William Makepeace Thackeray was, after Charles Dickens, the most celebrated British novelist of the nineteenth century. Today his reputation rests mostly on Vanity Fair (1847-1848) and has been eclipsed by that of George Eliot; even Anthony Trollope, who considered himself a "lesser Thackeray," has more novels still in print and a more loyal following. In his own day, however, many intellectuals preferred Thackeray to Dickens. Trollope ranked Thackeray first among the English novelists of the nineteenth century; Charlotte Brontë, who dedicated the second edition (1848) of Jane Eyre (1847) to Thackeray, found in him a "profound and unique intellect"; Leslie Stephen compared him to Honoré de Balzac.

As a novelist Thackeray constantly fought for literary realism, and this quest led him into parodying and burlesquing literary forms, genres, and conventions. If the eighteenth century was the age of satire and the nineteenth century was the age of sincerity...