This book conveys Thackeray's development as a novelist, lecturer in
Great Britain and the United States, familiar essayist, and shaper of
cultural awareness as editor of a major new journal - a development
especially growing out of the achievement of Vanity Fair, where he has
so powerfully articulated the comical and absurd system of forces
defining the human existence that he and his readers shared.
Articulating the connections among Thackeray's varied work and
activities, Harden reveals the broadening imaginative growth and
deepening understanding of a supremely insightful perceiver and critic
of human life.