| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9781410105110 | | Publisher: Fredonia Books (NL) | | Publish Date: 4/10/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 39940436 | | Item#: BJDT2D | | Pages: 176 |
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| | | The story of "Catherine,"which appeared in Fraser''s Magazine in 1839-40, was written by William Makepeace Thackeray, under the name of Ikey Solomons, Junior, to counteract the injurious influence of some popular fictions of that day, which made heroes of highwaymen and burglars, and created a false sympathy for the vicious and criminal. With this purpose, the author chose for the subject of his story a woman named Catherine Hays, who was burned at Tyburn, in 1726, for the deliberate murder of her husband, under very revolting circumstances. Mr. Thackeray''s aim obviously was to describe the career of this wretched woman and her associates with such fidelity to truth as to exhibit the danger and folly of investing such persons with heroic and romantic qualities.
Annotation:
First serialized in Fraser's Magazine in 1839 and 1840, CATHERINE is a short, satirical novel about a murder.
| PraiseTimes Literary Supplement
"...CATHERINE...was conceived as a corrective satire on a fashionable genre. It did not shake off the shadow of the Newgate novels it was intended to parody...; but that was not Thackeray's intention. On the contrary, he considered his story a failure because he had not made his retelling of a sordid eighteenth-century murder sordid enough." - Catherine Peters 11/26/1999 |
| Author Bio| William Makepeace Thackeray | | Thackeray's father worked for the East India Company, and Thackeray was born in Bombay. When his father died when the boy was 4, his mother remarried, and he was raised in England. He attended the Charterhouse School, where he was brutally tormented by his schoolmates, one of whom smashed his nose beyond repair--a deformity that embarrassed him all his life. He went to Cambridge, but left before he took a degree to travel in Germany, where he met Goethe. He studied art in Paris, read for the law but loathed it and never practiced, lost his inheritance through his own carelessness, and finally turned to writing fiction. He began as a satirist but, with the publication of VANITY FAIR (1847-48), his fourth novel, he became wealthy and successful and settled down to write fiction in earnest. He was married in 1836, but his wife was institutionalized with mental problems. In his heyday, Thackeray was often compared to Dickens, who was a greater popular and financial success but whose melodrama, sentimentality, and failure to adhere to strict realism Thackeray frequently criticized. Largely due to VANITY FAIR and a handful of other great novels, Thackeray is regarded as one of the finest writers of the Victorian era. He died of a cerebral hemmorhage at his newly completed home in Bayswater, at the age of 52. |
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