The Novelist's Responsibility to Instruct

Peter L. Shillingsburg, Professor of English, Mississippi State University

Note 10 to Chapter 1 of the author's Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray, which University Press of Virginia published in 1992. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

"If we want instruction, we prefer to take it from fact rather than fiction" (Thackeray, "Lever's St. Patrick's Eve - Comic Politics," Morning Chronicle, 3 April 1845, rpt. in Thackeray: Contributions, p. 71).

Last modified: 4 April 2001