ABSTRACT
The 1840s saw a continuation of Michael Angelo Titmarsh's reviews of art exhibitions, which were not always appreciated by those whose works he discussed. In an essay published in the Pictorial Times in his favourite guise of Titmarsh, Thackeray commends a scheme of setting up a lottery, for general subscription, in which the prizes would be works of art. Handel joins Mozart and Haydn on Thackeray's musical Parnassus; but since he composed his greatest works in Hanoverian England, he will be used to provide eighteenth-century English local colour in the late novel The Virginians. Among the sketches Thackeray contributed to journals other than Fraser's, two add telling touches to his developing construction of a Germany seen through English eyes. A young travelling-companion endears himself to his English compatriots by being able 'to ask for what he wanted in the regular German twang', and charms the girls by being able to spout the appropriate lines from Childe Harolde as their boat passes 'the castled crag of Drachenfels'.
