abstract:A Shabby Genteel Story is an early and unfinished novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. It was first printed among other stories and sketches in his Miscellanies; a note there by Thackeray, dated 10 April 1857, describes it as "only the first part" of a longer story which was "interrupted at a sad period of the writer's own life" and never subsequently completed.