Thackeray's Novels

Jack P. Rawlins's study explores one of the great problems of mid-Victorian literature: the explanation and justification of William Makepeace Thackeray’s narrative style and structure. Rawlins finds that Thackeray in his novels of English society uses an exaggeratedly conventional plot structure as a means to comment on the condition of the novel in England. The frustration and fury that have traditionally been the response of the feeling reader to the excesses of Thackeray’s narrator are the r