December 24

1863 William Makepiece Thackeray (52), journalist and novelist, died. Thackeray is perhaps best remembered for his panoramic social satire Vanity Fair (1848), a novel which made him as famous as Dickens, and for An Irish sketchbook (1843), an account of an extensive four-month tour that he made from July to October the previous year. Well received by his middle-class English readers, the Sketchbook did, however, upset many of his Irish readers for its perceived anti-Catholic bias and unrelenting descriptions of pre-Famine poverty, the latter contrasting with his extensive accounts of the culinary fare in various establishments. Staying in the Shelbourne, for instance, he enjoyed ‘a copious breakfast of broiled Dublin Bay herrings, a buffet lunch and a plentiful dinner at 6p.m.’ and, in Skibbereen, ‘an exuberant dinner of trout and Kerry mutton’. Staying at the King’s Arms in Dundalk, however, he reported that the best food was reserved for ‘His Grace the Most Reverend the Lord Archbishop of Armagh and of Ireland, and his clergy’, noting that, ‘when their reverences were gone, the laity were served; and I have no doubt, from the leg of a duck which I got that the breast and wings must have been very tender’. Thackeray certainly did enjoy his food and, indeed, it was gluttony that precipitated his premature demise. On a brighter note, his first novel, The luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), about the adventures of an eighteenth-century Irishman, was the inspiration for one of the more unusual films of the 1970s. Written, directed and produced by the legendary Stanley Kubrick and partly filmed in Ireland, Barry Lyndon (1975), despite a dreadful performance by Ryan O’Neal in the title role, won four Oscars, including that for Best Cinematography.