. Universities," appears on the scene, and there ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... modern French novelist but has the gift of it by the ream; so easy to be philosophical,—one has only to begin a few substantives with capitals; and withal it is so hard to be genial and agreeable. Since Goldsmith's day, perhaps only Irving and Thackeray had achieved it, till Mr. Hughes made himself the third. It is no easy thing to write a book that shall seem so easy,—to describe your school-days with such instinctive rejection of the unessential, that whoever has been a boy feels as if he were reading the history of his own, and that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various

... Pieces for Declamation, New Dialogues, &c. Illustrated with excellent likenesses of Charbam, Mirabeau, Webster, Demosthenes, Cicero, Grattan, Patrick Henry, Curran, Sheridan, Madame Roland, Victor Hugo, Calhoun, Hayne, Everett, Tennyson, Longfellow. O. W. Holmes, Bret Harte, Epes Sargent, Thackeray, Dickens, and ...
— The Nursery, No. 165. September, 1880, Vol. 28 - A Monthly Magazine For Youngest Readers • Various

... re-read that charming little story with ever-increasing admiration. I am sorry for the coarseness of some of his later writings; but he was, after all, a great novelist, second only in our times to George Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray.... I shall be glad to hear more about Mr. Wood's and Mrs. ——'s talks. Any hint or sign or token from the unseen and spiritual world is full of solemn interest, standing as I do on the shore of 'that vast ocean I ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields

... picture more or less vivid, though not of course complete and impartial, of the age to which he belongs, of the men, their manners, fashions, tastes, and prevalent opinions. Thus they have a historical as well as a literary and an ethical value. And Thackeray, in speaking of the office of the humorist or satirist, for to him they were one, says, "He professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture, your tenderness for ...
— English Satires • Various

... Dr. Holmes will rest on the three great books which have made his name famous on two continents. Thackeray had passed his fortieth year before he produced his magnificent novel. Holmes, too, was more than forty when he began that unique and original book, "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," one of the most thoughtful, graceful, and able investigations into philosophy and culture ever written. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... that his hostess was mistaken. At the hint of opposition she warmed. She was perfectly sure that there had been a second tourist of whom the same story had been told. The name escaped her. What was the name? Oh, what was the name? She clasped her knees for the name. Something in Thackeray. ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster

... so hard, so she winds up thus: "My father is hard at study; pray now rest yourself—HE'S SAFE FOR THESE THREE HOURS." Safe—if she had only said that "papa was safe," the sentence would have been purely modern, and have suited Thackeray as well as Shakspeare. See how quickly she has learnt to regard her father as one to be watched and probably kept in a good humour for the sake of Ferdinand. We suppose that the secret of the modern character of this particular passage lies simply in the fact that young people make love ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler

... Wendell Holmes, and at 131—also for a short time—Thomas Bailey Aldrich. It is, however, at 148, that we should longest pause. This, for many rich years, was the home of James T. Fields, that delightful man of letters who was the friend of many men of letters; he who entertained Dickens and Thackeray, and practically every foreign writer of note who visited this country; he who encouraged Hawthorne to the completion of the "Scarlet Letter," and he, who, as an appreciative critic, publisher, and editor, probably did more to elevate, inspire, and sustain the general literary ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery

... of Martin Luther and Alice in Wonderland (the only fairy-story she had been permitted to read) were the sum total of her library. But in the appendix of the dictionary she had discovered magic names—Hugo, Dumas, Thackeray, Hawthorne, Lytton. She had also discovered the names of Grimm and Andersen; but at that time she had not been able to visualize "the pale slender things with gossamer wings"—fairies. The world into which ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... drunkenness we read about in Chinese books is that of poets and philosophers, and in them it is, if not commended, at least not condemned. The attitude of literature towards them is much like that of Thackeray towards the gentlemen of ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland

... which he succinctly expressed to me the view of this second party: "There are three requisites which go to make a perfect writer. First, he must have something worth saying. Second, he must have a proper way of saying it. Third, he must have sincerity. Dickens had all three of these qualities. Thackeray had not much to say; he had a great deal of art in saying it, but he had not enough sincerity. Dostoevsky possessed all three requisites. Nekrasoff knew well how to express himself, but he did not possess the first quality; he forced himself to say something—whatever would ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... have assisted to polish these poor fellows off the face of creation, must, one may suppose, be very unintelligible to them; but nevertheless it is probably a subject of deep speculation. If the reading world were to take to sermons again and eschew their novels, Messrs. Thackeray, Dickens, and some others would look about them and inquire into the causes of such a change with considerable acuteness. They might not, perhaps, hit the truth, and these Indians are much in that predicament. It is said that very few pure-blooded Indians ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... black-walnut thing like a wardrobe, with a couple of drawers at the bottom, receptacles that seemed less adapted to pamphlets than to goloshes. "How grand!" Jane was not exigent as regarded music, but her whole being went forth towards books. "Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer; and Hume and Gibbon, and Johnson's Lives of the ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... delightful," replied Bessie, to whom a book was a powerful attraction. She was some time making her selection from the well-filled bookcase, but at last fixed on some poems by Jean Ingelow, and "The Village on the Cliff," by Miss Thackeray. Bessie had read few novels in her life; Dr. Lambert disliked circulating libraries for young people, and the only novels in the house were Sir Walter Scott's and Miss Austin's, while the girls' private ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... writers mentioned. This will explain, for instance, the total omission of the name of Roger Bacon, and the brief and, if regarded from a different point of view, the very unsatisfactory treatment of writers like Dickens and Thackeray. ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... said; made to understand that her own affairs were not so important, after all; and that it was far more essential to hear the charming gossip about the new and most popular Princess of Wales, or the quarrel between Dickens and Thackeray. Yet, after dinner, in the little sitting-room, where the Duchess, in a white gown with great pink bows, fitter for a girl fresh from Confirmation, and her cheeks with their fixed colour, which changed only at the discretion of her maid, babbled of nothing that mattered, Hylda's mind kept turning ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... are so uncommonly clever and learned," says Thackeray, "have a great tenderness and pity for the folks who are not endowed with the prodigious talents which we have. I have always had a regard for dunces,—those of my own school days were among the pleasantest of the fellows, and have turned out by no means the dullest in life; ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... Greece that Byron's death was profoundly felt, but in all Europe, which was under the spell of his genius. Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, in her charming recollections of Tennyson, says:—"One day the news came to the village—the dire news which spread across the land, filling men's hearts with consternation—that Byron was dead. Alfred was then a boy about fifteen. 'Byron was dead! I thought the whole world ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... heavily with ink that the result is just ink, and not shadow at all. Charcoal gives you depth and transparency. I was eager to do a series of the cathedrals, as I had done a series for the Dickens and Thackeray books, and had planned to give my, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... I specify a type under the designation of Book-Recipients, and I instance such cases as Dickens and Thackeray; but in fact there are many who would never go in pursuit of anything of the kind beyond a work of reference, and whose utmost exploit is the payment of a friendly subscription. The only title to admittance into my category of such doubtful enthusiasts is the sentimental enhancement of value arising ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... you sing Sweet as Casella, can with passion ring, That pen whose rapid ease ne'er trips with haste, Nor scrapes nor sputters, pointed with good taste, First Steele's, then Goldsmith's, next it came to you, Whom Thackeray rated best of all our crew,— Had letters kept you, every wreath were yours; Had the World tempted, all its chariest doors 20 Had swung on flattered hinges to admit Such high-bred manners, such good-natured wit; At courts, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... met and routed, we know that of old this was their usual fate, it seems to have been the chief reason for their existence. For my part I think a day ill-spent in which I have not read a few pages of Fielding or Thackeray. I have the most kindly feelings towards Dickens, Jane Austen and George Eliot, and when I am tired I write little ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... I know with fair accuracy what was intended by the character as given of Amelia Booth, of Clarissa, of Di Vernon, and of Maggie Tulliver. But as their persons have not been drawn with the pencil for me by the artists who themselves created them, I have no conception how they looked. Of Thackeray's Beatrix I have a vivid idea, because she was drawn for him by an artist under his own eye. I have now to describe Mary Lawrie, but have no artist who will take the trouble to learn my thoughts and to reproduce them. ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope

... woe. He went on complaining of his own fate, quite forgetful of mine. Instead of continuing to listen, I fell to gazing around the synagogue more or less furtively. One of the readers attracted my special attention. He was a venerable-looking man with a face which, as I now recall it, reminds me of Thackeray. Only he had a finer head than the ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... about Mary and the fat boy. It was in the garden at her mother's twenty-two years ago. She remembered it well now, and quite suddenly. She could remember how Gerry, young-man-wise, had tried to utilise Thackeray to show his greater knowledge of the world—had flaunted Piccadilly and Pall Mall before the dazzled eyes of an astonished suburban. She could remember how she read it aloud to him, because, when he read over her shoulder, she always turned ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... the contemporary Englishmen with whom his lot was thrown, he was rather addicted to the bottle; but, on the whole, it may fairly be advanced that unnecessary stress has been laid on these aspects of his life by Macaulay, Thackeray, and others. After a chequered career, he died near Carmarthen, in Wales, on September ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... history—Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, Quentin Durward. But as a matter of fact these latter, though possibly easier to understand and better suited to the general public, were not invariably preferred. The novels were 'the Scotch novels.' Although Thackeray, when he praises Scott, takes most of his examples from the less characteristic, what we may call the English group, on the other hand, Hazlitt dwells most willingly on the Scotch novels, though he did not like Scotsmen, and shared some of the prejudice of Stendhal—'my ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker

... and gentleness, and yet neither mawkish nor unnatural; his fears make him real to us, and the horror of his situation allows us to accept his exquisite pleading as possible. We need only think of Tennyson's May Queen, or of his unspeakable Arthur, or of Thackeray's prig Esmond, in order to understand how difficult it is in literature to make goodness attractive or even credible. Yet Shakespeare's art triumphs where no one else save Balzac and Tourgenief has ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... their outlet in the lantern. Among the numerous portraits on the walls there are several of famous men. Among them we find Dryden, Vaughan, Thompson (by Herkomer), the Duke of Gloucester (by Sir Joshua Reynolds), Coke (the great lawyer), Thackeray, Tennyson (by G.F. Watts), Cowley and Bentley. On the other side of the entrance passage are the kitchens with the combination rooms above, where more notable portraits hang. The remainder of the court is composed of living-rooms ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home

... to know who was the author,—perhaps not without a suspicion that he was addressing the man who could tell. In 1861 he guaranteed, or advanced, the cost of "The Early Italian Poets," up to L100, with Smith and Elder; and endeavoured, but unsuccessfully, to induce Thackeray to find a place for other ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... new novels? Send up Scribe and the 'Arabian Nights' and 'Robinson Crusoe' and the 'Three Guardsmen,' and Mrs. Whitney's books. We have Thackeray and ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... ago that the true romance of America was not in the fortunes of the Indian, where Cooper sought it, nor in New England character, where Judd found it, nor in the social contrasts of Virginia planters, as Thackeray imagined, but in the story of the fugitive slaves. The observation is as true now as it was before War, with swift, gigantic hand, sketched the vast shadows, and dashed in the high lights in which romance loves to lurk and flash forth. But the stage is enlarged on ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford

... "Alroy," 1832, "Henrietta Temple" and "Venetia," 1837—nor the later ones—"Lothair," 1870, and "Endymion," 1874—are to be ranked with "Coningsby" and "Sybil." Many characters in "Coningsby" are well-known men. Lord Monmouth is Lord Hertford, whom Thackeray depicted as the Marquess of Steyne, Rigby is John Wilson Croker, Oswald Millbank is Mr. Gladstone, Lord H. Sydney is Lord John Manners, Sidonia is Baron Alfred de Rothschild, and Coningsby is Lord Lyttelton. Lord Beaconsfield died in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... Richardson. Dr. Young looked upon him as an "instrument of Providence." Ladies at Ranelagh held up "Pamela," to show that they had the famous book.[168] Nor was this interest confined to the last century. "When I was in India," said Macaulay to Thackeray, "I passed one hot season at the hills, and there were the governor-general, and the secretary of government, and the commander-in-chief, and their wives. I had "Clarissa" with me, and as soon as they began ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... know when Thackeray wrote 'Vanity Fair' as well as you do. I'm no Thackeray to begin with, and, besides, I am older at thirty-eight than he was when he died—yes, older than he would have been if he had lived twice as long. So far as feeling and all the rest ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln

... you might read a thousand of their productions without suspecting, if you did not already know the fact, that it had any connexion with our physical nature. The men and women, youths and maidens, of Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot, to say nothing of minor writers, are true enough to nature in other respects, but in all sexual relations they are mere simulacri. George Meredith is our only novelist who triumphs in this ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... goes to school, his way is smoothed very much at first by the cakes and pocket-money he brings with him. Till these are gone he must be a weak boy indeed who cannot (at a small school) find some one to fight his battles and fetch and carry for him. Thackeray has thought of this (what does he not think of?) in his little book, "Dr. Birch," where a young sycophant is represented saying to his friend, who has just received a hamper, "Hurrah, old fellow, I'LL LEND YOU MY KNIFE." This was considered ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... who had lost a leg or an arm, and who must lie in one position for weeks. To help them get through the time was to help them to live. I therefore made the library rich in popular fiction and genial books of travel and biography. Full sets of Irving, Cooper, Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, Marryat, and other standard works were bought; and many a time I have seen a poor fellow absorbed in their pages while holding his stump lest the jar of a footstep should send a dart of agony to the point of mutilation. My wife gave much assistance in my hospital duties, ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe

... of a Pope or a Thackeray, Had I the wisdom of Hegel or Kant, Then might I sing as I'd like to of Zachary, Then might I sing a Taylorian chant. Oh, for the lyrical art of a Tennyson! Oh, for the skill of Macaulay or Burke! None of these mine; so I give him my benison, Turning reluctantly ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams

... Cinderella. With or without her big footman, the little Princess could have rambled safely in the grounds which her predecessors had made for her, could have fed the ducks which swam in the round pond before her palace windows, could have drunk from the curious little mineral well, where, in Miss Thackeray's 'Old Kensington,' Frank Raban met Dolly Vanburgh, or peeped out of the little side gate where the same Dolly came face to face with the culprits George and Rhoda. The future owner of all could have easily strayed down the alleys among the Dutch elms which King William brought, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler

... of modern life in which unscrupulously acquired capital is the chief agent.... Mr. Warner has depicted this phase of society with real power, and there are passages in his work which are a nearer approach to Thackeray than we have had from any ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... of Anthony Trollope's novels. It is very likely. My acquaintance with him was then very recent. He is one of the English novelists whose works I read for the first time in English. With men of European reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was otherwise. My first introduction to English imaginative literature was "Nicholas Nickleby." It is extraordinary how well Mrs. Nickleby could chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister Ralph rage in ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad

... rolled into the library by the deferential servant of the house, on which he would place the dear lady's spectacles and a book, its ivory marker showing where the last reading had ended—it might be Prescott's "Ferdinand and Isabella," or Irving's "Granada," or Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," or perhaps, Dickens's ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith

... belong to that incredible company of Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn over whom Thackeray let fall so ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... dessert was taken to task by his colleague on the Punch staff, Angus B. Reach, whom he addressed as Mr. Reach, instead of as Mr. (Scottice) Reach. With ready promptitude, Thackeray replied: "Be good enough Mr. Re-ack to pass ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... time was pitifully small and ludicrously prescriptive, but its shelves held a few of the fine old classics, Scott, Dickens and Thackeray—the kind of books which can always be had in sets at very low prices—and in nosing about among these I fell, one day, upon two small red volumes called Mosses from an Old Manse. Of course I had read of the author, for these books were listed in my History of American Literature, ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... [Mr. Thackeray, talking of after-dinner speeches, has lamented that "one never can recollect the fine things one thought of in the cab," in going to the place of entertainment. I am not aware that there are any "fine things" in the following pages, but such as there are stand to a speech which really did get ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... relations between Dutch and foreign authors and publishers. The pecuniary injury done to foreign authors, however, is very slight, while in reputation they have benefited; for if Dutch private libraries are not without their Shakespeare, Motley, Macaulay, Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley, Browning, not to mention French and German classics, this is mainly due to the fact that the parents of the present generation had the opportunity of buying Dutch translations, and explained to their children the value and the beauty of ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough

... Perhaps Thackeray is right when he says, "The men who appreciate woman most are those who have felt the sharpness of her claws." That is to say, things show up best on the darkest background. If so, let us give Xantippe due credit. She tested the temper of the sage by railing on him and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... merits jam! And the more modern a classic is, the more it resembles the stuff of the year and the less it resembles the classics of the centuries, the more easy and enticing do you find that classic. Hence you are glad that George Eliot, the Bronts, Thackeray, are considered as classics, because you really *do* enjoy them. Your sentiments concerning them approach your sentiments concerning a "rattling good story" in ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT

... order, or demand for its execution the highest attributes of genius; but, whatever it may be, the power of accomplishing it with success is not shared by "thousands of clever fellows." Thousands of clever fellows, fortified by Mr. Thackeray's opinion, may think that they could write the articles which they read in the morning journals; but let them take pen ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... It is said Newton was smoking under a tree in his garden when the historic apple fell. Scott, Campbell, Byron, Hood, and Lamb all smoked, and Carlyle and Tennyson were rarely without a pipe in their mouths. The great novelists, Thackeray, Dickens, and Bulwer were famous smokers; and so were the great soldiers, Napoleon, Bluecher, and Grant. While nearly all the poems here gathered together were written, and perhaps could only have been written, ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various

... has not the ease, grace, and various power of Scott's,—or the racy, idiomatic character of Thackeray's,—or the exquisite purity and transparency of Hawthorne's: but it is a manly, energetic style, in which we are sure to find good words, if not the best. It has certain wants, but it has no marked defects; if it does not always command admiration, it never offends. It has not the highest finish; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... come to a hard word, I cry 'Wheelbarrows,' and skip him." On his own topics he was very sensible, and no owner could have found fault with him had he not been just a little racketty on shore. In my refined days I remember reading in one of Thackeray's books about a young lord who was much loved by one Henry Esmond: My friend Jack was very like that young man, and you could not get vexed with him,—or, at any rate, you could not ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman

... father's savage ways the despair, the scorn of himself, the rage with destiny, the bitter enmity against a world in which he was no longer to exist. Only Deleah felt in her heart the sorrow of it all—Deleah who was a reader of Thackeray, of Trollope, of Dickens, of Tennyson; whose eyes had wept for imaginary woes before these bitter drops had been wrung from them for her own; who had learnt that tears were not the only signs of an anguished heart; and ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... through all his life," Thackeray says, "and recognise but a bow and a grin. I try and take him to pieces, and find silk stockings, padding, stays, a coat with frogs and a fur collar, a star and blue ribbon, a pocket handkerchief ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall

... He admitted that he expected to become a great man, and, though he had not quite decided upon the nature of his career,—saving, of course, the makeshift of journalism,—it was not unlikely that he would elect to be a novelist like—well, probably like Thackeray. ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie

... the club publishes a book, one of the fraternity has a footing in the Edinburgh, another in the Quarterly, a third in Fraser, and a fourth in Blackwood, and so the new work is well introduced. Both Tennyson and Thackeray, it is said, got well taken notice of in this way by their comrades. But there was no plan at the bottom of it—nothing to constitute them a name. The Apostles were always inveighing against cant—always affecting much earnestness, and a hearty dislike of formalism, which rendered them ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various

... glass. And so with the financier. When one of the Rothschilds heard that a friend of his who had died had left only a million of money he remarked: "Dear me, dear me! I thought he was quite well off." His life had been a failure, because he had only put a million by for a rainy day. Thackeray expresses the idea ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... method and their moral, partaking of that heroic and ideal element, which will make them live, I trust, long after thousands of mere novels have returned to their native dust. I mean Miss Muloch's "John Halifax, Gentleman," and Mr. Thackeray's "Esmond," two books which no man or woman ought to read without being ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... these tales of the sea could scarcely have been attained by a "landlubber". It has much practical significance, then, that Cooper chose material which he knew intimately and which gripped his own interest. His success came like Thackeray's and Stevenson's and Mark Twain's—without his having to reach to the other side of the ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... type is commonly Protestant; and sometimes seems to be almost anti-national in its acrid instinct for judging itself. Its nationalism only appears when it flings itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner or the invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift. Thackeray simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was not a stage Irishman. He was not (in the English novelist's opinion) winning and agreeable enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swift was much too harsh and disagreeable to be English. There is a great deal of Jonathan ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... make Figures of its artists and literary men was the most detestable. Respectable Figures—Examples to the young. The suppressions, the coverings up that had to go on, the white-washing of Dickens,—who was more than a bit of a rip, you know, the concealment of Thackeray's mistresses. Did you know he had mistresses? Oh rather! And so on. It's like that bust of Jove—or Bacchus was it?—they pass off as Plato, who probably looked like any other literary Grub. That's why I won't have anything to do with these Academic developments ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... at Leipzig in the original; and it is said to have had a larger sale in Germany than the work of any German historian. Baron Humboldt and Baron Bunsen address their writings to the English as much as to the German public. The novels of Dickens and Thackeray are expected with the same impatience at Leipzig and Berlin as in London. The two great German classics, Schiller and Goethe, have found their most successful biographers in Carlyle and Lewes; and several ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... of long-drawn breath, a feeling as of long tension suddenly set free, a turning as if by one accord to one another. Then— well, then all the tongues leaped into action, and for the remainder of that evening, like Thackeray's folk "At the Springs," they talked, and ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)

... there better in Fielding or Goldsmith? The man is a true genius; and, with quiet and comfort, might produce masterpieces that would last as long as any we have, and delight millions of unborn readers. There is more truth and nature in one of these papers than in all ——'s Novels together."—Thackeray, always a close friend of the Sterling house, will observe that this is dated 1841, not 1851, and have his ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... take amiss the rebuke of the kindly satirist, who was so ready to show up his own weaknesses? In this respect our own great satirist Thackeray is very like him. Nor is this strange. They had many points in common—the same keen eye for human folly, the same tolerance for the human weaknesses of which they were so conscious in themselves, the same genuine kindness of heart. Thackeray's ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... Traits and Stories, by S. Lover in his Legends and Stories, and by G. Griffin in his Tales of a Jury-Room. These all tell their tales in the manner of the stage Irishman. Chapbooks, Royal Fairy Tales and Hibernian Tales, also contained genuine folk-tales, and attracted Thackeray's attention in his Irish Sketch-Book. The Irish Grimm, however, was Patrick Kennedy, a Dublin bookseller, who believed in fairies, and in five years (1866- 71) printed about 100 folk- and hero-tales and drolls (classes 2, 3, and 4 above) in his Legendary Fictions of ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)

... in our most private hours, and whom we fear and scruple to offend: our witnesses and judges. And among these, even if you should think me childish, I must count my d'Artagnan - not d'Artagnan of the memoirs whom Thackeray pretended to prefer - a preference, I take the freedom of saying, in which he stands alone; not the d'Artagnan of flesh and blood, but him of the ink and paper; not Nature's, but Dumas's. And this is the particular crown and triumph of the artist - not to be true merely, but ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... School teachers, and others in like capacity, will easily discriminate between authors suitable for juvenile or untrained tastes, and authors whose appeal is specially to those of maturer thought and experience. Differing as much in method and style as in choice of period and character type, Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" and George Eliot's "Romola" have at least this in common—they require a very high degree of intelligence for their due appreciation. Who, among those of us with any knowledge of such works, would dream of recommending them to a youthful reader fresh from the perusal of Miss ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield

... History of the Pelham Administration. Thackeray's Life of Lord Chatham. Macaulay's Essay on Chatham. Horace Walpole's Reminiscences. Smyth's Lectures on Modern History. Jesse's Memoirs of the Pretenders. Graham's History of the United States, an exceedingly valuable work, but not sufficiently known. Lord Mahon's, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... introducing to it their only brother. We were not only invited to our embassy and on visiting terms with all the English Colony (that colony whose annals at that period are written in The Adventures of Philip, and to which Thackeray's mother and nearest relatives, like ourselves, belonged), but we were, in virtue of some American connections, admitted to the American embassy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... I cast upon the barren primer commons of this cold world! And that reminds me to say that I have been reading the essays by Arnold and Brownell which you gave me, with no little animosity. Brownell's criticism of Thackeray is very suggestive, and brushes away a deal of trash that has been written about his lack of artistic method. But I never supposed such loose sentences would be characteristic of so acute a critic. They do not stick together naturally, but merely logically. And I am sure you would ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... real characters, and the spectator at liberty to go behind the scenes and look upon and talk with the kings and queens between the acts; to examine the scenery, to handle the properties, to study the "make up" of the imposing personages of full-dress histories; to deal with them all as Thackeray has done with the Grand Monarque in one of his caustic sketches,—this would be as exciting, one might suppose, as to sit through a play one knows by heart at Drury Lane or the Theatre Francais, and might furnish occupation enough to the curious idler ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... seaweed and the air of the American forest. Charles Kingsley has smitten the morbidness of the world, and led a great many to appreciate the poetry of sound health, strong muscles, and fresh air. Thackeray did a grand work in caricaturing the pretenders to gentility and high blood. Dickens has built his own monument in his books, which are an everlasting plea for the poor and the anathema of injustice. Now, I say books like these, read at right times and read in right proportion ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... can, what practical work lies ready to their hands. Most of our scientific men are in this last class; our popular authors either set themselves definitely against all religious form, pleading for simple truth and benevolence (Thackeray, Dickens), or give themselves up to bitter and fruitless statement of facts (De Balzac), or surface-painting (Scott), or careless blasphemy, sad or smiling (Byron, Beranger). Our earnest poets and deepest thinkers are doubtful and indignant ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... as a foundation for the "Blithedale Romance," and caused no further injury than the loss of his money. It would have required a Thackeray to have realized and described the humorous side of it—the highly practical joke of so many well-educated and cultivated people making life ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns

... one question of the Thackerayan student, and it is this:—There was one Becky whom everybody knows, but there was another BECKY as good, as kind, as sympathetic, and as simple, as the first Becky was bad, cruel, selfish, and cunning. Where is BECKY the Second to be found in W.M. THACKERAY's Works? ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various

... 1893-4 saw Oscar Wilde at the very zenith of success. Thackeray, who always felt himself a monetary failure in comparison with Dickens, calls success "one of the greatest of a great man's qualities," and Oscar was not successful merely, he was triumphant. Not Sheridan the ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... would never have connected it with the flood of paragraphs that appeared in the Press announcing that the acumen of the publisher had discovered a new author of genius—paragraphs wherein he was compared with Dickens, Thackeray, Flaubert, Richardson, Sir Walter Besant, Thomas Browne, and the author of "An Englishwoman's Love-letters." As it was, it did not occur to him to wonder why the publisher should spend so much money on advertising a book of which he had seemed to have but a half-hearted appreciation. After all ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton

... temperament, the charm of simplicity and good-heartedness and culture; in the Harvard undergraduate, who is a boy, while his English contemporary is either a young man or a schoolboy, less pleasant stages; and in the old Bostonian who heard, and still hears, the lectures of Dickens and Thackeray. Class Day brings so many of that older generation together. They reveal what Harvard, what Boston, was. There is something terrifying in the completeness of their lives and their civilisation. They are like a company of dons whose studies are of a remote and finished world. But the subject of ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... treated warily. In Rabelais and Swift, in Fielding and Smollett, coarse manners must be reprobated. In George Eliot's novels, with exceptions, and in 'Jane Eyre,' there is a subtle taint that is unwholesome to the unguarded reader. Thackeray too frequently compels us to associate with evil company; and, while admiring the writer's skill, the reader should keep well outside of almost ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... disgust, induced by a throng of more than usually absurd imitators, enabled Carlyle, the poet's successor in literary influence (followed with even greater unfairness by Thackeray), more effectively to lead the counter-revolt. "In my mind," writes the former, in 1839, "Byron has been sinking at an accelerated rate for the last ten years, and has now reached a very low level.... His fame has been very great, but ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... the period ending with the year 1867 the Old Corner was one of the best known spots in Boston, not alone by reason of its antiquity, but equally by reason of its distinguished literary history and its habitues. Here Charles Dickens and Thackeray used to loiter and chat with their American publishers; Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier, and Whipple the essayist, made it their head-quarters. Nearly all of their best-known writings, and those of Emerson, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various

... marriage in the controversies of the nineteenth century. But when all this is allowed, no one will seriously rank Kingsley, in the really literary sense, on the level of Carlyle or Ruskin, Tennyson or Browning, Dickens or Thackeray: and if such a place cannot be given to him, it can be given even less to his lusty and pleasant friend, Tom Hughes, whose personality floats towards the frankness of the Boy's Own Paper; or to his deep, suggestive metaphysical friend Maurice, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... be judged, like any other genius, by what he created, what he brought into the world. We are not called on to say whether he was as great as Homer, as Shakespeare, as Cervantes, as Fielding, as Manzoni, as Thackeray. He was always quite himself, and followed no model, though thousands of writers have attempted to follow him and acquire the title of being Dickens-y. For over half a century he had the ear of the English-reading public the world over. It laughed ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... imagined, that could satisfy Bridget, who cannot read, and her mistress, who comes to church cloyed with the dainties of half a dozen literatures? Who could preach a sermon that would hold attentive the man saturated with Buckle, Mill, Spencer, Thackeray, Emerson, Humboldt, and Agassiz, and the man whose only literary recreation is the dime novel? In the good old times, when terror was latent in every soul, and the preacher had only to deliver a very simple message, pointing out the one way to escape endless torture, a very ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... big," he said one night of a recent English novel. "But the last part was the kind of thing that poor old Thackeray might ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... They are not compelled to furnish copy between daylight and dark. They need a course of study in English prose more than anyone else, and they would profit by the effort. As a class they seem to be like the young man in Du Maurier's picture, who, being asked if he had read Thackeray, replies, "No. I nevah read novels; I ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various

... What undermines the renown of Dickens is the growing conviction that the texture of his mind was common, that he fell short in courageous facing of the truth, and in certain delicacies of perception. As much may be said of Thackeray, whose mind was somewhat incomplete for so grandiose a figure, and not free from defects which ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett

... both just and generous, and it is still better to have a heart to use the power. Robinson has acted handsomely throughout, in short, like the gentleman he is. I wonder if his behaviour on this occasion will weigh with snobs against the iniquity of his having a shop. I thought Thackeray had done something to demolish similar rubbish when he described the young cads who gave the schoolboy Dobbin the ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... Blackwell, M. D., and Mrs. Scharlieb, M. D., together with a number of ladies engaged in the department of nursing. (6) Social and philanthropic workers. (7) Literature, including Miss Anna Swanwick, Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Miss S. D. Collet, Miss Olive Schreiner, Mrs. Emily Crawford, Miss Amelia B. Edwards. (7) Art and music. (8) Landowners, women engaged in business and working women, the latter class represented by the secretaries of nine women trades' societies, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... ghosts in "The AEneid" were unable to speak aloud until they had drunk blood. Instinctively, then, one seeks to infuse more red corpuscles into the somewhat anaemic veins of these tales and romances. For Hawthorne's fiction is almost wholly ideal. He does not copy life like Thackeray, whose procedure is inductive: does not start with observed characters, but with an imagined problem or situation of the soul, inventing characters to fit. There is always a dreamy quality about the action: no violent quarrels, no passionate love ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers

... States he met both Dickens and Thackeray. His friendship with Dickens was begun by a letter which Irving wrote to the great novelist, enthusiastically praising his work. At once Dickens replied in a long letter, fairly bubbling over with delight and friendship. Here ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody

... the first has not fulfilled its promise. Of course, I wasn't clearly conscious of this at the time: who is? But I had had my youthful passion and my tragic disappointment, as you know: I had looked far enough into what Thackeray used to call the cryptic mysteries to save me from the Scylla of dissipation, and yet preserved enough of natural nature to keep me out of the Pharisaic Charyb-dis. My devotion to my legal studies had already brought me a mild distinction; ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... last time he saw Thackeray at Christmas of 1863 they spoke of their mutual friend Mrs. Frank Hampton of South Carolina, whom Thackeray had portrayed as Ethel Newcome, and who had recently passed away from life. Thackeray had read ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... Zooelogy, and our youthful poet may have watched animals from the jungle climb up the blackboard at the touch of what would have been only a piece of chalk in any other hand, but became a magic creative force under the guidance of that wizard of science. Here he could have followed with Thackeray the varying fortunes and ethic vagaries of the royal Georges. His poetic soul may have kindled with the fire of Macready's "Hamlet" when, thinking that he was too far down the slope of life to hark back to the days of the youthful Dane, he proved that ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... Goldsmith, and Coleridge; I know all these names. Here's a statue of Shakespeare, though of course he isn't buried here. There's a tablet to Jenny Lind. Wasn't she a singer? Seems to me I've heard my grandpa speak of her. And, if here isn't Thackeray's grave—there in the ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson

... of Ainsworth's Magazine, which came to an end in 1853, when he acquired the New Monthly Magazine, which he edited for many years. This was the heyday of Ainsworth's reputation alike in literature and in society. His home at Kensal Manor House became famous for its hospitality, and Dickens, Thackeray, Landseer, Clarkson Stanfield, Talfourd, Jerrold, and Cruikshank were among his guests. The list of his principal historical novels, with their dates of issue, may now be given: "Rookwood," 1834; "Crichton," 1837; "Jack Sheppard," 1839; "Tower of ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... that the "Report" was largely drafted by Buller, and it almost certainly bears traces of his influence. Buller was a very talented man, witty, popular and generous, and is described by Carlyle as "the genialest radical I have ever met." Among his intimate friends were Grote, Thackeray, Monckton Milnes and Lady Ashburton. A bust of Buller is in Westminster Abbey, and another was unveiled at Liskeard in 1905. He wrote "A Sketch of Lord Durham's mission to Canada," which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... will attempt to expound it. It may be taken generally that a man loves his own stock and environment, and that he will find something to praise in it; but whether it is the most praiseworthy thing or no will depend upon the man's enlightenment as to the facts. If the son of Thackeray, let us say, were brought up in ignorance of his father's fame and genius, it is not improbable that he would be proud of the fact that his father was over six feet high. It seems to me that we, as a nation, are precisely in the position of this hypothetical child of Thackeray's. We fall back upon ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... aesthetics is in like manner either gratuitous or useless. Either you like the right things without being recommended to do so, or if you dislike them, your mind cannot be changed by lectures on the laws of taste. You recollect the story of Thackeray, provoked, as he was helping himself to strawberries, by a young coxcomb's telling him that "he never took fruit or sweets." "That" replied, or is said to have replied, Thackeray, "is because you are a sot, and a glutton." And the whole science of aesthetics is, in ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... for perhaps the most famous inn in the country—a place at which princes and statesmen have stayed, and to which Louis Philippe and his Queen resorted. The "Star and Garter" has figured in the romances of some of our greatest novelists. One comes across it in Meredith and Thackeray, and it finds its way into numerous memoirs, nearly always with some comment upon its unique beauty of situation, a beauty that was never more real than at this moment when the spring foliage is just ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield

... in terms of the utmost "RESPECTABILITY," is generally comic. The English word is here purposely employed, as the practice itself is characteristically English. Many instances of it may be found in Dickens and Thackeray, and in English literature generally. Let us remark, in passing, that the intensity of the effect does not here depend on its length. A word is sometimes sufficient, provided it gives us a glimpse of an entire system of transposition accepted in certain social circles and reveals, as it were, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson

... disclaimer in the very teeth of his admirers. So set in his anonymity was he that Charles Baudelaire, his critical discoverer, was forced to write a long essay about his work and only refer to the artist as C.G. The poet relates that once when Thackeray spoke to Guys in a London newspaper office and congratulated him on his bold sketches in the Illustrated London News, the fiery little man resented the praise as an outrage. Nor was this humility a pose. His life long he was morbidly nervous, as was Meryon, as was Cezanne; but he was neither ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... Shakespear entered the East India Company's service, and had four sons by Emily, eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray: (1a) John Dowdeswell Shakespear, Lieutenant-Colonel of the Bengal Artillery, who married Margaret, only daughter of Joseph Hodgson, F.R.S. He died without issue, April 6, 1867, aged sixty.[353] (2a) William Makepeace Shakespear, (3a) George ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes



Words linked to "Thackeray" :   writer, author



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