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Like many of his fellow Victorian novelists, William Makepeace Thackeray is noted for his ability to create memorable characters—such as Major Gahagan, Charles Yellowplush, Becky Sharp, Major Pendennis, Henry and Beatrix Esmond, Colonel Newcome, and, not least of all, the roundabout commentator who addresses the reader in Thackeray's nonfiction as well as in his fiction. In spite of giving such prominence to character delineation, Thackeray also came to develop an important new kind of novel, the "novel without a hero." Such a novel may have a chief figure: one who is neither a romantic hero nor a rogue hero but a flawed, recognizable human being like Arthur Pendennis or Philip Firmin. In the case of several of Thackeray's masterpieces, such as Vanity Fair (1847-1848) and The Newcomes (1853-1855), however, the center of interest is the complex of relationships among the characters —an analogue of society itself.
Thackeray's writing is important for being governed by an intense historical awareness that constantly reveals itself in the precise, concrete detail of an evoked visible world, but also in a persistent consciousness of the flow of time, which ages both things and human experience, diminishing both and calling the value of both into question.
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