ABSTRACT
In 1833, the twenty-two-year-old William Makepeace Thackeray, whose facility in drawing initially led him to consider painting as a profession, produced a pen-and-ink version of a popular Victorian theme.1 “The Awful History of Blue Beard,” as he entitled his little comic book, illustrates seven scenes from the gothic story of serial marriage and murder that had been transposed more than a century earlier into a literary fairy tale in Perrault’s Histoires.
