The Irish Sketch-book

Thackeray travels in Ireland and recounts his experiences in story.. A summer Day in Dublin - A Country House - Cork - Rainy Days at Glengarriff - Killarney - Tralee - Galway - Newry - Belfast and much more.. Originally published 1887. Illustrated.. William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works particularly Vanity Fair a panoramic portrait of English society.. Thackeray began as a satirist and parodist writing papers with a sneaking fondness for roguish upstarts like Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair Barry Lyndon in The Luck of Barry Lyndon and Catherine in Catherine. In his earliest works writing under such pseudonyms as Charles James Yellowplush Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Savage Fitz-Boodle he tended towards the savage in his attacks on high society military prowess the institution of marriage and hypocrisy.. During the Victorian era Thackeray was ranked second only to Charles Dickens but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair. In that novel he was able to satirize whole swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It also features his most memorable character the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp. As a result unlike Thackeray's other novels it remains popular with the general reading public; it is a standard fixture in university courses and has been repeatedly adapted for movies and television.. In Thackeray's own day some commentators such as Anthony Trollope ranked his History of Henry Esmond as his greatest work perhaps because it expressed Victorian values of duty and earnestness as did some of his other later novels. It is perhaps for this reason that they have not survived as well as Vanity Fair which satirizes those values.. Thackeray saw himself as writing in the realistic tradition and distinguished himself from the exaggerations and sentimentality of Dickens. Some later commentators have accepted this self-evaluation and seen him as a realist but others note his inclination to use eighteenth-century narrative techniques such as digressions and talking to the reader and argue that through them he frequently disrupts the illusion of reality. The school of Henry James with its emphasis on maintaining that illusion marked a break with Thackeray's techniques.