The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. - Softcover

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811, but sent to England at the age of six. He was educated at Charterhouse and at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1833 he settled in Paris, after a major financial loss, and tried a career as a painter. It was here he met nineteen-year-old Isabella Shawe, upon whom he based many of his virtuous but weak heroines, and whom he married in 1836. A year later they settled in London, where Thackeray turned seriously to journalism. His writing for periodicals included The Yellowplush Correspondence, which appeared first in Fraser's Magazine and then in 1841 in book form. Around this time personal and domestic pressures caused the already helpless Isabella to subside into a state of complete and permanent mental collapse and the subsequent breakdown of the marriage formed a central part of Thackeray's consciousness. His early work centred around rogues and villains, most famously in The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844; revised as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. in 1856), and in his masterpiece, Vanity Fair, which appeared in monthly parts in 1847-8 and which most clearly reveals his socially satirical edge. The Book of Snobs, which originally appeared as a series in Punch, also attacks Victorian society with vicious wit. Thackeray's later novels include The History of Pendennis, (1848-50); The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. (1852); The Newcomes (1853-5); The Virginians, (1857-9), which is a sequel to Henry Esmond; and The Adventures of Philip (1860-62). He also wrote a series of lectures, The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853), and numerous reviews, articles and sketches, usually in the comic vein. From 1860 to 1862 he also edited the Cornhill magazine. Thackeray died suddenly on Christmas Eve, 1863.

Out of modesty, one supposes, the impossibly virtuous (and fictional) Henry Esmond narrates his adventures in the third person. Raised to believe himself a nobleman's love-child, he eventually discovers he is a legitimate heir. This knowledge he suppresses in favor of his near relations and benefactors, especially the Jacobite Lady Castlewood and her daughter, both of whom he loves devotedly, and one of whom he eventually marries. In the meantime, neither he nor his kin can escape the political, martial, and religious turmoil of Queen Anne's England. Published in 1852, this novel helped establish Thackeray as Charles Dickens's rival in popularity. Narrator Gordon Griffin, who has previously tackled both, here displays an enthusiastic sincerity that contributes much charm to his deep understanding of the tone and milieu of this novel. Though seeming to downplay the melancholy that seeps into the prose, he manages to convey it without letting it overwhelm the vigor of the writing. Y.R. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine