Publisher's Synopsis
Catherine( A NOVEL): A Story was the first full-length work of fiction produced by William Makepeace Thackeray. It first appeared in serialized installments in Fraser's Magazine between May 1839 and February 1840. Thackeray's original intention in writing it was to criticize the Newgate school of crime fiction, exemplified by Bulwer-Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth, whose works Thackeray felt glorified criminals... A Shabby Genteel Story is an early and unfinished novel by William Makepeace Thackeray.After a brief preliminary chapter outlining the early life of certain characters the story begins in England in the winter of 1835. A well-born but impoverished gentleman calling himself "George Brandon" is hiding from his creditors in the out-of-season seaside town of Margate. He finds cheap lodgings with a family consisting of James Gann, a bankrupted small businessman; his termagant and socially pretentious wife, Juliana; her two elder daughters by her first husband, Rosalind and Isabella Wellesley Macarty; and her downtrodden youngest daughter, Caroline Gann.Though he despises the entire family as ridiculously vulgar, Brandon plans to amuse himself by seducing one or other of the elder girls, who are local belles; but though at first they find him attractive they soon realise he is mocking them and their social milieu. Thereafter they treat him with scorn, and so Brandon irritably switches his attentions to the youngest, Caroline. She responds by conceiving a passionate first love for him, and he begins a covert flirtation with her - in part to irritate another lodger who adores her. This is the handsome, vain, deluded young artist Andrew 'Andrea' Fitch.[1] From being at first an amusement to Brandon however Caroline eventually becomes an obsession, for although desperately in love she makes it clear she will not sleep with him unless he offers marriage: and this Brandon cannot do, as his financial future depends on his making a good match with a wealthy wife. ... William Makepeace Thackeray ( 18 July 1811 - 24 December 1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. He is famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society. George Edward Bateman Saintsbury( 23 October 1845 - 28 January 1933), was an English writer.Born in Lottery Hall, Southampton, he was educated at King's College School, London, and at Merton College, Oxford where he achieved a first class BA degree in Classical Mods, (1865), and a second class in literae humaniores (1867). He left Oxford in 1868 having failed to obtain a fellowship, and briefly became a master at the Manchester Grammar School before spending six years in Guernsey as senior classical master of Elizabeth College, where he began his literary career by submitting his first reviews to The Academy. From 1874 until he returned to London in 1876 he was headmaster of the Elgin Educational Institute, with a brief period in 1877 on the Manchester Guardian. For ten years he was actively engaged in journalism, becoming an important member of the staff of the Saturday Review. Some of the critical essays contributed to the literary journals were afterwards collected in his Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 (2 vols., 1890-1895), Essays on French Novelists (1891), Miscellaneous Essays (1892), Corrected Impressions (1895). In 1895 he became professor of rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh, a position he held until 1915. He retired to 1A Royal Crescent, Bath, Somerset and died there in 1933.....
