Cayenne and Cream Tarts: W. M. Thackeray and R. L. Stevenson

Abstract

Thackeray’s affinity with the eighteenth century is well-known and amply demonstrated in his work. It is, incidentally, an affinity which he shared with Robert Louis Stevenson. Less obvious, yet important, is Thackeray’s association of the Arabian Nights with his fictional picture of the Augustan Age. In Henry Esmond and The Virginians we see English readers becoming acquainted with the Nights. Esmond has not read the work in the mid 1690s, whereas his grandson, Harry Warrington, later finds a ‘translation [presumably Galland’s] of an Arabian Work of Tales, very diverting’ (x, 249). Harry’s friends, the Lambert family of Tunbridge Wells, have a copy of The Persian Tales, translated from the French by Ambrose Philips in 1714. This collection imitated the Nights in exploiting the appeal of the exotic and unusual.