Non-fiction: The Paris Sketch Book

Overview
William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Paris Sketch Book (1840) gathers a lively suite of essays, travel sketches, and satirical portraits written under his persona “Mr. Titmarsh.” Composed during the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe, the book offers a shrewd Englishman’s view of Paris as capital, carnival, and cautionary mirror for Britain. Thackeray strolls through salons and streets, museums and theatres, courts and cafés, measuring French taste and temperament against English habits, and measuring both against the claims of art, justice, and common sense. The result is a panoramic, often comic social anatomy that moves easily from anecdote to criticism to history.

Structure and scenes
The pieces range from flâneur’s observations to formal criticism and historical sketches. He visits the Louvre and the studios to appraise the “French school of painting,” weighing neoclassical decorum against romantic color and bravura, and finding in caricature and lithography a democratic energy the grand manner often lacks. He surveys boulevard theatres and melodramas, amused at their sentiment, spectacle, and improbabilities, yet intrigued by the audience they marshal. He peers into the Paris Morgue, where death becomes a public tableau, and into courtrooms and newspapers in the sensational “Case of Peytel,” tracing how legal procedure, journalism, and curiosity feed on one another. He sketches types, the Englishman abroad, the grisette, the dandy, the editor, and reconstructs episodes from French history to explain present manners, from ancien régime frivolity to revolutionary fervor and bourgeois consolidation after 1830.

Themes and concerns
Comparison is the book’s method and theme. Thackeray alternately mocks and admires: French polish and theatricality are set against English prudence and hypocrisy. He is quick to puncture national vanities, including his own countrymen’s tours and their clichés, but he is equally wary of Parisian excess, of art that prefers attitude to truth, of journalism that prefers sensation to justice, of politics that turns ideals into pageantry. The July Monarchy appears as a reign of respectability and commerce, its fêtes and flags overlaying a city still haunted by revolution; Paris is modern not for its stability but for its ability to turn everything, art, crime, grief, into spectacle.

The book’s moral interest gathers around public appetite. The Morgue visit and the Peytel case expose the uneasy commerce between suffering and spectatorship. Thackeray’s skepticism of capital punishment later deepens, but here already he scrutinizes the machinery of punishment and the crowd that demands a show. His art essays push a related argument: caricature’s rough truth-telling may be more honest than heroic canvases that flatter power or fashion.

Style and voice
The narrator’s voice is urbane, ironic, and companionable, shifting from mock-heroic to plainspoken as a scene requires. He delights in concrete detail, a bonnet, a bill, a balcony, then widens the frame to a quick lecture on manners, markets, or monarchy. The “Titmarsh” mask licenses genial self-deprecation and sly asides; the satire seldom hardens into scorn, because observation is tethered to human sympathy. Even when he ridicules stage bombast or critical jargon, he listens attentively to audiences and artisans, retaining curiosity about how taste is made.

Significance
As an early book by a future novelist of manners, The Paris Sketch Book foreshadows Thackeray’s later mastery: social types sharply drawn, moral judgments cushioned by irony, attention to the economies that shape taste and feeling. It also captures a Paris between revolutions, paradoxically stable and febrile, inventing modern urbanity. By mixing travelogue, criticism, and anecdote, Thackeray offers not a guidebook but a diagnostic portrait: a city of pictures and performances, where spectatorship governs art, politics, and everyday life, and where an English observer learns as much about London as about Paris by watching how the French choose to look at themselves.