Breeches and Metaphysics

This study traces the successive stages of Thackeray's contact with the German world and analyses the discourse he developed as a result. The author is concerned with the fiction and criticism of Thackeray's :Paris Sketch Book" and the impressions related by the cockney traveller in "Irish Sketch Book" and "Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo". Thackeray's own pictorial illustrations of his writings and those by Cruikshank, Doyle and Walker, which he supervised and supplemented, are recognized as an integral part of his German discourse. The study is a chronological one, setting Thackeray's construction of "German" and "the Germans" against the background of his own development and of the social, industrial, cultural and political history of Britain and its continental neighbours.