Thackeray, who based the novel on the life and exploits of the Anglo-Irish rake and fortune-hunter Andrew Robinson Stoney, later reissued it under the title The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.

Left penniless and with creditors at his heels, Redmond enlists as a common private in a British Army infantry regiment headed for service in Germany during the Seven Years' War.

After winning a large sum of money, enough to present himself as a rich aristocrat, Redmond schemes to marry into the family of a young German heiress.

While staying in France following his uncle's death, Redmond comes into the acquaintance of the Countess of Lyndon, an extraordinarily wealthy noblewoman married to a much older man in poor health.

He looks after a few childhood benefactors in Ireland, including his cousin Ulick (Nora's brother, who had often stood up for him as a boy) who he personally styles into a fashionable young socialite.

As the American Revolutionary War breaks out, Barry seeks to raise his prestige, financing a regiment of men to serve in America and gaining control of the Lyndon family pocket borough so he may sit in Parliament.

However, his good fortunes ebb again: his stepson (and his wife's heir), Lord Bullingdon, is reported dead in America; as Barry had commissioned the boy commander of his regiment, he is accused of plotting his demise.

Throughout the monthly releases, Thackeray managed to keep an advance of one or two chapters, but in October 1844, the promised manuscript was not ready on time, and the editor-in-chief Nickisson published another text in its place.

The final part was written during a trip to Egypt, and the ultimate chapter in Malta in October 1844 on the way back, while the ship was in quarantine in the port of Valletta.

The first edition of 1844 is composed of two asymmetrical parts: sixteen chapters are devoted to Barry's social ascent, and three (published in September, November, and December 1844) to his decline and fall.

When republished in 1865,[N 1] along with several other stories, in a book titled Miscellanies;[5] the novel became The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., By Himself, the publisher's initiative followed by a plethora of pompous mentions emphasizing the grandiose destiny of the scoundrel.

The influential Saturday Review, founded by Alexander Beresford Hope in 1855, considered Barry Lyndon to be the most characteristic and successful of Thackeray's works.

Several of the author's colleagues emphasized the tour de force represented by this novel, particularly Trollope, who proclaimed that "if Dickens revealed the best of his creative power early in life, Thackeray showed himself to have a superior intellect.

Never has the strength of his mind been raised higher than in Barry Lyndon, and I know of no storyteller whose intellectual faculties can surpass this prodigious enterprise."

American writer William Dean Howells, who read the novel as early as 1852, wrote that it was "the most perfect creation [...] a fabulous feat of pure irony."

[15]Finally, as Thackeray wrote, he traveled constantly, hence, according to some critics, the cosmopolitan aspect of the novel, with significant episodes set in France or Germany, and also some details echoing the author's Middle Eastern tour, such as Barry's stay in Ludwigslust where he is accompanied by a "negro" named Zamor, dresses in Turkish clothing, and stays in a "palace arranged in an Oriental and quite sumptuous manner".

[2] From the first paragraphs of his narrative, with the help of heraldists, the Englishman Gwillim and the Frenchman Louis Pierre d'Hozier (p. 13, then 139, according to the 1975 edition used as a reference), Barry takes stock of his lineage: "I am of the opinion that there is no gentleman in all of Europe who has not heard of the Barry family of Barryogue, in the kingdom of Ireland [...]" Throughout the novel, he frequently returns to this subject, especially in chapter IV where his uncle, the Chevalier de Bali-Bari, asserts that this is "the only knowledge becoming of a gentleman."

This question of nobility of heart as opposed to that of birth is in the air: Dickens takes it up four years after Barry Lyndon in Great Expectations (1860), another first-person novel, where he has Herbert Pocket say exactly the same thing as he undertakes to instill some life principles in young Pip and quotes his father Matthew Pocket: "It is one of his principles that no man has ever behaved like a gentleman without first having been, since the world began, a gentleman at heart.

The last part of the story, concerning Redmond Barry's tumultuous relationship with Lady Lyndon, is inspired by the life of Andrew Robinson Stoney-Bowes, a type of character that the English commonly call a "Rake" or "Rakehell", meaning a gambler, debaucher, reveller, and indebted person.

[16] And according to Robert A. Colby, the plot involving the Princess of X is based on what Thackeray called "a silly little book", titled L'Empire, ou, Dix ans sous Napoléon (1836), by Baron Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1786-1864),[17] which relates, among other things, the execution of Princess Caroline by the King of Wurttemberg for adultery[18][N 2] The two stories seem to have merged in Thackeray's mind, as both involve tyrannical husbands, hysterical wives, and adultery against a backdrop of a corrupt society.

A parallel can also be drawn between the shameful end of Barry in prison and the miserable exile of the famous "Beau" Brummell (1778-1840) in France, who fled from his debts and whose career has been in the spotlight since William Jesse published his biography in 1844.

Moreover, in chapter XIII, p. 193, Thackeray places an allusion in the form of a wink under the pen of his narrator hero: Think of the fashion of London being led by a Br-mm-l!

a nobody’s son: a low creature, who can no more dance a minuet than I can talk Cherokee; who cannot even crack a bottle like a gentleman; who never showed himself to be a man with his sword in his hand: as we used to approve ourselves in the good old times, before that vulgar Corsican upset the gentry of the world!This was an exclamation intended for the Victorian public.