An intense fascination with the experience of time has long been recognised as a distinctive feature of the writing of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863). This collection of essays, however, represents the first sustained critical examination of Thackeray’s `time consciousness’ in all its varied manifestations. Encompassing the full chronological span of the author’s career and a wide range of literary forms and genres in which he worked, Thackeray in Time repositions Thackeray’s temporal and historical self-consciousness in relation to the broader socio-cultural contexts of Victorian modernity. The first part of the collection focusses on some of the characteristic temporal modes of professional authorship and print culture in the mid-nineteenth century, including periodical journalism and the Christmas book market. Secondly, the volume offers fresh approaches to Thackeray’s acknowledged status as a major exponent of historical fiction, reconsidering questions of historiography and the representation of place in such novels as Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond. The final part of the collection develops the central Thackerayan theme of memory within four very different but complementary contexts. Thackeray’s absorption by memories of childhood in later life leads on to his own subsequent memorialisation by familial descendants and to the potential of digital technology for preserving and enhancing Thackeray’s print archive in the future, and finally to the critical legacy perpetuated by generations of literary scholars since his death.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction, Richard Salmon. Part 1 Time, Modernity and Literary Culture: Thackeray’s ephemera: fashion, modernity and the sketch, Richard Salmon; `The myth of the century’: Thackeray and Bohemia, Antonia Harland-Lang; Time out of time: Thackeray and Christmas temporality in The Rose and the Ring, Kate Forrester. Part 2 Historical Fictions: Genre and Place: `Fac simile!’: Thackeray’s simulations of 18th-century literary figures, Richard Pearson; Paddythackeray: Thackeray and the timeless space of the Irish military novel, Jim Shanahan; Thackeray and silver fork Bloomsbury: Vanity Fair as local historical novel, Matthew Ingleby. Part 3 Memory and Legacy: Nostalgia and jam tarts: memory and childhood in Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers, Alice Crossley; Keeping it in the family: Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s duty of care, John Aplin; Digital Thackeray: preserving the legacy?, Clare Horrocks; The `cracked and warped looking glass’ of Thackeray’s critics, Judith Fisher. Index.