John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character

A collaboration between two Victorian giants - the novelist who gave us 'Vanity Fair' and the cartoonist who illustrated it. Thackeray's commentary accompanies Leech's sharp-eyed cartoons, which first appeared in Punch magazine, exposing the absurdities of English middle-class life with gleeful precision. Here are men obsessed with their whiskers, women tangled in crinoline, families performing respectability for neighbors they despise. Leech's pen catches everything: the pretensions of the newly wealthy, the agonies of social climbing, the desperate maintainence of appearances. Thackeray, never one to miss an opportunity for irony, frames these scenes with observations that are as razor-sharp as anything in his novels. The book functions as both celebration and loving critique of the English character - that peculiar mix of domestic warmth and social anxiety. Whether you come for the historical curiosity or the enduring relevance of its satire, these pictures remain remarkably fresh. The vanities Leech skewered have simply found new costumes.