While studying in Paris, he married a young Irishwoman named Isabella Shawe. Although he eventually abandoned the idea of making his living as a painter, Thackeray continued to sketch and paint throughout his life and illustrated many of his own works. He later attended the prestigious Char-terhouse School and then Trinity College, Cambridge, which he left before finishing his degree.Īfter reading law for a short time, Thackeray moved to Paris, where he studied art. During these years Thackeray attended several boarding schools, where he was extremely unhappy. His mother, who remarried and remained in India, did not return to England for four years.

After his father's death when Thackeray was six, however, Thackeray was sent to England, where he was cared for by relatives. The British East India Company was a trading company with political power that reaped high profits from such goods as salt, indigo, and coffee while modernizing India. At the time, India was under the colonial rule of the company, and, indirectly, Great Britain. Unhappy Childhood Spent in Boarding Schools Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India, in 1811, where his father worked as a secretary for the British East India Company. Works in Biographical and Historical Context Anne (1852), a historical novel set in early eighteenth-century England, to be his most well-planned and carefully executed work. Although Vanity Fair has received more critical attention than any of his other works, many regard The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a Colonel in the Service of Her Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1848), a panorama of early nineteenth-century English upper-middle-class society, is generally regarded as Thackeray's masterpiece.

Anne (1852)īritish author William Makepeace Thackeray is best known for his satiric sketches and novels of upper- and middle-class English life and is credited with bringing a simpler style and greater realism to the English novel. The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1848)

Wm thackeray novels