Thackeray, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE, born 18th July 1811, died 24th December 1863. The
Thackerays were originally a race of small landholders settled at Hampsthwaite in Yorkshire. In fullness of time, as was often the case with such families, the younger sons began to leave their native village and try their fortunes in other walks of life. In 1711 we find the Rev. Elias Thackeray of Christ's College, Cambridge, established in the rectory of Hawkswell, Yorkshire. His nephew, Thomas Thackeray, became headmaster of Harrow School and the father of sixteen children; the youngest of whom, William Makepeace, was the grandfather of the novelist. This William Makepeace Thackeray went to Bengal in the East India Company's service, from which he retired in 1777 with a fortune. The fourth of his twelve children, Richmond Thackeray, born in 1781, was the father of the novelist. Richmond Thackeray also went to India in the Company's service, where he married Miss Anne Becher, a renowned Calcutta beauty, the daughter of a fellow civilian.
William Makepeace Thackeray, the only child of the marriage, was born on the 18th July 1811 at Calcutta. When he was five years old his father died; and soon after his mother married Major Carmichael Smyth, of the Bengal Engineers. She lived to survive her son. There were no children of the second marriage. On the death of his father, Thackeray, then a child of five years old, was sent home. He lived partly under the care of an aunt, Mrs Ritchie, who is recorded to have been surprised to find that her husband's hat fitted the little boy. At eleven he was sent to the Charterhouse, where he remained six years. Innumerable passages in his books prove that his schooldays had as important an influence on his art as the more adventurous boyhoods of Sterne and Dickens had on theirs. It should be added that the broken nose so conspicuous in all Thackeray's caricatures of himself was the accident of a school fight. While Thackeray was at school his parents returned from India and settled near Ottery-St-Mary in Devonshire, which is made the scene of the earlier chapters of Pendennis. In 1829 Thackeray was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge. He left the university after two years without taking his degree; but except from the academic point of view his time was not wasted. Without being a scholar, he acquired a literary knowledge of the classics, and he gained all those indirect advantages which distinguish Oxford and Cambridge from other seats of perhaps purer learning. For one thing, Cambridge fixed his social status. Though afterwards he was to consort with Bohemians and other strange acquaintances into whose company a man is forced by adversity, he was never a Bohemian, and always faithful to the traditions of the class in which he was born and bred. It was at Trinity that Thackeray first appeared in print, the work being a burlesque of the prize poem on the subject of Timbuctoo, which had been won by Alfred Tennyson. 'A poem of mine,' he writes to his mother, 'hath appeared in a weekly periodical, here published and called the Snob. . . . Young had a pleasant wine party at which for a short time I attended. Timbuctoo received much laud. I could not help finding out that I was very fond of this same praise. The men knew not the author, but praised the poem.'
On leaving Cambridge Thackeray travelled for two years, in Germany for the most part, and on his return determined to go to the bar. It was necessary for him to choose a profession, as his fortune did not exceed some £500 a year. This, moreover, was soon diminished by losses from the
Copyright 1892 in U.S.
by J. B. Lippincott
Company. failure of an Indian bank; and he was probably glad of an excuse to abandon the law for the more immediately remunerative pursuit of literature. From the very first he had a passion for drawing and literary composition, his fancy in both running to caricature. Early in 1833 he became a regular contributor to the National Standard and Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, Music, Theatricals, and the Fine Arts, a weekly journal, price twopence, edited by F. W. N. Bayley, Esq., a then well-known journalist. With the nineteenth number Thackeray took the editorship, and subsequently became the proprietor also. 'My National Standard, as usual,' he writes from the Garrick Club. 'It has increased in sale about twenty in the last month. At this rate I shall be ruined before it succeeds.' The paper finally came to an end after little more than a year's existence. But art, not literature, was Thackeray's real ambition at that time. 'I think,' he says in a discussion of plans which followed the family losses, 'I can draw better than do anything else, and certainly I should like it better than any other occupation.' And towards the end of 1833 he joined his parents at Paris to study painting seriously. 'I am sure we shall be as happy here as possible, and I believe I ought to thank Heaven for making me poor, as it has made me much happier than I should have been with the money. I spend all day now, dear mother, at the Atelier, and am very well satisfied with the progress I make.' But Thackeray was not destined to realise the ideals of the envied 'J. J.' of The Newcomes. Money was wanted, and could always be earned by the pen. It is curious to observe that Thackeray, who must, one would have thought, have been conscious of his genius for fiction, was content for years to work in the humble and practical walks of journalism. How much or what he wrote at this period is not known, but it is certain that his portrait appears in a conspicuous place in the group by Maclise of the contributors to Fraser which was published in the magazine for January 1835. It was at this time too that he made his famous application to illustrate Pickwick.
In 1836 Thackeray married Isabella, daughter of Colonel Shawe, of the Indian army. His bride brought him no fortune, and he must have known that his marriage plunged him in grim earnest into the battle of life. Years afterwards, writing to a friend, he says: 'I married at your age with £400, paid by a newspaper which failed six months afterwards, and always love to hear of a young fellow testing his fortune bravely in that way.' The newspaper which failed was the Constitutional, the property of the Metropolitan Newspaper Company, of which Thackeray's stepfather was chairman. It was started to rival the leading daily papers, but it only existed from September 1836 to July 1837, when it failed, carrying with it the rest of the fortune of Thackeray and his parents. During the first months of the life of the Constitutional Thackeray acted as Paris correspondent. Early in 1837 he moved with his wife to London, living first in Albion Street, Hyde Park, where his eldest daughter was born, and then at Great Coram Street. The marriage was a very happy one, and, in spite of the failure of the Constitutional, work was abundant and the future promising. Thackeray was writing regularly in the Times, which was then no less important than it is now, and also in the New Monthly, Fraser's Magazine, and in Cruikshank's Comic Almanacks. It is perhaps worth mentioning that in the Times he wrote the review of Carlyle's French Revolution. In 1838 was born a second daughter, who died in infancy; and in 1840 a third, Mrs Leslie Stephen, who died in 1875. The illness which followed the birth of the third daughter affected Mrs Thackeray's mind, and she never recovered, though she lived till 1894. This misfortune broke up the home. The children were sent to Paris to their grandmother, and for a year Thackeray travelled about with his wife from watering-place to watering-place, as the doctors recommended, but without result. The truth had to be realised, and Thackeray went back to London, alone and worse than alone. But his genius was by this time asserting itself, and, though his success in the vulgar sense of the word was not assured till the publication of Vanity Fair, not a year passed without his contributing to the magazines—in addition to a great mass of journalism—work the quality of which is not now disputed. In 1840 appeared his first book, The Paris Sketch-book, a series of reprints, followed in 1841 by the Comic Tales and Sketches, which contained the Yellowplush Papers from Fraser, Major Gahagan from the New Monthly, and the Bedford Row Conspiracy. These publications were a failure. In the same year the Hoggarty Diamond and the Shabby Genteel Story appeared in Fraser, followed by Barry Lyndon and Men's Wives in the same magazine. In 1843 and 1846 appeared respectively the Irish Sketch-book and Cornhill to Cairo. 'I can suit the magazines,' he wrote to a friend, 'but I can't hit the public, be hanged to them.' However, the magazines, and more especially Punch, the staff of which he joined in 1842 both as writer and drawer of pictures, enabled him in 1846 to set up house again; and he brought his family over from Paris to Young Street, Kensington Square. He was installed in this new home when the publication of Vanity Fair began, in monthly numbers, early in 1847; at which time he was also bringing out the Snob Papers in Punch. Vanity Fair was not at first a success. The earlier numbers failed to attract attention, and there was even a talk of stopping the publication altogether. Towards the end of the year, however, luck changed. Thackeray himself used to say that it was the success of the first of his Christmas books, Mrs Perkins's Ball, which made him fashionable. But, whatever the cause, there was no doubt about the fact. Every month the sale increased, and by the time Vanity Fair was finished it had made the author's reputation. Thackeray was no longer the servant, but the master of the public.
Vanity Fair had two results for Thackeray—the first, that he became a lion of society, and for some years enjoyed or endured the consequences of his position; the second, that he had no longer to look to Punch and the magazines for bread. The last number of Vanity Fair appeared in July 1848. It was followed in November of the same year by the first instalment of Pendennis. Pendennis was followed by Esmond, which was published in three volumes in 1852; and Thackeray then sailed for America with his lectures on the humorists, which he had already delivered with great success in London. On his return in 1853 The Newcomes began to appear; and on its conclusion in 1855, after the publication of The Rose and the Ring, which was begun at Rome for the amusement of his children, Thackeray again made a journey to America with his lectures on the 'Four Georges.' In 1857 he tried to get into parliament, standing for the city of Oxford as a Radical against Mr Cardwell, but was defeated by a majority of seventy-three. During this year and the next the Virginians came out. On the 1st January 1860 the Cornhill Magazine made its appearance, with Thackeray as editor. To the Cornhill he contributed Lovel the Widowcr and Philip, which seem to have been written somewhat against the grain, though Philip is specially interesting for the auto- biographical element which it contains. But if the Cornhill did not bring out Thackeray's best work as a novelist, it furnished the occasion for the Roundabout Papers, the desultory form of which was a source of strength, not of weakness, and showed his powers at their best. In 1862 he gave up the editorship of the Cornhill, not being equal to the task of refusing manuscripts; but he continued to work for the magazine, and in that year he moved into a new house which he had built on Palace Green, Kensington. He always had a taste for bric-a-brac, which was not so fashionable then as now; and this house was the first built in London in red brick, in the style of Queen Anne, which has since taken such developments throughout the country. Here he began to write Denis Duval, which, so far as he had completed it when he died, promised to be as great as anything he had done. But his health, which had practically been broken by a fever caught in Rome in 1855, was bad. No immediate danger was feared, but he was found dead in his bed on the morning of Christmas Eve, 1863. He was buried in Kensal Green. His bust is in Westminster Abbey, in Poets' Corner.
The best commentary on Thackeray's books is furnished by the story of his life, as will be seen, it is hoped, even from the short account we have given. The qualities of his work speak for themselves to the least experienced of those who read him, and little need be said by way of exposition. It may be worth while, however, to point out that as an artist he is unsurpassed by any novelist, either in style or in his powers of description and of character drawing, or in the crowning gift of telling a story. His ideal of the novel was, like Fielding's, that it should be not an affair of plot or a form of idyll, but a prose epic; and if this ideal has ever been approached it is surely in Vanity Fair and The Newcomes. In the second place, it is worth dwelling for a moment on Thackeray's extraordinary sense of fun. So much of his humour is tinged with irony that readers sometimes fail to observe what sources of natural laughter are in his books, and what an unrivalled exhibition they give of purely comic power. Lastly, a word must be said about his satire. There will always be a class to whom Thackeray must appear as attacking the very essence of human society and turning to ridicule its most useful and ornamental members. Critics of this school can naturally never forgive him or sympathise with his genius. There is another class which takes a different view, and considers that what Thackeray calls 'snobbishness' is neither an essential nor a necessary part of human nature. Which of these two opinions may be correct it is impossible to prove; but if one turns from what Thackeray ridiculed to what he admired, it must be admitted that for a satirist his views of life are strangely sentimental. No one, it is safe to assume, ever read Vanity Fair without preferring Rawdon Crawley to his brother Pitt. But if those who think the Book of Snobs unjust will consider the reasons for this preference, they will understand why Thackeray disliked some things and why he cared for others.
No authorised biography of Thackeray has ever been published. There is a good short Life in the 'Great Writers' series (1891), by Mr Herman Merivale and Mr F. T. Marzials. In 1899 Mr Lewis Melville published a Life in two volumes. Some of his letters were published in Scribner's Magazine (1887). Many of his drawings may be found in The Orphan of Pimlico (1875). The best portraits of him are by Samuel Lawrence; there was also a vigorous statuette by Boehm. See also Mrs Richmond Ritchie's Chapters from Some Memoirs (1894) and her introduction to the Biographical Edition of the works (13 vols. 1898-99); Eyre Crowe, Thackeray's Haunts and Homes (1897); and Sir W. W. Hunter, The Thackerays in India (1897).
His eldest daughter, ANNE ISABELLA, novelist, is better known still as 'Miss Thackeray' than by her married name, Mrs Ritchie. Born in London in 1837, she passed her childhood in Paris, her girlhood at Kensington, and first appeared as an author in vol. i. of the Cornhill (1860) with 'Little Scholars.' To this sketch succeeded a dozen or more volumes of novels, tales, biographical essays, &c., of which may be mentioned The Story of Elizabeth (1863), The Village on the Cliff (1867), Old Kensington (1873), Miss Angel (1875, its heroine Angelica Kauffmann), Mrs Dymond (1885), Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning (1892), and her dainty modern recasts of such old-world stories as 'Bluebeard' and 'Cinderella.' Tender, delicate, harmonious, her books are feminine as very few women's books, and are just for that reason delightful. In 1877 she married her cousin, Mr Richmond Thackeray Ritchie.