Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference: Allusion in The Newcomes

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

In this learned study, McMaster is concerned to substantiate an earlier
critic’s claim that W.M. Thackeray’s The Newcomes is “in some
respects the richest, not only of Thackeray’s books but of all
Victorian fictions.” He does so by exploring what the dust jacket
calls the novel’s “cultural density”—its elaborate allusions to
English poets, Latin classics, the Bible, novels, plays, songs, the
world of painting, history, London topography, newspapers, and (finally)
its use of artificial but meaningful names.

This book emerged out of scholarly work originally undertaken to
provide annotations for the novel. Such annotations are undoubtedly
useful, although they concentrate more on what dates a book than on what
renders it timeless. The treatment is detailed, even encyclopedic, but
narrow. I would have liked to hear more about Thackeray’s “cultural
density” in comparison with that of, say, Dickens or George Eliot. A
saturation in The Newcomes may well be the best way to learn what it
felt like to be a middle-class male in Victorian England, but I’m not
sure that this constitutes fictional richness.

A book, then for the Victorian devotee only.