In Thackeray's work, the place of _The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a
Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Anne. Written by Himself_--lies
midway between his four other principal books, _Vanity Fair, Pendennis,
The Newcomes_, and _The Virginians_; and its position serves, in a
measure, to explain its origin. In 1848, after much tentative and
miscellaneous production, of which the value had been but imperfectly
appreciated, the author found his fame with the yellow numbers of
_Vanity Fair_. Two years later, adopting the same serial form, came
_Pendennis_. _Vanity Fair_ had been the condensation of a life's
experience; and excellent as _Pendennis_ would have seemed from any
inferior hand, its readers could not disguise from themselves that,
though showing no falling off in other respects, it drew to some extent
upon the old material. No one was readier than Thackeray to listen to a
whisper of this kind, or more willing to believe that--as he afterwards
told his friend Elwin concerning _The Newcomes_--"he had exhausted all
the types of character with which he was familiar." Accordingly he
began, for the time, to turn his thoughts in fresh directions; and in
the year that followed the publication of _Pendennis_, prepared and
delivered in England and Scotland a series of _Lectures upon the English
Humourists of the Eighteenth Century_. With the success of these came
the prompting for a new work of fiction,--not to be contemporary, and
not to be issued in parts. His studies for the _Humourists_ had
saturated him with the spirit of a time to which--witness his novelette
of _Barry Lyndon_--he had always been attracted; and when Mr. George
Smith called on him with a proposal that he should write a new story for
L1000, he was already well in hand with _Esmond_,--an effort in which,
if it were not possible to invent new puppets, it was at least possible
to provide fresh costumes and a change of background. Begun in 1851,
_Esmond_ progressed rapidly, and by the end of May 1852 it was