Here Thackeray gives eloquent and pronounced articulation to several of the most deeply rooted Victorian, and indeed modern, concerns. In creative tension with this historical awareness, moreover, is Thackeray's satire, which is not limited and local but beyond time and place, radically challenging the reader's most fundamental assumptions about human life, but doing so in a voice that always evokes a personal human presence alongside the reader. He therefore gave a new prominence to the commentary of narrative personae and so offered a permanently valuable counterstance to what later came to be their pronounced opposites in the impressive dramatic novels of Henry James. Finally, one can see the importance of the wit and philosophical irony of Thackeray's fictional voices, with the constant shifting of perspective that alone can mediate to the reader the profound indeterminacy at the heart of his writing--an indeterminacy that finds its counterpart in much subsequent literature.
Service with the British East India Company's Bengal establishment characterized Thackeray's immediate male ancestors on both sides of his family.
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