Hawes Donald - William Thackeray

WILLIAM THACKERAY: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES

General Editor: B.C.Southam

The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writers work and its place within a literary tradition.

The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries.

Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writers death.

WILLIAM THACKERAY

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Edited by

GEOFFREY TILLOTSON

AND

DONALD HAWES

First Published in 1968

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

Compilation, introduction, notes and index 1968 Geoffrey Tillotson and Donald Hawes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 0-203-19807-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-19810-7 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-13458-7 (Print Edition)

To

GORDON N.RAY

who has done so much for Thackeray

General Editors Preface

The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and nearcontemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of literature. On one side, we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writers historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading-public, and his response to these pressures.

The separate volumes in The Critical Heritage Series present a record of this early criticism. Clearly, for many of the highly-productive and lengthily-reviewed nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, there exists an enormous body of material; and in these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the most important views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for their representative quality.

For writers of the eighteenth century and earlier, the materials are much scarcer and the historical period has been extended, sometimes far beyond the writers lifetime, in order to show the inception and growth of critical views which were initially slow to appear.

In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of the authors reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes will make available much material which would otherwise be difficult of access and it is hoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged.

B.C.S.

Preface

Almost all the fifty-six items printed below are reviews. One or two are parts of private letters, and one was appended to an edition. The text of all but one of the printed pieces is taken from the first edition, usually that of magazine or newspaper, with the correction of obvious misprints and the standardization of titles of books, stories and other literary works. In the nineteenth century most reviews were anonymous, and in reprinting them we have added in square brackets the names of their authors where we could find them. Since many of the writers are, and perhaps were, obscure, we have given a few biographical facts about them in the headnotes. What correcting of texts has been called forthat of misprints or misquotations from Thackerays textwe have done silently, but have left them as they stand when the author has adapted them to suit the run of his own sentence. We have not reproduced the long quotations that were designed to give the prospective buyer or reader a sample of the novel under review, but have replaced them with a reference to Thackerays Works (in the Oxford edition in seventeen volumes, 1908). When we refer to Letters it is to Gordon N.Rays edition, 4 volumes, Cambridge, Mass., 19456. We have given the source of quotations when we knew them, except for those too well known to need it.

The chronological order which is surely obligatory in a collection such as this has, when the topic is a novelist, an appropriately narrative interest. This is especially striking when the same reviewerG.H. Lewes is the salient examplereviews a series of books, and builds his further comments on those made already, even sometimes repeating a bon mot he had either forgotten he had used before or hoped his readers had. Reading them in something like the order Thackeray read them in, we see that they achieve a shape, the biological shape of a progression.

GEOFFREY TILLOTSON

DONALD HAWES

London

30 November 1966

Acknowledgments

For permission to reprint copyright material we are grateful to Mrs. Edward Norman Butler and Professor Gordon Ray for our excerpts from Thackerays letters, and to Sir Basil Blackwell for those from Charlotte Bronts. We wish to thank the editors of those periodicals that are still flourishing for their kind permission to reprint the pieces we have taken from Blackwoods Magazine, the Cornhill Magazine, the Quarterly Review, The Scotsman, the Spectator and The Times.

G.T.

D.H.

Chronological Table