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Notes
Miriam M. H. Thrall (Rebellious Fraser's [1934], 55-80) feels Thackeray learned how to write satire at Fraser's. While this extreme view of the importance of the relationship is unfounded — based as it is on an erroneous supposition of Thackeray's editorial role —, there can be no question that the Fraser's period helped shape at least the working habits of the novelist. See Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (1955), pp. 196, 198, 201.
Uses of Adversity, note 13, p. 469, refers to Gulliver's outdated Thackeray's Literary Apprenticeship as "the best study of the tangled bibliography of Thackeray's early years."
I would like to express my particular debt to Professor Houghton, who has made available to me the working apparatus of The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, and has been generous with his counsel.
See Uses of Adversity, chap. 1, for a detailed account of the difficulties Thackeray's prohibition of a biography has placed in the way of those who have attempted to assess his work.
As The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. H. E. Scudder (1889), XX; The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. W. P. Trent and J. B. Henneman (1904), XXVII.
Letters, I, 185-238; 249-251. For further arguments against Thackeray's authorship see Thrall, pp. 62-64, and Lewis Benjamin, William Makepeace Thackeray (1910), I, 131-134.
"The Author of Elizabeth Brownrigge: A Review of Thackeray's Techniques," SP, XXXIX (1942), 81-82.
The Murder of the Man who was "Shakespeare" (1955). Boll is, we should say, more reasonable and more scholarly than the author of this extreme example of a faulty procedure gone astray. Boll, in addition, does recognize some important differences in style between "Elizabeth Brownrigge" and Thackeray's known work, but, with some inconsistency, sees these differences resulting from the nature of parody and the youth of the writer.
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