2. Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Dino Felluga and Kenneth Crowell for bringing my edition of Catherine into the electronic era via Cove. I would also like to thank those who helped with earlier versions of this edition: Professor Ira B. Nadel, who supervised the Ph.D dissertation at the University of British Columbia, on which this edition is based, along with the other members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Herbert J. Rosengarten and the late Dr. William E. Fredeman.

Catherine

A forgotten masterpiece, William Makepeace Thackeray’s first novel, Catherine, has languished in obscurity, in part due to its author’s own unhappiness with it. He had set out to write a satire of the Newgate novels of the 1830’s with their glorification of criminals, but instead turned out a tale of a roguish heroine much in the mould of the equally roguish heroine of Vanity Fair: Becky Sharp. Also like Vanity Fair, this novel provides some wry social commentary through the mouth of its cynical narrator.