The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes And Misfortunes, His Friends And His Greatest Enemy (The Penguin English Library) - Softcover

'If the best men do not draw the great prizes in life, we know it has been so settled by the Ordainer of the lottery'

When Thackeray had finished Vanity Fair he turned back to his own youth and early manhood to write what was to be one of the finest English autobiographical novels. Loose and episodic in style, Pendennis is sustained by its author's easy, flowing, almost conversational style, and is an unfolding panorama of brilliant scenes: of boyhood in one of the semi-barbarous schools of the period; of undergraduate life at Oxbridge (Thackeray's coinage); and of all the richly variegated life of London in the 1830s and 1840s. Throughout it bears the imprint of its author's personality - at once sentimental and ironic, jovial and disenchanted.

This edition contains an introduction discussing Thackeray's life, and the autobiographical nature and background of his novel. It also includes selected further reading, notes and a list of people and places.

Edited by Donald Hawes with an introduction by J. I. M. Stewart