#i loved 'vanity fair' as a kid but thackeray does seem like a bit of a jerk (and definitely a bigot)

[clove-pinks]

Portrait sketch of William Makepeace Thackeray by Samuel Laurence, 1848 (British Museum).

The 1840s saw the advent of the modern tourist industry and Thackeray was one of many Britons who in that decade flocked to the Holy Land and the Pyramids. (Though it was not until the 1860s that Cook’s Tours began plying the waters of the Nile, Thomas Cook first ventured into the tourist business in 1841.) On board his P&O steamer Thackeray found that all the British excursionists were reading Alexander Kingslake’s Eothen, just published—a book addressed to another eastern traveler, Eliot Warburton, whose The Crescent and the Cross was also published in 1844. The redoubtable Harriet Martineau took ship with friends in 1846 to the East, publishing Eastern Life, Present and Past in 1848—a volume R.K. Webb describes as containing “travels and a torrent of philosophizing,” both utilitarian and Unitarian.

— Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914

The Temple of Dendera, Upper Egypt, by David Roberts, 1841 (Art UK)