Pendennis... still

I'm up to page 340 now and I know how it ends but young Pen is such a personable young man that I'm going to pursue it further. Besides, the title page promised me an account of his greatest enemy and I can't actually work out who that is yet. They haven't got long to appear!

Thackeray had a bit of an idee fixe on pineapples in the mid 200s of the book. I wonder if they were in the news when that part of serial was published. Pineapples are eaten by rich young men of fashion out for a jaunt with theatrical women. They appear in elegant dining rooms as dessert and there's an odd comment about how breeding by a clever Mr Someone or Other has improved the size of the pineapple and reduced its gestation period from nine to three months. I would have thought that pineapples had been happily growing to the same size for the same length of time for milennia. This calls for further research!