Word: thackeray
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Professor Copeland, in accordance with his usual custom, has not announced in advance what selections he will read. In the past he has read from Kipling, Stephen Leacock, Dunne, Thackeray, and many others, as well as from the Bible...
...problems during the daytime. . . . At night things cool off and quiet down. The stars come out. . . . Then-if ever-a stray thought is likely to come swirling out of the darkness like a bat and light on you. . . . I wish I could write books that live, like Dickens or Thackeray. . . . All I do is scratch down a few evanescent thoughts that are born in the night, and hardly live...
...Thackeray-"with his warped, middle-class outlook, poor, frightened little mid-nineteenth-century Thackeray"-who gave George IV and his Brighton days their bad reputation in Victorian England. To that novelist George was everything that an English monarch should not be: a bigamist, a liar and a lecher who played practical jokes, gambled, drank heavily, and, as Prince of Wales, with an income of ?70,000, managed to accumulate ?250,000 of debts in three years. Brighton, despite its quaint, un-English charm, its surface respectability, had been the scene of his historic revels, remained so charged with memories...
Sharing none of Thackeray's prejudices, Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton, in their new history of Brighton, find George IV, while not exactly an ornament to Britain, at least no unmixed Victorian monster. His streak of family insanity "had softened down to a curious, harmless and most effective eccentricity." He was frequently drunk, but no more so than most English aristocrats of that period. His delusions, that he had defeated many butchers and bakers in fistfights, that he had commanded at many a battle, including Waterloo, were merely symptoms of the same madness that had made his old father...
...live long enough to experience regrets for their cost. Although Sitwell and Barton write long and authoritatively on the beauties of the romantic architecture he sponsored, a taint of snobbishness and affectation is discernible in their accounts. Despite Brighton and its patron's love of art, Thackeray was probably more nearly right about George IV than Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton...