INTRODUCTORY NOTE. THACKERAY was in his thirty-seventh year when he began the publication of Vanity Fair; for eighteen years he had been contributing to periodicals, chiefly Fraser's Magazine and Punch; he had published also a few books, the most important, besides those which were reprints of his magazine work, being The Irish Sketch Book and Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo; he had, three or four years before, seen his The Luck of Barry Lyndon appear as a serial in Fraser's, but heretofore in almost every instance his work had been credited to Michael Angelo Titmarsh. The publication of Vanity Fair in monthly instalments, as a separate work, with the author's name in full, marks the real début of the great novelist, and therefore very properly stands as the first issue in a complete series of his writings. A paragraph in an article by Abraham Hayward in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1848, gives a convenient summary of Thackeray's career up to the time of the appearance of Vanity Fair, and may properly be quoted here. "Mr. Thackeray is now about thirty-seven years of age, of a good family, and originally intended for the bar. He kept seven or eight terms at Cambridge, but left the University, without taking a degree, with the view of becoming an artist; and we well remember, ten or twelve years ago, finding him |