SOURCE: “Thackeray and Orientalism: Cornhill to Cairo and The Newcomes,” in English Studies in Canada, Vol. XVI, No. 3, September, 1990, pp. 297-313.

In the following excerpt, Perkin discusses William Makepeace Thackeray's use of Oriental motifs in his novel The Newcomes and cites some influences on Thackeray's notion of Orientalism as presented in his travel book Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo.

Like numerous other Victorian writers, but more insistently and pervasively, Thackeray constructs an image of the east as a place of mystery, cruelty, adventure, and sensuality. The various distinct aspects of his presentation of the Orient combine to create a literary world that is defined in terms of its otherness. I am following Edward Said in using the terms “east” and “Orient” to indicate a vast and undifferentiated area comprising the Middle East and Asia, and existing in the Western European imagination (see Said, esp...