Word: thackeray
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...Thackeray's literary fortune has been, in one respect, unique. He founded no school of writers nor attended at any time supreme popularity, but his works have constantly increased in favor both among authors and among the reading public. To understand rightly the genius of Thackeray's writings, one must look at the world as the author himself looked at it, must understand his thoughts and know his life...
...Thackeray was brought to England from India in 1816, and at the age of eleven he entered the Charterhouse School. There his life, though passed in the partial seclusion from his fellows which his gentle, timid nature chose, was not distinctive or unusual Later he entered Cambridge, then studied law for a time, studied drawing in Paris, and at length returned to London and began writing for papers and magazines...
...still he was merely a writer with no definite purpose, and from among the various branches of literature had not finally chosen the kind of writing which he was to make peculiarly his own. Truth in writing, that power that scorns the sham and pictures the real, Thackeray had, and a fund of brilliant humor also. He had lacked the personal and distinctive individuality that was needed to make him prominent and now for the first time, by a serious realization of his own powers, he was to achieve this...
...appeared "Vanity Fair," Thackeray's most powerful work. With terrible truth he painted the frivolous world of London society, and with scathing satire laid its nature bare. A chord of sombreness and melancholy sounds through the book, for Thackeray was not painting the world but arraigning a society in which all was indeed vanity and where the play was indeed "played...
...Vanity Fair" was Thackeray's first great success. In truthful depiction and now in satire he had succeeded; he was then to enter, as a novelist, the third stage of his literary development. "Fun is good, truth is better, and love is best of all" he once wrote, and he was about to take up that kind of writing which mirrors the moral ideals of the world, the law of which is love. If "Vanity Fair" was Thackeray's most powerful book, "Henry Esmond" was of all his works the best and noblest. Its charm does...