This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ... Rook and Mr. Pigeon, The Fashionable Authoress, and Going to see a Man Hanged. This rendered it difficult even for the initiated to recognise all his work, and to the average reader each name suggested a different author. Thackeray himself has explained the necessity that drove him to the use of so ...
Read More
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ... Rook and Mr. Pigeon, The Fashionable Authoress, and Going to see a Man Hanged. This rendered it difficult even for the initiated to recognise all his work, and to the average reader each name suggested a different author. Thackeray himself has explained the necessity that drove him to the use of so many noms-de-plume. "It may so happen to a literary man," he wrote in Brown on the Press, ' that the stipend which he receives from one publication is not sufficient to boil his family pot, and that he must write in some other quarter. If Brown writes articles in the daily papers, and articles in the weekly and monthly periodicals too, and signs the same, he surely weakens his force by extending his line. It would be better for him to write incognito than to placard his name in so many quarters--as actors understand, who do not perform in too many pieces on the same night, and as painters, who know it is not worth their while to exhibit more than a certain number of pictures." He also realised that this was not the high-road to fame. "It cannot be denied," he says in the same article, "that men of signal ability will write for years in papers and perish unknown--and in so far their lot is a hard one, and the chances of life are against them. It is hard upon a man, with whose work the whole town is ringing, that not a soul should know or care who is the author who so delights the public." Then, too, it must be remembered that the only books he had published before Vanity Fair were The Paris Sketch Book and Comic Tales and Sketches, which were reprinted magazine articles of not the greatest value; The Irish Sketch Book and From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, both interesting, intelligent, and cleverly written; and the notoriously unpopular Second...
Read Less
Add this copy of The Life of William Makepeace Thackeray Volume 2 to cart. $41.67, new condition, Sold by Paperbackshop rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Bensenville, IL, UNITED STATES, published 2021 by HardPress Limited.