‘The truth forces itself upon me,’ he wrote to his friend William Aytoun (half of ‘Bon Gaultier’), ‘now is the time, my lad, to make your A when the sun at length has begun to shine. Sometime between 18, the literary journalist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) drafted a few short pieces entitled Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society (illustrated by himself), which he hoped would constitute the opening chapters of an as-yet unspecified longer work. ‘A great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing and fiddling’: Life in ‘Vanity Fair’
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |