That's Jimmy Hook (Rhys Ifans), a former man-about-town who has washed up in London's East End, from which he plots endlessly to claw his way back into society.
Left out by him was the straight-to-video disaster Man About Town, the execrable Surviving Christmas, and then even when he re-teamed with a major talent in Kevin Smith, the end result was the painful to watch Jersey Girl.
"Pendennis" follows "Pen" through his West Country upbringing to his debt-bilking sojourn at "Oxbridge University" (Thackeray himself spent five unproductive terms at Cambridge), his life as a literary man about town in the London of the early 1840s, his writing of a best-selling novel called "Walter Lorraine, " and his eventual marriage to his milksop cousin Laura.