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.
Jane Eyre was filmed in 2006, and was shot in Derbyshire, England. Derbyshire is also where Thornfield Hall is presumed to be located (Wikipedia Contributors). An interesting find about Derbyshire that plays into Jane’s happiness within the reading and film is how Derbyshire is known for their botany.
