Burlesques / The Fitzboodle Papers / The Fatal Boots [The New Century Library Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, Volume VII].

New York, NY Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1909. Hardcover Very Good: shows light wear to extremities; mild rubbing; sunning at the backstrip and hinges has blanched the green leather to brown, but the gilt titles and designs remain bold and clearly legible; former owner's book plate at front paste-down end paper. Frontispiece illustration has its tissue cover. Purple silk ribbon marker. Binding secure; text clean. Despite noted flaws, remains clean, sturdy, and quite presentable. Lovely little volume. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 16mo. 559pp. Flexible Green Leather with gilt titles and designs at the backstrip. Sewn-in Silk Place-marker. Top Edge Gilt. After a century, the high-quality paper remains remarkably white. Earliest printing of this item we have found is 1902; this is the 1909 impression. Flexible Leather Hardback. William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society. During the Victorian era, Thackeray was ranked second only to Charles Dickens, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair. In that novel he was able to satirise whole swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It also features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp. As a result, unlike Thackeray's other novels, it remains popular with the general reading public; it is a standard fixture in university courses and has been repeatedly adapted for movies and television. In Thackeray's own day, some commentators, such as Anthony Trollope, ranked his History of Henry Esmond as his greatest work, perhaps because it expressed Victorian values of duty and earnestness, as did some of his other later novels. It is perhaps for this reason that they have not survived as well as Vanity Fair, which satirises those values. Thackeray saw himself as writing in the realistic tradition and distinguished himself from the exaggerations and sentimentality of Dickens. Some later commentators have accepted this self-evaluation and seen him as a realist, but others note his inclination to use eighteenth-century narrative techniques, such as digressions and talking to the reader, and argue that through them he frequently disrupts the illusion of reality. The school of Henry James, with its emphasis on maintaining that illusion, marked a break with Thackeray's techniques.