The Adventures of Philip

Publishing history and reception[edit]

The Adventures of Philip was first published as a serial in the Cornhill Magazine (of which Thackeray was the editor) between January 1861 and August 1862, with illustrations by the author and Frederick Walker.^[2] It then appeared in book form published by Smith, Elder & Co. in three volumes in 1862, dedicated to Thackeray's friend Matthew James Higgins. The Leipzig firm of Bernhard Tauchnitz issued it the same year in two volumes.^[3]

Critical reception of the book was on the whole not good, many reviewers suggesting that the author had written himself out. The anonymous notice in the Saturday Review, for example, claimed that Thackeray's readers "ask him for something from his pen; what it is they do not care; and as he really has no other method of easily satisfying them, he gives them reminiscences of his old novels in profusion." Walter Bagehot, in The Spectator, said, "As far as 'plot' is concerned, Philip is a failure. No one of all its most numerous readers has probably read it with eager interest as a story." ^[4]

Nevertheless, Thackeray's fans must have found something to enjoy, since the book was reprinted frequently up the First World War. It fell into general neglect thereafter, very few reprints having been called for during the past 100 years, but in 2008 The Adventures of Philip was issued by Cambridge Scholars Publishing as volumes 12 and 13 of their edition of Thackeray's Complete Works, and a critical edition with commentary by Judith Law Fisher was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2010.^[5]