The May 1839-February 1840 serialisation of Catherine: A Story in Fraser’s Magazine marked the first novel-length work by the twenty-eight-year-old author William Makepeace Thackeray. At the time of Catherine’s release, Thackeray was making a name for himself as a writer of journalistic, satirical, and burlesque pieces for The Times, The Morning Chronicle, and Bentley’s Miscellany (Carey 1977, p. 15). Catherine would bring together Thackeray’s gift of mimicry with his interest in history and the theatre, as he lampooned the popular Newgate novels of the 1830s. It is perhaps because of its topical subject matter and tonal disparities that Catherine’s critical popularity has waned. Thackeray’s biographer Gordon N. Rey found the novel “more impressive in its parts than as a whole” (Rey, 1955, p. 235), while Kathleen Tillotson argued that it has “more significance in Thackeray’s...
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Citation: Skwiat, Matthew. "Catherine". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 December 2022 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6141, accessed 09 June 2026.]
