1. Works by Thackeray
The Book of Snobs. Ed. John A. Sutherland. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978.
A Collection of Letters of W. M. Thackeray, 1847-1855. London, 1887 (abbreviated Collection).
The History of Henry Esmond. Ed. Edgar F. Harden. New York: Garland, 1989.
Despite her death at the end of Catherine, Catherine Hayes lived on, in a marginal way, in Thackeray's later works, even provoking a minor controversy by her appearance in the serialized version of Pendennis in 1850. Earlier she had made a brief, obscure appearance at the end of Vanity Fair, when the narrator recorded Becky Sharp's three lawyers as being Messrs. Burke, Thurtell, and Hayes, Burke and Thurtell being the names of two other notorious murderers.
A. The Newspapers of 1726
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.
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.
The Maspalomas dunes, located on the island of Gran Canaria, in the Province of Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands is the filming location for the desert scene at the beginning of the 2006 BBC adaptation of “Jane Eyre” as directed by Susanna White. According to Wikipedia, the dunes “were formed by sand from the now subdued marine shelf, when it was laid dry during the last ice age and the wind blew the sand towards the coast of the island” (Wiki). The significance of the inclusion of these dunes and the desert scene in the beginning of “Jane Eyre” is not at first clear.
