ABSTRACT
WHILE FINANCE CAPITALISM AND SPECULATION IN PARTICULAR ARE recurrent themes in Thackeray’s novels, The Newcomes occupies a special place in this regard, as a novel about a writer writing about artists and bankers. Appearing in installments from 1853 to 1855, at the peak of Thackeray’s popularity, The Newcomes was his most ambitious and comprehensive novelistic statement on two questions that dominated his writing as an established literary figure: the question of the social status of literature and art and the question of the social identity of the middle class within a society that he saw as profoundly structured by a snobbish class culture.
