Theme : william makepeace thackeray works

CONCLUSION
Thackeray is most often compared to one other great novelist of Victorian literature, Charles Dickens. During the Victorian era, he was ranked second only to Dickens, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively as the author of Vanity Fair. In that novel he was able to satirize whole swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It also features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp. As a result, unlike Thackeray's other novels, it remains popular with the general reading public, is a standard fixture in university courses, and has been repeatedly adapted for movies and television.
In Thackeray's own day, some commentators, such as Anthony Trollope ranked his The History of Henry Esmond as his greatest work, perhaps because it expressed Victorian values of duty and earnestness, as did some of his other later novels. It is perhaps for this reason that they have not survived as well as Vanity Fair, which satirizes those values.
Thackeray saw himself as writing in the realist tradition and distinguished himself from the exaggerations and sentimentality of Dickens. Some later commentators have accepted this self-evaluation and seen him as a realist, but others note his inclination to use eighteenth-century narrative techniques, such as long digressions and directly addressing the reader, and argue that through them he frequently disrupts the illusion of reality. The school of Henry James, with its emphasis on maintaining that illusion, marked a break with Thackeray's techniques.
Meanwhile tragedy struck in his personal life as his wife succumbed to depression after the birth of their third child. She attempted suicide and eventually lapsed into a permanent state of a detachment from reality. Thackeray desperately sought cures for her, but nothing worked, and she ended up confined in a home, where she remained until 1893, outliving her husband by 30 years. After his wife's illness, Thackeray became a virtual bachelor, pursuing other women such as Mrs. Jane Brookfield, but never establishing another permanent relationship.
In the early 1840s, Thackeray had some success with two travel books, The Paris Sketch Book and The Irish Sketch Book. Later in the decade, he achieved some notoriety with his Snob Papers, but the work that really established his fame was the novel Vanity Fair, which first appeared in serialized installments beginning in January 1847. Even before Vanity Fair completed its serial run, Thackeray had become a celebrity, sought after by the very lords and ladies he satirized and hailed as the equal of Dickens.
He remained "at the top of the tree," as he put it, for the remaining decade and a half of his life, producing several large novels, notably Pendennis, The Newcomes, and The History of Henry Esmond, despite various illnesses, including a near fatal one that struck him in 1849 in the middle of writing Pendennis. He twice visited the United States on lecture tours during this period, and there fell in love with the young American girl, Sally Baxter.