Chapter Four

Abstract

By 1839–40 the twenty-eight-year-old author had revealed a number of characteristics that readers have come to identify as distinctively Thackerayan: his gift for mimicry; his comic wit; his acute consciousness of the artifices of ballet, painting, opera, drama, and other forms of human expression; the detailed concreteness of his narratives; his apparently instinctive use of narrative voices projected into at least partly-dramatized personas; and above all his ironical perspective on human folly—a perspective intermittently humanized by a sense of pathos. From the beginning, his narratives had focused on human pretense—whether of emotion, of wealth, of worldly accomplishment, or especially of social standing—and on the wholly or partly anesthetized awareness that accompanies such pretense and such aspirations. Most centrally, perhaps, he revealed the debilitation of those who entertain fantasies of fashionable life and, more broadly, he evoked the devastating emptiness of lives unsustained by a moral inheritance.