The Newcomes

Abstract

After submitting to the arduous discipline of writing a superb third-person historical narrative that in part articulates his personal anguish of separation from a marital couple of whom he was very fond (the Brookfields, of course), and that movingly generalizes his pain and his awareness of his narrative’s personal implications—as readers well know—Thackeray returns to the contemporary world and to more, though not entirely impersonal, considerations in his next novel, The Newcomes. Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family. By way of introduction, however, he reiterates his most fundamental assumption about human behavior. In a brilliant short narrative that brings together in amusing interaction and dialogue characters populating the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine, and the tales of Perrault, Thackeray’s narrator (Pendennis) concludes with the rhetorical question: “What stories are new?”