ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses father's charismatic authority as defined by Weber alongside 'the power of addressing mankind in the name of religion', in J. S. Mill's formulation, triangulates 'fathers', actors, and books. It describes William Makepeace Thackeray's recurring descriptions of the father preaching, and the father at prayer, showing how they intersect with both theatricality and sentimentality. The chapter explores Thackeray's novels into conversation with manuals from the 1830s through the 1850s, marketed to father figures charged with engaging mixed households during daily family prayer. It also discusses intersections between religious and sentimental writing within the Victorian literary marketplace. Early in Thackeray's novel The History of Pendants, the young Pen, who would grow up to narrate Thackeray's late novels, toddles tipsily into a half-empty theater. Thackeray's criticism of Sterne applied, he knew, to himself, another who spent a career bringing 'his personal griefs and joys, his private thoughts and feelings to market, to write them on paper, and sell them for money'.
