It is supposed to be edited by Pen, whose own adventures we have just completed, and is commenced by that celebrated night passed by Colonel Newcome and his boy Clive at the Cave of Harmony, during which the colonel is at first so pleasantly received and so genially entertained, but from which he is at last banished, indignant at the iniquities of our drunken old friend Captain Costigan, with whom we had become intimate in Pen's own memoirs.
The boy Clive is described as being probably about sixteen.

At the end of the story he has run through the adventures of his early life, and is left a melancholy man, a widower, one who has suffered the extremity of misery from a stepmother, and who is wrapped up in the only son that is left to him,--as had been the case with his father at the beginning of the novel.

_The Newcomes_, therefore, like Thackeray's other tales, is rather a slice from the biographical memoirs of a family, than a romance or novel in itself.
It is full of satire from the first to the last page.

Every word of it seems to have been written to show how vile and poor a place this world is; how prone men are to deceive, how prone to be deceived.

There is a scene in which "his Excellency Rummun Loll, otherwise his Highness Rummun Loll," is introduced to Colonel Newcome,--or rather presented,--for the two men had known each other before.