Reviews

Catherine: A Story by William Makepeace Thackeray

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roach's review

dark funny tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

Some chairs, and a dismal old black cabinet, completed the furniture of this apartment: it wanted but a ghost to render its gloom complete.

I stumbled over this author, a contemporary of Charles Dickens, by accident and while having a Wikipedia deep-dive on the fellow, stumbled on this novel in particular, which intrigued me. William Makepeace Thackeray was so sick and tired of the authors of his time picking real-life criminals and romanticizing them in their fictional texts that he took it upon himself to teach the public a lesson. So he chose a criminal himself out of the Newgate Calendar, a popular magazine about recent executions of the Newgate prison, and began to write this novel to show once and for all that criminals are not to be glorified for, in fact, their stories are actually miserable and vile if told correctly.
For the subject he chose Catherine Hayes, a woman that was burned at the stake for murdering her husband about 100 years prior.

It's a fascinating concept, especially for the time, although I went into it fully expecting a misogynistic depiction of a woman painted as the devil herself. Luckily, that hasn't exactly been the thing as there are plenty of male characters surrounding her that are far worse than her and, although it's not exactly intended that way, you could easily come out of this story taking that Catherine was driven to her awful crime by the abuse she endured at the hands of these men. Reading this, Catherine was much more sympathetic than the author probably wanted her to seem. I'm sure the 200-year difference between the writing of this text and me reading it had some part in that too, as the domestic abuse and cultural elements that are part of this story have a much different weight nowadays than they did back then.
But even aside from that, apparently Thackeray himself stated that the exercise that was this book was a failure and even he began to feel for this fictional version of Catherine Hayes that he created.
That being said though, I'm certain that both this fictional Catherine and the real person deserved better.

Anyway, what this novel ends up being then is a somewhat pulpy romance that feels like a parody of itself. At moments, the book manages to feel like an ugly collection of misery, as the author probably intended. But for most of the book, it almost works like a literary episode of Mystery Science Theater where the creator of the story takes time to poke holes into his own text and desperately tries to convince you that criminals just don't make for subjects worth romanticizing.
Thackeray goes on tangents of describing how a scene might have been written if it was written by one of his contemporaries, in kitschy and dramatic wordplay, but then doubles down that he refuses to do that to drive home his own point. He also makes out-of-character quips at points or rants about the Newgate Calendar, that aforementioned popular magazine of ongoing executions that seems to be read for entertainment and used as inspiration by authors. He even namedrops popular novels of the time that took real-life criminals as characters and he apologizes to the viewer for introducing the reader to characters that are "so utterly worthless" but, alas, that's what the public seems to want.
All of this has a surprisingly lighthearted aura to it and didn't match the cynical expectations I had beforehand. Whether it be the intended effect or not, Thackeray's Catherine was, for long parts of it, a funny commentary on crime/romance novels, written by a witty and fairly charming, if somewhat unconvincing, author.

The story itself moved on at a rather quick pace too and aside from the usual tangents of the time was a genuinely pretty engaging plot. Almost every character with a name in this book is a criminal and not a good person in general, but their escapades are still interesting. Catherine herself is depicted as not innocent as well and she admittedly does make some odd decisions, but all in all she read, to me at least, as a complete victim of her circumstances, and as the final pages drew closer, I couldn't wait for her to perform the infamous crime because of which she had been chosen for as the titular character in the first place.
The ending even, allegedly, cites real newspaper texts of the time in an attempt to draw the murder as realistically cruel as possible, which is a wonderful cherry on top of this uptight exercise of a moral lesson.

I think that Thackeray's original point had some merit to it but the execution seemed a bit misguided and not very convincing. Nevertheless, it made for a decently entertaining read, be it intentionally so or not.

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