Henry Esmond

I'm reading Henry Esmond by good old Thackeray this week. It's another tale of a young man's adventures at college, in love, in the army and eventually in America. The difference is that this one's set in time of William and Mary of Orange and Queen Anne, which was about a hundred and fifty years prior to when it was written. I don't know whether this is why all the lords and Dukes have proper names rather than the irritating dashes he uses in his modern books. And many of them are real too!

It's pretty well exactly what you'd expect from his other books. Thackeray skewers the rich,the pretentious, the drunk, the jealous and the formerly beautiful trying to preserve their looks. Our hero is the unwitting victim of plots for the first few hundred pages and his sense of honour stops him pursuing things to his own advantage. But there is also a lot about the Jacobeans and the politics of the era - most of which are explained quite well. One of young Henry's early mentors is a Jesuit priest who conspires to bring King James back to England. A relative dies at the Battle of the Boyne. When he grows up he goes and serves under the Duke of Marlborough.

Annoyingly, like Thackeray's other books, it's probably a bit too clever by half, with classical allusions and bits of foreign languages thrown in. One of the characters pretends to prefer to speak in French but she's never learnt to write it so her letters are a bit phonetically spelt which would be highly amusing I'm sure if I happened to speak nineteenth century French. And on the train yesterday morning I was reading along and he was talking about the folly of the Stuarts when he put in a footnote of three lines of Greek poetry. I recognised one word (meaning "fool") and if I'd been near a dictionary I might have tried to figure it out but I thought "he's only showing off. I'm sure it doesn't matter."*

This makes me wonder whether people would like Dickens as much if he'd gone to university. Maybe it's his very lack of erudition that makes him so popular still. That and having a few more plots than old WM...

* Of course, if I was reading a proper annotated modern edition I could have found out immediately what it meant but that's all a bit serious and academic. I can't help earnestly reading every note and come away informed but a bit bored. I prefer reading old editions of old books. This is an Illustrated Pocket Classic published by Collins and London and Glasgow in the 1920s. It weighs less than my diary and, even though I don't have a pocket big enough, it easily fits into my smallest handbag.