The Paris Sketch Book of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh

Before Vanity Fair made him a household name, William Makepeace Thackeray traveled to Paris and returned with this wickedly funny account of English tourists abroad. Under the pseudonym Mr. M. A. Titmarsh, Thackeray turns his satirist's eye on the chaos of crossing the Channel: the frantic families at London Bridge loaded down with absurd quantities of luggage, the battles with customs officials, the disasters in French hotels. But it's the observations on Parisian society that truly sparkle. Thackeray dissectes the pretensions of English travelers attempting to navigate French customs with excruciating comedy, captures the particular humiliations of being a foreigner, and paints vivid portraits of the characters who populate the boulevards and cafes of 1830s Paris. The prose has that quintessential Victorian quality of someone who finds the entire human comedy endlessly amusing. This is Thackeray before he became Thackeray the novelist, but the wit is already fully formed, the eye already mercilessly sharp. For readers who love sharp social commentary and want to see Paris through the eyes of a writer who found every form of human pomposity hilarious.