W. M. Thackeray's European Sketch Books: A Study of Literary and Graphic Portraiture (review)

One of the most pleasant surprises of graduate school was learning that virtually any useful critical tool you could imagine was already in print and waiting for you at a major research library. For me, that tool was Lidmila Pantûçková's W. M. Thackeray as a Critic of Literature, volumes 10 and 11 (1972) of Brno Studies in English. In exhaustive and exhausting detail, she summarized and quoted from Thackeray's remarks about any writer or literary work he had ever mentioned. As someone writing on Thackeray, I found Pantûçková's work unreadable but invaluable. So comprehensive it couldn't possibly cohere, the book's erudite and painfully inclusive prose nevertheless provided me with shortcuts to sources and quotations.

A less forbidding, yet similarly encyclopedic grasp of Thackeray's writings has made possible the work of several other scholars. Though Edgar Harden's critical writing, editing, and annotating make him preeminent, Robert Colby's Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity (1979) identifies almost every reference in Thackeray to popular literature and culture, and in Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference: Allusion in The Newcomes (1991), R. D. McMaster explores exactly what the title promises. These writers all appear in the acknowledgments and bibliography of S. S. Prawer's W. M. Thackeray's European Sketch Books: A Study of Literary and Graphic Portraiture.

Prawer has already published the 439-page Israel at Vanity Fair: Jews and Judaism in the Writings of W. M. Thackeray (1992), and the 554-page Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray's German Discourse (1997). His new book employs the method of the first two. A preface declares that he will explore Thackeray's attitudes about all continental Europeans except for the Germans. (They already have a book.) Since Thackeray famously made his observations through images as well as words, over 150 drawings will also be reproduced and discussed.

France dominates the study. Since "to do full justice" to this subject "would require a separate book"—presumably one as long as Breeches and Metaphysics—the eighty- one-page "Part 1: Among the French" can only provide a sampling (16). Apart from a chapter on Thackeray's treatment of Louis-Philippe, then, Prawer focuses on the French characters in Vanity Fair (1847-48), Pendennis (1848-50), The Newcomes (1853-55), Philip (1861-62), and Denis Duval (1864). Especially given the book's title, this decision seems odd. It was in Paris during the 1830s that Thackeray made himself a writer: surely The Paris Sketch Book (1840), The Second Funeral of Napoleon (1841), and his critical and journalistic writing from this time deserve a chapter of their own. As Richard Pearson has shown, a great deal can be learned from Thackeray's French apprenticeship.

"Part 2: A Roundabout Journey through the European Heartlands" is more of a 250-page guide book than an argument. Each of the chapters on Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal begins with an overview of Thackeray's published opinions about the country, often linked to a brief account of his actual experience there. A loosely associative yet detailed walk through Thackeray's relevant works culminates in a coda that draws together the chapter's main examples. "Part 3: 'The Sick Man of Europe' and the Ottoman Empire" follows the same pattern. Its forty-five-page survey of Thackeray's remarks on "the Turks" draws extensively from his Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846). Having roamed from Scandinavia to Jerusalem, Prawer then draws his book on Thackeray's Europe to a close. Ireland, America, India, and Africa presumably wait for future volumes.

What does this book provide its readers? It is a useful reference work for anyone working on a related topic—British satiric representations of various national characters, for...