The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray (review)

418 letters in canada 1999 in carrying mail and men (recruits) into the Columbia Department, a route used until the late 1840s B it was in effect another brigade route. Gibson's narrow focus can be forgiven but could have been clarified more in the introduction. The conclusion deals with the issues of cost and changes in the fur trade that saw its demise. The cut-off date for the research, at the time of the Oregon Treaty in 1846, is significant, though the brigade system continued for a dozen more years via a trail across the Cascades to the lower Fraser, the outlet earlier envisaged by Governor George Simpson. Two appendices, William Connolly's journal of a brigade trip in 1826 and Peter Warren Dease's account of a journey in 1831, provide the fodder for much of Gibson's analysis. The notes are prodigious and a measure of the extensive research, especially of Hudson's Bay Archives records, that has gone into this work. Indeed, this is the strength of Gibson's style and method B the use of primary sources to recreate the past in a narrative fashion. Although the reliance on quotations is sometimes laborious, it is sound and readable research. This publication is an invaluable source of information on the Columbian `communication,' as well as the far western fur trade in general. Undoubtedly, more will be published on this subject, but Gibson's work stands so far as the most important book on the brigade system for this area. (KEN FAVRHOLDT) William Makepeace Thackeray. The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Edited by Edgar F. Harden University of Michigan Press, viii, 248. US $75.00 If we divide Thackeray's writing career into before and after Vanity Fair (1847), The Luck of Barry Lyndon, published between January and December 1844, falls into the end of the earlier period. By this time Thackeray had contributed to about twenty periodicals, including Fraser's Magazine, where he was a regular contributor. It was steady income which he valued and which he continued after the time when his reputation as a novelist meant he didn't have to write for magazines. In June 1841 he was planning the story which became Barry Lyndon for Fraser's. He suggested a sheet and a half (twenty-four pages) a month for a fee of twenty guineas, a bit more than the going rate. He regularly made ten to twelve guineas a sheet (sixteen pages) from magazines. Books paid more than twice as much, and publishing books was his real aim, so what was interesting about this story was that he was already planning it as a book, looking to publication beyond the magazine instalments. His literary success until then was limited to two travel books, a novella, short stories and novel-length fiction published in magazines. He had attracted public attention even if he hadn't sold particularly well. He began to write Barry Lyndon in earnest in humanities 419 February 1842, and the first instalment was published in January 1844, under the pseudonym Thackeray had used before in Fraser's, George Fitzboodle. It is very much in the satirical, anti-establishment style of the magazines Thackeray was writing for simultaneously, Punch and Fraser's. Peter Shillingsburg in Pegasus in Harness has made clear that Thackeray was no slapdash artist but instead an able businessman and a reliable professional , so the delay in the October 1844 instalment of Barry Lyndon was not because of slacking but because Thackeray was abroad, in Smyrna, on a free trip to write a travel book. In any case he managed to finish the story by 3 November 1844. It was not immediately published in book form, and Edgar F. Harden speculates that this might have been because it was not as well received as Thackeray might have hoped. It was eventually published in two volumes, but not until 1853, when it appeared in a pirated edition, published by Appleton in New York, to coincide with Thackeray's lecture tour there after Vanity Fair had made him a celebrity. But Appleton paid him nothing. It was first published as a book in England in 1856, under the title...