ABSTRACT
In The History of Pendennis, Thackeray goes beyond merely providing a negative example of anti-domesticity and the inassimilable British subject to give full expression to an idealized national culture. Pendennis is a bilduungsroman that traces the social education of a boy who at a crucial period of his youth becomes fatherless. Irish anti-domesticity is emphasized by the portrayal of Emily's father and their relationship. Emily is his chief co-conspirator, and their sphere of operations is the marriage market to which Emily has gained entree by means of her physical charms. In both Barry Lyndon and The Irish Sketch Book, as well as in his journalism, Thackeray attributed Irish difference to historical contingency, and he repeats his conviction again in Pendennis through the narrator's descriptions of Jack Costigan: 'I take it no foreigner understands the life of an Irish gentleman without money, all these are mysteries to us inconceivable'.
