American Criticism of Thackeray 1848-1855

Abstract

VA ITY FAIR was published in the United States in the late summer of I848, and in October, I855, its author came to America for his second lecture tour. The aim of this paper is to examine the Thackeray criticism written by Americans and published in American critical journals during this seven-year period. The particular purpose has been to determine if there was a shift in the appreciation of Thackeray as a result of his first American lecture tour in the winter of I852-I853. Accepting the nineteenth-century interest in the biography of its artists and accepting the penchant to criticize in terms of the man and his biography, we would expect that the favorable appearance which Thackeray made in America would have some effect on the serious magazine criticism of the time. As far as I have been able to tell there have been no specific inquiries into Thackeray's American reputation; this seems strange since, if for no other reason, the criticism written about the English novelist is an index of American critical opinion in the mid-century. The publication of Vanity Fair was not Thackeray's first appearance in America. A number of his short magazine pieces had been reprinted in American periodicals, and, characteristically enough, Thackeray's first book, The Yellowplush Correspondence, was published in America by a Philadelphia publisher in i838.1 While his