Charles Paul de Kock

Although one of the most popular writers of his day in terms of book sales, he acquired a literary reputation for low-brow output in poor taste.

"[2] His father, Jean Conrad de Kock, a banker of Dutch extraction, was guillotined in Paris 24 March 1794, a victim of the Reign of Terror.

[2] In 1820 he began his long and successful series of novels dealing with Parisian life with Georgette, ou la Nièce du tabellion.

In Thackeray's Pendennis, the title character of the book remarks that he had read nothing of the "novel kind" for thirty years, except Paul de Kock, who certainly made him laugh.

"[7] The 1905 New International Encyclopædia describes his stories as "rather vulgar, but not immoral, demanding no literary training and gratifying no delicate taste".

[citation needed] Anne O'Neil-Henry, a modern academic who has taken an interest in de Kock, calls him "the July Monarchy's bourgeois writer par excellence," but that "by the 1830s his name carried a specific connotation: 'Paul de Kock' signified 'bad' literature, a sort of … marker of poor taste."

However, she clarifies, "while critics around 1830 began to use his name synonymously with lowbrow literature, many of their reviews evinced an appreciation of some elements of his work and recognition of his successful command of the taste of modern readers.

With the exception of a few excursions into historical romance and some miscellaneous works of which his share in La Grande yule, Paris (1842), is the chief, they are all stories of middle-class Parisian life, of guinguettes and cabarets and equivocal adventures of one sort or another.