Thackeray's The Newcomes has been described as one of the richest of Victorian fictions. In Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference, R.D. McMaster unveils the magnitude of this richness.

Figures of Finance Capitalism brings into focus Victorian narratives by major middle-class writers in which the workings of finance capitalism are prominently featured, and reads this interest in finance capitalism in the context of middle-class misgivings about a class system still dominated by a patrician elite. This book illustrates the centrality of finance capitalism to the mid-Victorian middle-class social imagination by discussing a selection of major Victorian texts by Dickens, Gaskell, Thackeray and Macaulay. In so doing, it draws on several new perspectives on British history, as offered in the work of historians such as Tom Nairn, David Cannadine, and P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins. Articulating the basic coordinates for a new sociology of mid-Victorian literature, Borislav Knezevic views texts through the prism of the mid-Victorian literary field and its negotiations of the contemporary field of power.

Thomas assumes that the image of slavery is recurrent throughout Thackeray's fiction. She examines relationships in Thackeray's fiction in which people have been reduced to objects and power is an end.

The perilous trade of authorship to which Thackeray refers in his famously succinct observation is the subject of Judith Fisher's study into skepticism and its literary connotations.