Sharing a joke
Reading Thackeray: A Literary Life by Peter Shillingsburg and finding that he loses me a little in making his defense of Thackeray. In a more general sense I'm lost because he seems to know a lot of people who don't think Thackeray is being ironic all that often; if you know somebody is making a joke when he ambles up beside you, puts his thumbs in his lapels, and begins talking about how grand he is, this might be a remedial course in Thackeray studies. (Also, and I hate to even put this in the first post of this blog, he appears to have it out for our namesake and the focus of this society, the eminent novelist Arthur Pendennis. I shudder to think what he will say about the sainted Mrs. P and dread to consider whether we will have to exchange words over it.) Specifically, though, I think he's missing a not-just-possible read of the famous passage he's explicating here— And while the moralist who is holding forth on the cover, (an accurate portrait of your humble...