Twelve months in the life of Bob Stubbs, a swindler with no talent for it, told by himself: the boots he never paid for at school follow him through the militia, a courtship, a debtor's prison and back. Thackeray wrote it for a comic annual, one chapter to a month, and it is the earliest sight of the voice he would use in Barry Lyndon — a scoundrel who thinks he is the injured party.