ABSTRACT
Pendennis is a novel about maturity. Its central concern is with the growth of the writer and the man into a respectable middle-class novelist and husband, negotiating the various influences and temptations encountered in early life and manhood. 'Pendennis is about the artist as well as the man, or rather, about the artist as man.' The novel is genetically a bildungsroman, tracing the spiritual development of the central subject, but places this firmly against the material world that he inhabits. Pendennis is a novel of spinning coins, where value might be found on either side, but neither side can exist without its counterpart and counterpoint. The Dawn's editorial presents its own brand of truth in opposition to that of the Day's, and without any other basis or reality. William Morris Thackeray uses Pendennis to explore various kinds of writerly power, just as he examines the power relations within class and gender.
