The History of Pendennis

When Thackeray had finished Vanity Fair he turned back to his own youth and early manhood to write what was to be one of the half-dozen best English autobiographical novels. Loose and episodic in structure, Pendennis is sustained by its author’s easy, flowing, almost conversational style, and is an unfolding panorama of brilliant scenes; of boyhood in one of the semi-barbarous schools of the period; of undergraduate life at Oxbridge (Thackeray’s coinage); and of all the richly variegated life of London in the 1830s and 1840s. Throughout it bears the imprint of its author’s personality at once sentimental and ironic, jovial and disenchanted. Above all it is, as J. I. M. Stewart sums it up, steadily and multitudinously entertaining’.