Thackeray, William Makepeace
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–63),English novelist and author of The Rose and the Ring (1855). This satirical fairy story, subtitled ‘a fireside pantomime for great and small children’, was written to amuse his two daughters who were in Rome with him in 1853. The preface describes how they wanted to give a Twelfth Night party, but that no shop in Rome could provide ‘the characters—those funny painted pictures of the King, the Queen, the Lover, the Lady, the Dandy, the Captain, and so on, with which our young ones are wont to recreate themselves at this festive time’. Thackeray thereupon drew the characters and wove a story round them. We see King Valoroso and his queen on facing pages—‘Here behold the monarch sit | With her majesty opposite’; this running commentary in couplets continues through the book. Valoroso has usurped the throne of his nephew, Prince Giglio, who has been encouraged to lapse into a state...
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