The Drawn from Life

This is a selection of Thackeray's periodical journalism from the mid-nineteenth century, the sketches and essays he wrote for magazines before and beside his novels. The pieces observe London clubs, dinners, travel, picture galleries, and the manners of people on the make, often in a first-person voice that mocks snobbery and literary fashion. Some items are comic portraits; others report on art, the theatre, or foreign cities. There is no continuous plot. The volume is a gathering of magazine prose, illustrated with the author's own drawings, not a novel and not a picture book without text.

Bound in brown cloth with a montage of Thackeray's sketches in brown. Dark brown endleaves. Pale brown slipcase.