A Joint Catalogue Of The Periodicals, Publications And Transactions Of Societies, And Other Books Published At Intervals, To Be Found In The Various Libraries Of The City Of Toronto

Writing under a host of comic pseudonyms he produced reviews, travel books, short novels, satiric sketches, parodies, and so forth. With the publication of Vanity Fair (1847–1848), the novel for which he remains best known, he achieved fame and regained status, moving into London society. Other successful novels followed, and Thackeray left behind forever the scrambling for assignments and fees of his journalist years. Thackeray thus experienced in his own life a variety of social milieux, and he knew at first hand something of the volatility and unpredictability of a money economy. He was never quite in the mainstream of his class (his family's Anglo-Indian connection set him apart at the outset from the regular English gentleman), but he was never quite outside it either, even when living in the bohemian world of painters and journalists. Not surprisingly, the characteristic terrain of his fiction is that ambiguous border: the obscure territory between classes, especially what his contemporary W. C. Roscoe called the "debateable land between the aristocracy and the middle classes"; sites of transition like boardinghouses and hotels; or informal public spaces such as clubs or taverns ...»