ABSTRACT
The journalist and Literary Fund archivist, Nigel Cross, certainly seems persuaded of this when he claims that Pen's effusive words represent a 'touching and finally a little embarrassing' expression of the middle-aged Thackeray's hurt at events which had occurred in the decade leading up to his last complete novel's serialisation in the Cornhill Magazine. In fact Pen's outburst is certainly in part a wry acknowledgement of some of the figurative and sociological associations which had built up around the increasingly familiar idea of a British version of Bohemia during the 1850s. Thackeray himself would have been aware of borrowings from his own work by some of these writers during this time and the author would argue that Pen's elegy to Bohemia is to a significant extent a playful repayment of the compliment. It was certainly true that, by the time that Pen named Bohemia in print, ostentatious attempts to define oneself as Bohemian were generally viewed as highly distasteful.
