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The appeal for the preservation of Thackeray's House in Young Street, Kensington, is so unanswerable that merely to have made it should have secured its aim. There Thackeray wrote Esmond— which I with many others would claim was the greatest novel in the English language, Vanity Fair and Pendennis. Exactly by what means the preservation could be assured is matter for argument. If the National Trust could acquire it at a reasonable figure the rent should more than cover the outlay. But that would, of course, dispose of the interesting suggestion that a Thackeray House, open to the public, should be instituted to match the Dickens House in Doughty Street. In that case public subscription, or assistance from some such body as the Pilgrim Trust, would be needed. That the house should be destroyed, or converted to the requirements of a business firm, would be philistinism beyond defence.
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