Set in the second half of the eighteenth century Barry Lyndon is the fictional autobiography
of an adventurer and rogue whom the reader is led to distrust from the very beginning. Born
into the petty Irish gentry and outmanoeuvred in his first love-affair a ruined Barry joins
the British army. After service in Germany he deserts and after a brief spell as a spy
pursues the career of a gambler in the dissolute clubs and courts of Europe. In a determined
effort to enter fashionable society he marries a titled heiress but finds he has met his match.
First published in 1844 Barry Lyndon is Thackeray's earliest substantial novel and in some
ways his most original reflecting his views of the true art of fiction: to represent a subject
however unpleasant with accuracy and wit and not to moralize. The text is that of George
Sainsbury's 1908 Oxford edition which restores passages cut when the novel was revised in 1856.
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