In Thackeray's work, the place of _The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Anne. Written by Himself_--lies midway between his four other principal books, _Vanity Fair, Pendennis, The Newcomes_, and _The Virginians_; and its position serves, in a measure, to explain its origin. In 1848, after much tentative and miscellaneous production, of which the value had been but imperfectly appreciated, the author found his fame with the yellow numbers of _Vanity Fair_. Two years later, adopting the same serial form, came _Pendennis_. _Vanity Fair_ had been the condensation of a life's experience; and excellent as _Pendennis_ would have seemed from any inferior hand, its readers could not disguise from themselves that, though showing no falling off in other respects, it drew to some extent upon the old material. No one was readier than Thackeray to listen to a whisper of this kind, or more willing to believe that--as he afterwards told his friend Elwin concerning _The Newcomes_--"he had exhausted all the types of character with which he was familiar." Accordingly he began, for the time, to turn his thoughts in fresh directions; and in the year that followed the publication of _Pendennis_, prepared and delivered in England and Scotland a series of _Lectures upon the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century_. With the success of these came the prompting for a new work of fiction,--not to be contemporary, and not to be issued in parts. His studies for the _Humourists_ had saturated him with the spirit of a time to which--witness his novelette of _Barry Lyndon_--he had always been attracted; and when Mr. George Smith called on him with a proposal that he should write a new story for L1000, he was already well in hand with _Esmond_,--an effort in which, if it were not possible to invent new puppets, it was at least possible to provide fresh costumes and a change of background. Begun in 1851, _Esmond_ progressed rapidly, and by the end of May 1852 it was completed. Owing to the limited stock of old-cut type in which it was set up, its three volumes passed but slowly through the press; and it was eventually issued at the end of the following October, upon the eve of the author's departure to lecture in America. In fact, he was waiting on the pier for the tender which was to convey him to the steamer, when he received his bound copies from the publisher.