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This essay examines William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48) through the lens of nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelicalism, arguing that Thackeray’s portrayal of Pitt Crawley (Junior) crystallizes the paradoxes of Evangelical reform culture in early Victorian Britain. Building on the critical foundations laid by Elisabeth Jay, Mark Knight, and Catherine Hall, the study situates Pitt within the historical context of Evangelical social reform, moral discipline, and political conservatism. Through close examination of Pitt Crawley’s domestic reforms at Queen’s Crawley and his engagement in politics, it demonstrates how Thackeray appropriates Evangelical ideals—domestic propriety, moral earnestness, and reformist zeal—only to expose their susceptibility to self-interest and hypocrisy. In exploring Pitt’s political ascent and eventual collapse following the 1832 Reform Act, the essay further interprets his career as an allegory for the decline of the Evangelical Tory aristocracy amid the rise of bourgeois liberalism. As a disillusioned Evangelical, Thackeray renders Vanity Fair not simply a critique of religious hypocrisy but a meditation on the limits of moral reform in a self-interested age.

McMaster has made an extensive identification and detailed study of the many kinds of allusions to be found in The Newcomes. There are allusions to classical, foreign-language, and English literature, as well as to the Bible, fables, theatre, opera, popular songs, nursery rhymes, newspapers, art, English and French history, and the topography of London. These allusions saturate the text of The Newcomes and appeal to several different readerships. McMaster specifies what Thackeray's contemporaries would have recognized and responded to and suggests interactions between the text and its readers.

Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Angela Carter both recreated the classic tale Beauty and the Beast. This article analyses these recreated tales using the new historicist and feminist theories. The analysis allows for a discussion of how each tale conforms to and/or contrasts with expected gender roles. Thackeray and Carter reflect particular ideas about gender within their tales. Writing in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively, the women published within particularly patriarchal social contexts – Ritchie slightly more so than Carter. The limiting social contexts allowed for minimal, if any, diversion from the status quo of expected gender behaviours. These social contexts impacted on the writers of these centuries and their texts. However, writers such as Thackeray and Carter did not simply accept the patriarchal expectations thrust upon men and women but actively commented against them within their tales. These women writers developed tales that were commentaries on the gender expectations of their social contexts. Although both of these centuries were saturated with patriarchal ideas encouraging particular rigid behaviours for men and women, Thackeray and Carter sought to recreate these limiting gender expectations through publishing dynamic tales. Each writer includes characters and relationships in their tales, which are alternatives to their societies’ patriarchal expectations of men and women. By creating new narratives into their Beauty and the Beast tales, these women writers both question and critique patriarchal rule and provide alternatives to it.

Thackeray is one of the most successful pasticheurs in the language, so accomplished in his evocation of the eighteenth century that we are barely conscious of the mechanisms by which he achieves success in the field. This article examines some of the ways in which he achieves a period color in Henry Esmond through an habitual aurea mediocritas in his judgments of character and also by judiciously blending eighteenth-century allusions (to The Rape of the Lock and Gray's \"Ode to Adversity\" among them) into the texture of his prose.

Dickens was a fashionable writer, and from what we know he was also a very fashionable person, but the use of the colour yellow in his works differs surprisingly from the fashion of his times. He hardly uses canary yellow for his materials, and he abstains from the use of yellow as an indication of brightness and symbol of optimism and hope, too. Yellow in Dickens is not a gay or illuminating colour, and it seems that Dickens creates his own logic of colours, in which he uses yellow predominantly not as a primary colour but as a tinge, a discolouring of that which was formerly white, or conceived of as white. This does not mean, however, that the use of the colour in his works is not heavily invested with symbolism--quite the opposite. Dickens uses his own colour code, and yellow signifies both the literal and metaphorical imprisonment in and of old age.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

This essay addresses the emergence of the Victorian novel. Rather than assuming the genre's natural or inevitable occurrence, I examine the ways in which William Makepeace Thackeray borrowed from his predecessors, Catherine Gore and Harriet Martineau, whose respective exploitation of the silver fork genre and the domestic novel enabled Thackeray to seize a historical moment in which fashionable fiction underwent its demise and the domestic novel emerged. This pivotal moment in literary history also witnessed the historical shift from consanguineal to conjugal family form; alterations in ideologies of marriage, gender, and property; and the possibility of generic transformation and reinvention. Given the instability of generic forms in the 1830s and 1840s, Thackeray also repurposed and hybridized fashionable and domestic fiction, as he modernized both for the 1840s Victorian novel.

This article argues that Lord Byron's Don Juan repeatedly references digestion-and failures of digestion-to register the visceral effects of almost twenty years of near-continuous global warfare on bodies and especially stomachs. If epic is traditionally understood as a poetic form that aggrandizes and gives coherence to the brutality of war, Don Juan reworks epic as a way of rendering the experience of war poetically undigestible. In doing so, the poem develops a non-reparative poetics of indigestion that represents the violence and trauma of war without attempting to celebrate war or make it easily consumable.