Catherine

Then uttering a horrible laugh, he fell down grovelling among the stones, gibbering and writhing in a fit of epilepsy. Catherine started forward and looked up. She had been standing against a post, not a tree--the moon was shining full on it now; and on the summit strangely distinct, and smiling ghastly, was a livid human head.

Inn-yard intrigue through Galgenstein seduction, murder conspiracy, and Tyburn reckoning forms a compressed anti-Newgate crime arc, so plot scores 84.

Catherine Hayes, who was burned at Tyburn, in 1726, for the deliberate murder of her husband, under very revolting circumstances. Mr. Thackeray's aim obviously was to describe the career of this wretched woman and her associates with such fidelity to truth as to exhibit the danger and folly of investing such persons with heroic and romantic qualities.

Catherine, Hayes, Brock, Galgenstein, and Billings are typed for satire against crime-glamour rather than sympathy, so cast scores 86.

“Who is that droll old gentleman?” said she; and being told that it was Captain Wood, she dropped him a curtsey, and said, with much respect, “Captain, your very humble servant;” which compliment Mr. Brock acknowledged by a gracious smile and bow.

Thirteen chapters move briskly through rogue set-pieces to Tyburn without Pendennis-scale digression, so pace scores 85.

like jolly Dick Turpin; or prate eternally about “to kalon,” like that precious canting Maltravers, whom we all of us have read about and pitied; or die whitewashed saints, like poor “Biss Dadsy” in “Oliver Twist.” No, my dear madam, you and your daughters have no right to admire and sympathise with any such persons, fictitious or real: you ought to be made cordially to detest, scorn, loathe, abhor, and abominate all people of this kidney.

Early Thackeray already mocks the appetite for jolly highwaymen and whitewashed criminals in direct address — satiric prose before the Vanity Fair curtain, so prose scores 88.

At that famous period of history, when the seventeenth century (after a deal of quarrelling, king-killing, reforming, republicanising, restoring, re-restoring, play-writing, sermon-writing, Oliver-Cromwellising, Stuartising, and Orangising, to be sure) had sunk into its grave, giving place to the lusty eighteenth.

Early-Georgian inns, aristocratic lodgings, and Tyburn post sketch low life as moral warning rather than panoramic London, so world scores 82.

At that famous period of history, when the seventeenth century (after a deal of quarrelling, king-killing, reforming, republicanising, restoring, re-restoring, play-writing, sermon-writing, Oliver-Cromwellising, Stuartising, and Orangising, to be sure) had sunk into its grave, giving place to the lusty eighteenth; when Mr. Isaac Newton was a tutor of Trinity.

Century-turnover fanfare drops the reader into a historical joke before the crime plot, so hook scores 86.

Mr. Thackeray's aim obviously was to describe the career of this wretched woman and her associates with such fidelity to truth as to exhibit the danger and folly of investing such persons with heroic and romantic qualities.

Anti-Newgate novel refusing to romanticise the real Tyburn murderess — early satiric realism against crime-fiction glamour — so innov scores 91.

Look, Cat--THE HEAD--THE HEAD!” Then uttering a horrible laugh, he fell down grovelling among the stones, gibbering and writhing in a fit of epilepsy. Catherine started forward and looked up… and on the summit strangely distinct, and smiling ghastly, was a livid human head.

Brock's cry and the gibbeted head land the satire as horror without redemption, so ending scores 90.