ABSTRACT
In Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917, Linda M. Austin defines nostalgia in this period as the simulation or alteration of memory in the act of inhabiting or possessing a recollection. Thackeray's thinly disguised narrator Mr Roundabout admits, in musing on his authorial responsibilities and intentions in the Roundabout Papers, that 'the author should like to touch you sometimes with a reminiscence that shall waken your sympathy, and make you say, Io anchè have so thought, felt, smiled, suffered'. This type of reminiscence is certainly appealing to Thackeray's narrative speaker, who indulges in protracted and varied incidents of nostalgic recollection. Nostalgia enables the simultaneous experience of age and youth through associative memory: 'we are not only elderly men, but. Children'. The child in particular is a focus for this exploration of the memorialised past. Both the child and his or her recollected possessions and pleasures are figured in the Roundabout Papers as talismanic reliquaries of communal as well as personal memory.
