Whilliam Thackeray

"  When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradis." " Never lose a chance of saying a kind word."

When William Makepeace Thackeray began his literary career, English prose fiction was dominated by Charles Dickens. Thackeray formed his style in conscious reaction against Dickens's programmatic indictment of social evils and against the artificial style and sentimental falsification of life and moral values of the popular historical romances. The familiar, moralizing commentaries of Thackeray's narrators, as integral a part of his novels as the characters themselves, expressed their author's detached moral disillusionment—usually touched with sentimentality. Although critical of society, Thackeray was never a radical intellectual, remaining basically conservative. He initiated a tendency toward plainer style and greater realism in the portrayal of the commonplace, a manner carried on in the English novel by Anthony Trollope.

The story is framed by its preface and coda as a puppet show taking place at a fair; the cover illustration of the serial instalments was not of the characters but of a troupe of comic actors at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. The narrator, variously a show manager or writer, appears at times within the work itself and is highly unreliable, repeating a tale of gossip at second or third hand.

1)  http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Thackeray%2C%20William%20Makepeace%2C%201811-1863

Thackeray's "Vanity Fair " was his most successful novel and it is not surprising that it was translated and published in Ukraine.

Many books of William Thackeray were made into films. Among the most popular ones are : 1) Pierscien i róza Pierscien i róza is a 1986 Polish musical film directed by Jerzy Gruza and starring Katarzyna Figura, Stefan Kazuro and Katarzyna Cygan. It is an adaptation of the novel The Rose and the Ring. 

Thackeray, feeling that he had written himself out, returned to earlier works for subjects for his later novels.  The Virginians  (1858–1859) follows the fortunes of Henry Esmond's grandsons in the United States, and  The Adventures of Philip  (1862) continues " A Shabby Genteel Story ." His later career included an unsuccessful campaign for  Parliament  as a reform candidate in 1857, and two lecture trips to the United States in 1852 and 1855. A founding editor of the  Cornhill Magazine,  he served it from 1859 to 1862.

Vanity Fair  (1847–1848) established Thackeray's fame permanently. Set in the time just before and after the Battle of Waterloo (1815; a battle that ended French domination of Europe), this novel is a portrait of society and centers on three families interrelated by acquaintance and marriage. In the unrestrained and resourceful Becky Sharp, Thackeray created one of fiction's most engaging characters.

Between 1837 and 1844 Thackeray wrote critical articles on art and literature for numerous papers and journals, but he contributed most of his fiction of this period to  Fraser's Magazine.  In  The Memoirs of C. J. Yellowplush,  which appeared in a series from 1837 to 1838, he parodied (humorously wrote in the style of) the high-flown language of "fashnabble" novels. In  Catherine  (1839–1840) he parodied the popular criminal novel. "A Shabby Genteel Story" (1840) and other short compositions explored the world of rogues (dishonest people) and fools in a spirit of extreme and bitter disappointment.  The Irish Sketch Book  (1843) and  Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cario  (1845), supposedly written by the confirmed Londoner Mr. M. A. Titmarsh, were in a lighter vein.

In 1829 Thackeray entered  Trinity College   at Cambridge University, where he was only an average student. He left the university the next year, convinced that it was not worth his while to spend more time in pursuit of a second-rate degree under an unsuitable educational institution. A six-month stay in Weimar, Germany, gave Thackeray a more William Makepeace Thackeray.  Courtesy of the Library of Congress . sophisticated polish, as well as a more objective view of English manners. After Thackeray returned to London, he began studying law at the Middle Temple. He seemed more devoted to the fashionable but expensive habits of drinking and gambling that he had acquired at Cambridge, however.

William Makepeace Thackeray was born on July 18, 1811, in Calcutta, India. He was the only child of Richmond and Anne Thackeray. His family had made its fortunes in the East India Company for two generations. In 1817, after the death of his father, five-yearold Thackeray was sent to England to live with his aunt while he received his education. He was a precocious (showed the characteristics of an older person at a young age) child and showed a talent for drawing.