Literature Network » William Makepeace Thackeray

Sadness balancing wit: Thackeray's life & works.

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From: New Criterion
Date: 20010101
Author:Allen, Brooke

Throughout William Makepeace Thackeray's professional life, he was plagued by explicit and implied comparisons with his great contemporary, Charles Dickens. Thackeray was born in 1811, Dickens a year later. By the mid-1830s, when the callow young Thackeray was knocking at the doors of literary London, Dickens was already in possession of the stage, the established star of the coming generation and very much the man to be measured against. As the two men aged, their relationship, cordial on the surface, would remain uneasy: they found it impossible to be friends. Thackeray, despite ...

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