The History of Pendennis
1850
Thackeray's follow-up to Vanity Fair pulses with an energy its predecessor lacks, a young man finding his way through the world rather than a woman climbing over bodies. Pen Pendennis begins as a miserable schoolboy and stumbles forward through Oxford, journalism, and London society, each stage revealing the contradictions of genteel English life. His uncle, the worldly Major Pendennis, serves as both guide and cautionary example, while Pen's passionate entanglement with an actress forces a collision between romantic idealism and social calculation that the novel explores with neither simple condemnation nor easy approval. This is Thackeray at his most generous: his satirical eye remains sharp, but his affection for this bumbling, decent hero warmth the portrait. The result is a panoramic, supremely entertaining novel about the true ebb and flow of life, for readers who found Becky Sharp dazzling but cold, Pen offers a protagonist worth rooting for.
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“Perhaps all early love affairs ought to be strangled or drowned, like so many blind kittens.””
— William Makepeace Thackeray
“What part of confidante has that poor teapot played ever since the kindly plant was introduced among us! Why myriads of women have cried over it, to be sure! [...] Nature meant very kindly by women when she made the tea plant; and with a little thought, what series of pictures and groups of the fancy may conjure up and assemble round the teapot and cup.””
— William Makepeace Thackeray
“How lonely we are in the world; how selfish and secret, everybody!””
— William Makepeace Thackeray
“Pendennis, sir," he said, "your idleness is incorrigible and your stupidity beyond example. You are a disgrace to your school, and to your family, and I have no doubt will prove so in after-life to your country. If that vice, sir, which is described to us as the root of all evil, be really what moralists have represented (and I have no doubt of the correctness of their opinion), for what a prodigious quantity of future crime and wickedness are you, unhappy boy, laying the seed! Miserable trifler! A boy who construes de and, instead of de but, at sixteen years of age is guilty not merely of folly, and ignorance, and dulness inconceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial ingratitude, which I tremble to contemplate. A boy, sir, who does not learn his Greek play cheats the parent who spends money for his education. A boy who cheats his parent is not very far from robbing or forging upon his neighbour. A man who forges on his neighbour pays the penalty of his crime at the gallows. And it is not such a one that I pity (for he will be deservedly cut off), but his maddened and heart-broken parents, who are driven to a premature grave by his crimes, or, if they live, drag on a wretched and dishonoured old age. Go on, sir, and I warn you that the very next mistake that you make shall subject you to the punishment of the rod. Who's that laughing? What ill-conditioned boy is there that dares to laugh?" shouted the Doctor.””
— William Makepeace Thackeray
“It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or, perhaps, who read books, so little as literary men.””
— William Makepeace Thackeray
“his first and only love, whom he had adored ever since when? – ever since yesterday, ever since for ever.””
— William Makepeace Thackeray
“Every man, however brief or inglorious may have been his academical career, must remember with kindness and tenderness the old university comrades and days. The young man's life is just beginning: the boy's leading-strings are cut, and he has all the novel delights and dignities of freedom. He has no idea of cares yet, or of bad health, or of roguery, or poverty, or to-morrow's disappointment.””
— William Makepeace Thackeray
