Catherine

Sickened by the popular novels that dressed up criminals as romantic heroes, William Makepeace Thackeray wrote Catherine to spoil the taste. Catherine Hayes, a servant girl, marries badly, poisons her way out, and burns at Tyburn — drawn as repellently as her author could manage, though his contempt keeps sliding into something like pity. His attack on the Newgate novel, and an early flash of the ...