This book conveys Thackeray's development as a novelist, lecturer in Great Britain and the United States, familiar essayist, and shaper of cultural awareness as editor of a major new journal - a development especially growing out of the achievement of Vanity Fair, where he has so powerfully articulated the comical and absurd system of forces defining the human existence that he and his readers shared. Articulating the connections among Thackeray's varied work and activities, Harden reveals the broadening imaginative growth and deepening understanding of a supremely insightful perceiver and critic of human life.