Like many of his fellow Victorian novelists, William Makepeace Thackeray is noted for his ability to create memorable characters--like Major Gahagan, Charles Yellowplush, Becky Sharp, Major Pendennis, Henry and Beatrix Esmond, Colonel Newcome, and not least of all the roundabout commentator who addresses the reader in Thackeray's nonfiction as well as in his fiction. In spite of giving such prominence to character delineation, Thackeray also came to develop an important new kind of novel, the "novel without a hero." Such a novel may have a chief figure: one who is neither a romantic hero nor a rogue hero but a flawed, recognizable human being like Arthur Pendennis or Philip Firmin. In the case of several of Thackeray's masterpieces such as Vanity Fair (1847-1848) and The Newcomes (1853-1855), however, the center of interest is the complex of relationships among the characters--an analogue of society itself.

Thackeray's writing is important...