William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackerary (1811-1863). Photo by Jesse Harrison Whitehust (1819-1875), circa 1855. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

William Makepeace Thackeray
Born	William Makepeace Thackeray 18 July 1811 (Template:Four digit-07-18) Calcutta, India
Died	24 December 1863 (Template:Four digit-12-25) (age 52) London, England
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	English
Period	1829–1864 (published posthumously)
Genres	Historical Fiction
Notable work(s)	Vanity Fair
Spouse(s)	Isabella Gethin Shawe
Influences John Bunyan, Balzac, Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift
Influenced George Orwell, Charlotte Brontë

William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 - 24 December 1863) was an English poet and novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society.

Life

Overview

Thackeray was the son of Richmond Thackeray, who held various important appointments in the service of the East India Company, and who belonged to an old and respectable Yorkshire family. The son was born at Calcutta, and soon after the death of his father, in 1816, was sent home to England. After being at a school at Chiswick, he was sent to the Charterhouse School, where he remained 1822-26, and where he does not appear to have been very happy. Meanwhile in 1818 his mother had married Major H.W.C. Smythe, who is believed to be, in part at any rate, the original of Colonel Newcome. In 1829 he went to Cambridge, where he remained for a year only, and where he did not distinguish himself particularly as a student, but made many life-long friends, including Spedding, Tennyson, FitzGerald, and Monckton Milnes, and contributed verses and caricatures to 2 university papers, The Snob and The Gownsman. The following year, 1831, was spent chiefly in travelling on the Continent, especially Germany, when, at Weimar, he visited Goethe. Returning he entered the Middle Temple, but having no liking for legal studies, he soon abandoned them, and turning his attention to journalism, became proprietor, wholly or in part, of 2 papers successively, both of which failed. These enterprises, together with some unfortunate investments and also, it would seem, play, stripped him of the comfortable fortune, which he had inherited; and he now found himself dependent on his own exertions for a living. He initially thought of art as a profession, and studied for a time at Paris and Rome. In 1836, while acting as Paris correspondent for the 2nd of his journals, he married Isabella, daughter of Colonel Shawe, an Irish officer, and the next year he returned to England and became a contributor to Fraser's Magazine, in which appeared "The Yellowplush Papers," "The Great Hoggarty Diamond," "Catherine," and "Barry Lyndon," the history of an Irish sharper, which contains some of his best work. Other works of this period were The Paris Sketch-book (1840) and The Irish Sketch-book (1843). His work in Fraser, while it was appreciated at its true worth by a select circle, had not brought him any very wide recognition: it was his contributions to Punch – the "Book of Snobs" and "Jeames's Diary" – which caught the ear of the wider public. The turning point in his career, however, was the publication in monthly numbers of Vanity Fair (1847-48). This extraordinary work gave him at once a place beside Fielding at the head of English novelists, and left him no living competitor except Dickens. Pendennis, largely autobiographical, followed in 1848-50, and fully maintained his reputation. In 1851 he broke new ground, and appeared, with great success, as a lecturer, taking for his subject "The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century," following this up in 1855 with the "Four Georges," delivered originally in America. Meanwhile Esmond, perhaps his masterpiece, and probably the greatest novel of its kind in existence, had appeared in 1852, and The Newcomes (1853), The Virginians, a sequel to Esmond, which, though containing much fine work, is generally considered to show a falling off as compared with its 2 immediate predecessors, came out in 1857-59. In 1860 the Cornhill Magazine was started with Thackeray for its editor, and to it he contributed Lovell the Widower (1860), The Adventures of Philip (1861-62), The Roundabout Papers, a series of charming essays, and Denis Duval, left a mere fragment by his sudden death, but which gave promise of a return to his highest level of performance. In addition to the works mentioned, Thackeray for some years produced Christmas books and burlesques, of which the best were The Rose and the Ring and The Kickleburys on the Rhine. He also wrote graceful verses, some of which, like "Bouillabaisse," are in a strain of humor shot through with pathos, while others are the purest rollicking fun. For some years Thackeray suffered from spasms of the heart, and he died suddenly during the night of December 23, 1863, in his 53rd year. He was a man of the tenderest heart, and had an intense enjoyment of domestic happiness; and the interruption of this, caused by the permanent breakdown of his wife's health, was a heavy calamity. This, along with his own latterly broken health, and a sensitiveness which made him keenly alive to criticism, doubtless fostered the tendency to what was often superficially called his cynical view of life. He possessed an inimitable irony and a power of sarcasm which could scorch like lightning, but the latter is almost invariably directed against what is base and hateful. To human weakness he is lenient and often tender, and even when weakness passes into wickedness, he is just and compassionate. He saw human nature "steadily and saw it whole," and paints it with a light but sure hand.

Family, youth, education

Thackeray, the only son of Richmond and Anne (Becher) Thackeray, was born at Calcutta on 18 July 1811. Both his father and his grandfather (W.R. Thackeray) had been Indian civil servants. His mother was only 19 at the date of his birth, was left a widow in 1816, and afterwards married Major Henry Carmichael Smyth.

Young Thackeray was brought home to England from India as a child, and was sent to private schools, in Hampshire and later at Chiswick. In 1822 he was transferred to Charterhouse, at that time still on its ancient site near Smithfield. Anthony Trollope, in his book on Thackeray in the “English Men of Letters” series, quotes a letter written to him about Thackeray's schooldays by George Stovin Venables. “He came to school young,” Venables wrote, “a pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy.” This accords with the fact that all through Thackeray's writings the student may find traces of the sensitiveness which often belongs to the creative mind, and which, in the boy who does not understand its meaning and its possible power, is apt to assume the guise of a shrinking disposition. To this very matter Venables tersely referred in a later passage of the letter quoted by Trollope: “When I knew him better, in later years, I thought I could recognize the sensitive nature which he had as a boy.” Another illustration of this idiosyncrasy is found in the statement, which will be recognized as exact by all readers of Thackeray, that “his change of retrospective feeling about his schooldays was very characteristic. In his earlier books he always spoke of the Charterhouse as Slaughter House and Smithfield. As he became famous and prosperous his memory softened, and Slaughter House was changed into Grey Friars, where Colonel Newcome ended his life.”

In February 1829 Thackeray went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and in that year contributed some engaging lines on “Timbuctoo,” the subject for the Prize Poem (the prize for which was won in that year by Tennyson), to a little paper called The Snob, a title which Thackeray afterwards utilized in the famous Book of Snobs. The opening stanza has become tolerably well known, but is worth quoting as an early instance of the direct comic force afterwards employed by the author in verse and prose burlesques:—

In Africa — a quarter of the world —

Men's skins are black; their hair is crisp and curled;

And somewhere there, unknown to public view,

A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo.

At Cambridge, James Spedding, Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Edward FitzGerald, W.H. Thompson (afterwards Master of Trinity), and others who made their mark in later life, were among his friends.

In 1830 he left Cambridge without taking a degree, and went to Weimar and to Paris. His visit to Weimar bore fruit in the keen sketches of life at a small German court which appear in Fitz-Boodle's Confessions and in Vanity Fair. In G.H. Lewes's Life of Goethe is a letter containing Thackeray's impressions of the German poet.

On his return to England in 1831 he entered the Middle Temple. He did not care to pursue the study of the law, but he found in his experience of the Temple the material for some capital scenes in Pendennis.

Early career

In 1832 Thackeray came of age, and inherited a sum which, according to Trollope, “seems to have amounted to about five hundred a year.” The money was soon lost — some in an Indian bank, some at play and some in 2 newspapers, The National Standard (with a long sub-title) and The Constitutional. In Lovel the Widower these 2 papers are indicated under one name as The Museum, in connexion with which our friends Honeyman and Sherrick of The Newcomes are briefly brought in.

In 1834 or at the end of 1833 Thackeray established himself in Paris in order to study art seriously. He had, like Clive in The Newcomes, shown talent as a caricaturist from his early boyhood. His gift proved of great value to him in illustrating much of his own literary work in a fashion which, despite all incorrectness of draughtsmanship, conveyed vivid suggestions that could not have been so well given by anyone but himself. Perhaps his pencil was at its best technically in such fantastic work as is found constantly in the initial letters which he frequently used for chapters in his various kinds of work, and in those drawings made for the amusement of some child friends which were the origin of The Rose and the Ring.

In 1836 Thackeray married Isabella, daughter of Colonel Matthew Shawe. There were 3 daughters born of the marriage, 1 dying in infancy. The eldest daughter, Anne Isabella (born 1837), married in 1877 Richmond Ritchie, of the India Office, who in 1907 was created a KCB. She inherited literary talent from her father and wrote several charming works of fiction, notably Miss Angel (1875), and subsequently edited Thackeray's works and published some volumes of criticism and reminiscences. The younger daughter, Harriet Marian (born 1840), married (Sir) Leslie Stephen in 1867 and died in 1875. Thackeray's own family life was early broken, for Mrs. Thackeray, to quote Trollope, “became ill and her mind failed her,” in 1840, and he “became as it were a widower to the end of his days”; Mrs Thackeray did not die till 1892.

In 1837 Thackeray came to London, worked at various kinds of journalism, and became a regular contributor to Fraser's Magazine. In this in 1841 appeared The History of Mr. Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond.

In 1840 came out The Paris Sketch-Book, much of which had been written and published at an earlier date.

In 1838 Thackeray had begun, in Fraser, The Yellowplush Papers and this was followed by Catherine. There soon followed Fitz-Boodle's Confessions and Professions, including the series Men's Wives, already mentioned; and slightly before these, the "Shabby Genteel Story," a work interrupted by Thackeray's domestic affliction and afterwards republished as an introduction to The Adventures of Philip, which took up the course of the original story many years after the supposed date of its catastrophe. In 1843 also came out the Irish Sketch-Book, and in 1844 appeared the account of the journey From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, in which was included the excellent poem of “The White Squall.” In 1844 there began in Fraser the Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, called in the magazine “The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a Romance of the Last Century.”

Thackeray became a contributor to Punch within the year of its founding. John Leech, an early contributor, had been at Charterhouse with Thackeray and the 2 men were friends through life. Thackeray's first series contributed to Punch did not attain or indeed deserve signal success. He made his first hit with Jeames's Diary, begun in November 1845, and may be said to have established his reputation by the Snob Papers (1846), now better known as The Book of Snobs. These, besides greatly improving Thackeray's position, provoked much discussion of various kinds. Thackeray himself was naturally accused of being a snob. To this charge he had partly given an anticipatory answer (in the 3rd chapter) in the statement that “it is impossible, in our condition of society, not to be sometimes a Snob,” and in giving the name of “Mr Snob” to the supposed historian of snobs throughout the series.

Thackeray's connection with Punch came practically to an end in 1851. The severance was due partly to differences in political opinion. His personal relations with the staff of Punch always remained cordial. Special mention may be made of another contribution of his to the paper, “Punch's Prize Novelists,” containing some brilliant parodies of Edward Bulwer Lytton, Lever, Benjamin Disraeli (in “Codlingsby,” perhaps the most perfect of the series), and others.

Literary success

In 1846 was published, by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, the 1st of 24 numbers of Vanity Fair, the work which placed Thackeray in his proper position before the public as a novelist and writer of the highest rank. It was completed in 1848, when Thackeray was 37 years old; and in the same year Abraham Hayward paid a tribute to the author's powers in the Edinburgh Review.

Vanity Fair was followed by Pendennis, Esmond and The Newcomes, which appeared respectively in 1850, 1852 and 1854. It has seemed convenient to take The Newcomes after Pendennis, because Pendennis and his wife reappear in this book as in The Adventures of Philip; but Esmond (1852) was written and published before The Newcomes.

In 1851 Thackeray had written The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, delivered as a series of lectures at Willis's Rooms, in the same year, and re-delivered in the United States in 1852 and 1853, as was afterwards the series called The Four Georges. Both sets were written for the purpose of lecturing. In 1854 was published a most delightful burlesque, The Rose and the Ring, whereof the origin has already been mentioned. In 1857 Thackeray stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for Oxford against Mr Cardwell, and in the same year appeared the initial number of The Virginians, a sequel to Esmond.

The last number of The Virginians came out in 1859, and in the same year Thackeray undertook the editorship of the Cornhill Magazine. This was a task which, as readers of his Roundabout Paper “Thorns in the Cushion” will remember, the kindliness and sensitiveness of his disposition made irksome to him, and he resigned the editorship in April 1862, though he continued to write for the magazine until he died. In the Cornhill appeared from his pen Lovel the Widower (previously written, with different names for some of the personages), in dramatic form; The Adventures of Philip (1861-62); and (1860-63) the story, unhappily never finished (just 3 installments were published, called Denis Duval. The Roundabout Papers, a small storehouse of some of Thackeray's best qualities as an essayist, came out in the Cornhill Magazine simultaneously with Lovel the Widower and with The Adventures of Philip.

On 23 December 1863, after returning from dining out and before dressing for bed, Thackeray suffered a stroke. He was found dead in his bed the following morning. His death at the age of 52 was entirely unexpected, and shocked his family, his friends, and the reading public. An estimated 7,000 people attended his funeral at Kensington Gardens. He was buried on 29 December at Kensal Green Cemetery.

Writing

Thackerary caricature by Edmund Dulac (1882-1953), Courtesy Internet Archive.

There can be little doubt that Thackeray will always be ranked among the foremost English writers of fiction, or that his more infrequent work as essayist and poet will go hand in hand with his wider achievements as a novelist. He was master of a style of great distinction and individuality, and ranks with the very greatest of English novelists.

Early fiction

The Paris Sketch-book (1840) contains among other things some curious divagations in criticism, along with some really fine critical work, and a very powerful sketch called “A Gambler's Death."”

The History of Mr. Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841) is a work filled with instances of the wit, humor, satire, pathos, which found a more ordered if not a fresher expression in his later and longer works. For freshness, indeed, and for a fine perception which enables the author to perform among other feats that of keeping up throughout the story the curious simplicity of its supposed narrator's character, The Great Hoggarty Diamond can scarcely be surpassed. The characters, from Lady Drum, Lady Fanny Rakes, Lady Jane and Edmund Preston, to Brough, Mrs and Miss Brough, Mrs Roundhand, Gus Hoskins, and, by no means least, Samuel Titmarsh's aunt, Mrs Hoggarty, with her store of “Rosolio,” are full of life; the book is crammed with honest fun; and for pure pathos, the death of the child, and the meeting of the husband and wife over the empty cradle, stands, if not alone in its own line, at least in the company of very few such scenes in English fiction.

The Yellowplush Papers are notable for their strange touches of humour, satire, tragedy (in the closing scene of the history of Mr Deuceace), and their sublimation of fantastic bad spelling (M'Arony for macaroni is a typical example of this).

Catherine is a strong story, and too disagreeable perhaps for its purpose, founded closely on the actual career of a criminal named Catherine Hayes, and intended to counteract the then growing practice of making ruffians and harlots prominent characters in fiction.

Barry Lyndon has, with a very great difference in treatment, some resemblance to Smollett's Ferdinand, Count Fathom — the hero, that is to say, is or becomes a most intolerable scoundrel, who is magnificently unconscious of his own iniquity. The form and pressure of the time depicted are caught with striking verisimilitude, and in the boyish career of Barry Lyndon there are fine touches of a wild chivalry, simplicity, generosity, which mingle naturally with those worse qualities that, under the influence of abominable training, afterwards corrupt his whole mind and career. The man is so infatuated with and so blind to his own roguery, he has so much dash and daring, and is on occasions so infamously treated, that it is not easy to look upon him as an entirely detestable villain until, towards the end of his course, he becomes wholly lost in brutish debauchery and cruelty. His latter career is founded on that of Andrew Robinson Stoney Bowes, who married the widow of John, 9th earl of Strathmore. There is also no doubt a touch of Casanova in Barry Lyndon's character.

Among minor but admirable works of the same period are found A Legend of the Rhine (a burlesque of the great Dumas's Olhon l'Archer), brought out in George Cruikshank's Table Book, edited by Gilbert Abbott À Beckett, Cox's Diary (on which has been founded a well-known Dutch comedy, Janus Tulp); and The Fatal Boots. This is the most fitting moment for naming also Rebecca and Rowena, which towers, not only over Thackeray's other burlesques, excellent as they are, but over every other burlesque of the kind ever written. Its taste, its wit, its pathos, its humour, are unmatchable; and it contains some of the best songs of a particular kind ever written, songs rivalled only by Peacock's best of the same sort.

Vanity Fair

Title-page to Vanity Fair (1848), drawn by William Makepeace Thackeray, who furnished the illustrations for many of his earlier editions. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

It is probable that on Vanity Fair (1848) has been largely based the foolish cry, now heard less frequently, about Thackeray's cynicism, a cry which he himself, with his keen knowledge of men, foresaw and provided against, amply enough as could be thought, at the end of the 8th chapter, in a passage which is perhaps the best commentary ever written on the author's method. He has explained how he wishes to describe men and women as they actually are, good, bad and indifferent, and to claim a privilege:

Occasionally to step down from the platform, and talk about them; if they are good and kindly, to love and shake them by the hand; if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader's sleeve; if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms politeness admits of. Otherwise you might fancy it was I who was sneering at the practice of devotion, which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous; that it was I who laughed good-humouredly at the railing old Silenus of a baronet — whereas the laughter comes from one who has no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for anything beyond success. Such people there are living and flourishing in the world — Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless: let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very successful too, mere quacks and fools; and it was to combat and expose such as those, no doubt, that laughter was made.

As to another accusation which was brought against the book when it came out, that the colors were laid on too thick, in the sense that the villains were too villainous, the good people too goody-goody, the best and completest answer to that can be found by anyone who chooses to read the work with care. Osborne is, and is meant to be, a poor enough creature, but he is an eminently human being, and one whose poorness of character is developed as he allows bad influences to tell upon his vanity and folly. The good in him is fully recognized, and comes out in the beautiful passage describing his farewell to Amelia on the eve of Waterloo, in which passage may be also found a sufficient enough answer to the statement that Amelia is absolutely insipid and uninteresting. So with the companion picture of Rawdon Crawley's farewell to Becky Sharp: who that reads it can resist sympathy, in spite of Rawdon's vices and shady shifts for a living, with his simple bravery and devotion to his wife?

As for Becky, a character that has since been imitated a host of times, there is certainly not much to be said in her defence. We know of her, to be sure, that she thought she would have found it easy to be good if she had been rich, and we know also what happened when Rawdon, released without her knowledge from a spunginghouse, surprised her alone with and singing to Lord Steyne in the house in Mayfair. After a gross insult from Steyne, “Rawdon Crawley, springing out, seized him by the neckcloth, until Steyne, almost strangled, writhed and bent under his arm. ‘You lie, you dog,’ said Rawdon; ‘you lie, you coward and villain!’ And he struck the peer twice over the face with his open hand, and flung him bleeding to the ground. It was all done before Rebecca could interpose. She stood there trembling before him. She admired her husband, strong, brave, and victorious.” This admiration is, as Thackeray himself thought it, the capital touch in a scene which is as powerful as any Thackeray ever wrote — as powerful, indeed, as any in English fiction. Its full merit, it may be noted in passing, has been curiously accented by an imitation of it in Alphonse Daudet's Fromont Jeune et Risler Aíné.

As to the extent of the miserable Becky's guilt in the Steyne matter, Thackeray leaves it practically open to the reader to form what conclusion he will. There is, it should be added, a distinct touch of good in Becky's conduct to Amelia at Ostend in the last chapter of the book, and those who think that too little punishment is meted out to the brilliant adventuress in the end may remember this to her credit. It is supreme art in the treatment of her character that makes the reader understand and feel her attractiveness, though he knows her extraordinarily evil qualities; and in this no writer subsequent to Thackeray who has tried to depict one of the genus Becky Sharp has even faintly succeeded. Among the minor characters there is not one — and this is not always the case even with Thackeray's chief figures — who is incompletely or inconsistently depicted; and no one who wishes fully to understand and appreciate the book can afford to miss a word of it.

Pendennis

It might be more easy to pick holes critically in Pendennis than in Vanity Fair. Pendennis himself, after his boyish passion and university escapades, has disagreeable touches of flabbiness and worldliness; and the important episode of his relations with Fanny Bolton, which Thackeray could never have treated otherwise than delicately, is so lightly and tersely handled that it is a little vague even to those who read between the lines. It can hardly be said that there is adequate preparation for the final announcement that those relations have been innocent, and one can hardly see why it should have been so long delayed. This does not, of course, affect the value of the book as a picture of middle- and upper-class life of the time, the time when Vauxhall still existed, and the haunt for suppers and songs which Thackeray in this book called the Back Kitchen, and it is a picture filled with striking figures. In some of these, notably in that of Foker, Thackeray went, it is supposed, very close to actual life for his material, and in that particular case with a most agreeable result.

As for the 2 “umbrae” of Lord Steyne, it is difficult to believe that they were intended as caricatures of 2 well-known persons. If they were, for once Thackeray's hand forgot its cunning. Here, as in the case of Amelia Sedley (Vanity Fair), the heroine has been thought a little insipid; and there may be good ground for finding Laura Pendennis dull, though she has a spirit of her own. In later books she becomes, what Thackeray's people very seldom are, a tiresome as well as an uninviting person. Costigan is unique, and so is Major Pendennis, a type which, allowing for differences of periods and manners, will exist as long as society exists, and which has been seized and depicted by Thackeray as by no other novelist. The Major's 2 encounters, from both of which he comes out victorious, with Costigan in the 1st and with Morgan in the 2nd volume, are true touches of genius. In opposition to the worldliness of the Major, with which Pendennis does not escape being tainted, we have Warrington, whose nobility of nature has come unscathed through a severe trial, and who, a thorough gentleman if a rough one, is really the guardian of Pendennis's career. There is, it should be noted, a characteristic and acknowledged confusion in the plot of Pendennis, which will not spoil any intelligent reader's pleasure.

Later novels

Probably most readers of The Newcomes (1854) to whom the book is mentioned think immediately of the fine, chivalrous and simple figure of Colonel Newcome, who stands out in the relief of almost ideal beauty of character against the crowd of more or less imperfect and more or less base personages who move through the novel. At the same time, to say, as has been said, that this book “is full of satire from the first to the last page” is to convey an impression which is by no means just. There is plenty of kindliness in the treatment of the young men who, like Clive Newcome himself and Lord Kew, possess no very shining virtue beyond that of being honourable gentlemen; in the character of J. J. Ridley there is much tenderness and pathos, and no one can help liking the Bohemian “F.B.,” and looking tolerantly on his failings. It may be that there is too close an insistence on the fiendish temper of Mrs Mackenzie and on the sufferings she inflicts on the colonel; but it must be remembered that this heightens the singular pathos of the closing scenes of the colonel's life.

To some students Esmond (1852) seems and will seem Thackeray's capital work. It has not been rivalled as a romance reproducing with unfailing interest and accuracy the figures, manners and phrases of a past time, and it is full of beautiful touches of character. But Beatrix, upon whom so much hinges, is an unpleasing character, although one understands fully why men were captivated by her insolent beauty and brilliancy; and there is some truth in Thackeray's own saying, that “Esmond was a prig.” Apart from this, the story is, like the illusion of a past time in the narrative, so complete in all its details, so harmoniously worked out, that there is little room for criticism. As to Esmond's marriage with the lady whom he has served and loved as a boy, that is a matter for individual judgment. Beatrix, it has been indicated above, is wonderfully drawn: and not the least wonderful thing about her is her reappearance as the jaded, battered, worldly, not altogether unkindly, Baroness in The Virginians. It was just what Beatrix must have come to, and her decline is handled with the lightest and finest touch.

The Virginians (1857) is a most unequal work, inferior, as sequels are apt to be, to Esmond as an historical romance, less compact and coherent, prone to divagation and desultoriness, yet charming enough in its lifelikeness, in the wit and wisdom of its reflections, and, as has been said, in its portrait of Beatrix grown old.

Lovel the Widower, changed from the dramatic to the narrative form, remains a piece of high comedy in which the characters are indicated rather than fully worked out, with a bold and practiced touch.

Among The Roundabout Papers is a story differing in form from the rest, called “The Notch on the Axe — a Story à la Mode.” It is an almost perfect specimen of the author's genius for burlesque story-telling; but it contains an odd instance, which a careful reader will not fail to discover, of that odd habit of inaccuracy of which Thackeray himself was conscious.

The Adventures of Philip is, as said earlier, in the nature of a sequel to or a completion of "A Shabby Genteel Story." As with the other direct sequel, it is a work of great inequality. It contains scenes of humour, pathos, satire, which rank with Thackeray's best work; some old friends from others of the novels make brief but pleasant reappearances in its pages; there are fine sketches of journalistic, artistic and diplomatic life, and the scene from the last-named in Paris is inimitable.

The Little Sister is altogether delightful; the Twysden family are terribly true and vastly diverting; the minor characters, among whom old Ridley, “J.J.'s” father, should be mentioned, are wonderfully hit off; nor did Thackeray ever write a better scene than that of the quarrel between Bunch, Baynes and M^cWhirter in the Paris pension. Philip himself is impossible; one cannot say that the character is ill-drawn — it is not drawn at all. It is an entirely different personage in different chapters; and it has here and there a very unpleasant touch which may perhaps have come of rapid writing. Yet so admirable are many parts of the book that Philip cannot be left out of the list of Thackeray's most considerable works.

Denis Duval, which reached only 3 numbers, promised to be a top-rank work, more or less in the Esmond manner.

Many attempts have been made at many times to institute a comparison between Thackeray and Dickens as novelists. In truth it would be as much to the purpose, to borrow a homely metaphor, to compare chalk with cheese. The two authors were so radically different in their purviews, in their modes of thought, in their methods of expression, that critical comparison between them is of its nature absolutely unprofitable. It is better to recognize simply that the two novelists stood, each in his own way, distinctly above even their most distinguished contemporaries. As to preference, that is a matter with which criticism has nothing, and individual inclination has everything, to do.

Poetry

Little has yet been said of Thackeray's performances in poetry. They formed a small but not the least significant part of his life's work. The grace and the apparent spontaneity of his versification are beyond question. Some of the more serious efforts, such as “The Chronicle of the Drum” (1841), are full of power, and instinct with true poetic feeling. Both the half-humorous, half-pathetic ballads and the wholly extravagant ones must be classed with the best work in that kind; and the translations from Beranger are as good as verse translations can be. Thackeray had the true poetic instinct, and proved it by writing poetry which equalled his prose in grace and feeling.

Critical introduction

by Charles L. Graves

Thackeray's greatness rests on his novels, but his excursions in meter, though they represent a small portion of his literary baggage, run into thousands of lines and fill nearly 300 pages of a miscellaneous volumes of his collected works. His connection with Punch began in 1842 and established his fame as a humorist. Most of his contributions were in prose, but he wrote a good deal of excellent satirical and topical verse for Punch, including the Bow Street Ballads (1848) and the "Battle of Limerick" in the same year. Many of his best poems, however, are to be found scattered through his various prose writings, for he followed the example of Scott in using verse in his novels, stories, and sketches, in the form of decoration or interlude.

Humor is the prevailing note; sometimes grim, as in the "Chronicle of the Drum", the best of his ballads, but more often satirical and caustic; sometimes extravagant, as in the Lyra Hibernica. "Charlotte" might have been written by Canning. Peg of Limavaddy recalls Father Prout, and some of his pieces are frankly derivative, such as the spirited paraphrases of Béranger, Ronsard, Uhland, Chamisso, and Horace. He excelled also in vers de société and occasional poems with an undercurrent of seriousness or irony; indeed, there are few branches of light verse that he did not adorn save that of parody.

Some of his topical verse hardly rose above the level of 1st-class journalism, and the “Jeames” and “Pleeceman X” ballads have lost their savor from the virtual extinction of the types depicted and dialect employed. But enough remains, apart from the general fame of the writer, to ensure him a distinguished position among Victorian writers of light verse.

Critical reputation

During the Victorian era, Thackeray was ranked below only Charles Dickens, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair. In that novel he was able to satirize whole swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It also features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp. As a result, unlike Thackeray's other novels, it remains popular with the general reading public, and is a standard fixture in university courses.

In Thackeray's own day, some commentators, such as Anthony Trollope, ranked his History of Henry Esmond as his greatest work, perhaps because it expressed Victorian values of duty and earnestness, as did some of his other later novels. It is perhaps for this reason that they have not survived as well as Vanity Fair, which satirizes those values.

Thackeray saw himself as writing in the realistic tradition and distinguished himself from the exaggerations and sentimentality of Dickens. Some later commentators have accepted this self-evaluation and seen him as a realist, but others note his inclination to use 18th-century narrative techniques, such as digressions and talking to the reader, and argue that through them he frequently disrupts the illusion of reality.

Recognition

Thackeray commemorative plaque in Notting Hill, London, 2013. Photo by Simon Harriyott. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

A marble bust of Thackeray by Carlo, Baron Marochetti was placed in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, in 1865.

In 1887 the Royal Society of Arts unveiled a blue plaque to commemorate Thackeray at the house at 2 Palace Green, London, that had been built for him in the 1860s. It is now the location of the Israeli Embassy.

Thackeray's former home in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, is now a restaurant named after the author.

In popular culture

Charlotte Brontë dedicated the 2nd edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray.

Vanity Fair has been repeatedly adapted for movies and television.

Barry Lyndon was a 1975 period drama film written, directed, and produced by Stanley Kubrick, based on Thackeray's 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, and starring Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Leonard Rossiter, and Hardy Krüger. The film won 4 Oscars at the 48th Academy Awards: Best Scoring: Original Song Score and Adaptation or Scoring: Adaptation; Best Costume Design; Best Art Direction; and Best Cinematography. Although some critics took issue with the film's slow pace and restrained emotion, its reputation, like that of many of Kubrick's works, has strengthened over time, with many now regarding it as among both Kubrick's greatest achievements and the greatest films of all time.

The Yellowplush Papers, which appeared in Fraser's Magazine beginning in 1837, were adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2009, with Adam Buxton playing Charles Yellowplush.

Miles Jupp plays Thackeray in the 2017 film The Man Who Invented Christmas.

Thackeray is portrayed by Michael Palin in the 2018 ITV television series Vanity Fair.

Though Edward Bulwer-Lytton is credited with originating the phrase "the Great Unwashed," its earliest citation to be found in his oeuvre is in The Parisians of 1872, while Thackeray used it as early as 1850 in Pendennis, in an ironic context implying the phrase would be known to his readers.

Publications

Poetry

• Ballads. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1855; Boston: Ticknor, 1855.
• Complete Poems. New York: White, Stokes, & Allen, 1883.

Plays

• Reading a Poem (edited by Charles Plumptre Johnson). London: Chiswick, 1891.

Novels

• The Yellowplush Papers. London: James Fraser, 1837; Philadelphia: E.L. Carey & M. hart, 1838.
• Catherine: a shabby genteel story. London: Fraser's Magazine, 1839–40; London: Smith, Elder, 1869; Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869.
• The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggerty Diamond. Lupton, UK: 1843; London: Bradbury & Evans, 1849.
• The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A romance of the last century. London: Fraser's Magazine, 1844; New York: D. Appleton, 1853; New York: New York University Press, 1970.
• Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (as "Mr. M.A. Titmarsh"). London: Chapman, & hall, 1846; New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1846.
• Vanity Fair: A novel without a hero. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1848; New York: Caldwell, 1848; New York: Random House, 1958.
• The History of Pendennis: His fortunes and misfortunes, his friends, and his greatest enemy.. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1849–1850.
  • Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Rebecca and Rowena: A romance upon romance (as "Mr. M.A. Titmarsh"; illustrated by Richard Doyle). London: Chapman & Hall, 1850
  • London: Hesperus, 2002.
• Men's Wives. New York: D. Appleton, 1852.
• The History of Henry Esmond. London: Smith, Elder, 1852; New York: Book League of America, 1852; Garden City, NY: Literary Guild of America, 1950.
• The Newcomes: Memoirs of a most respectable family. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1854.
• The Trememdous Adventures of Major Gahagan [fragment]. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1855.
• The Virginians: A tale of the last century. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1858.
• Lovel the Widower. London: Cornhill Magazine, 1860; London: Smith, Elder, 1861; New York: harper, 1861.
• The Adventures of Philip, on his way through the world: Shewing who robbed him, who helped him, and who passed him by. London: Smith, Elder, 1862; Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1862.
• Denis Duval. London: Cornhill Magazine, 1864; London: Smith, Elder, 1867.

Short fiction

• Little Travels and Roadside Sketches. 1840.
• The Paris Sketch-book of Mr. M.A. Titmarsh. London: John Macrone, 1840.
• Sketches and Travels in London. London: Bradbury & Evan,s 1856.
• Irish Sketch-book 1842; London: Chapman & all, 1857.
• Burlesques. New York: John W. Lovell, 1880.

Non-fiction

• The Book of Snobs; by one of themselves. London: Punch Office, 1848; London: Smith, Elder, 1859; New York: D. Appleton, 1852.
• The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. London: Smith, Elder, 1853; New York: Harper, 1853.
• The Four Georges. London: Smith, Elder, 1861
• Roundabout Papers. London: Smith, Elder, 1863; New York: Harper, 1863.
• Contributions to 'Punch', etc. London: Smith, Elder, 1898; New York: Harper, 1898.
• Literary Essays (&) Essays on Art. New York: Society for English & French Literature, 1904.

Juvenile

• The Rose and the Ring (illustrated). London: University Press, 1855; New York: Harper, 1855.
• The Christmas Books of Mr. M.A. Titmarsh. London: Smith, Elder, 1868.

Collected editions

• Works. London: Henry Frowde / Oxford University Press, 1847.
• Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, in twenty-four volumes. (24 volumes), London: Smith, Elder, 1878-1879.
• Complete Works. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889.
• Thackeray's Lighter Hours: Being selections from the minor writings. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin, 1900.
• Stray Papers: Being stories, reviews, verses, and sketches (1821-1847). London: Hutchinson, 1901.
• Prose Works (edited by Walter Jerrold). London: J.M. Dent, 1901-1903.
• Illustrations (edited by John Buchanan-Brown). Newton Abbot, UK & North Pomfret, VT: David & Charles, 1979.

Letters and journals

• "A collection of unpublished letters of Thackeray". New York: Scribner's Magazine, 1877.
• A Collection of Letters of W.M. Thackeray, 1847-1855 (edited by Jane Octavia Brookfield). London: Smith, Elder, 1887; New York: Scribner, 1887.
• Thackeray's Letters to an American Family (introduction by Lucy W. Baxter). New York: Century, 1904.
• Some family letters of W.M. Thackeray: Together with recollections by his kinswoman Blanche Warre Cornish. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911.
• The Letters of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, with forty-two additional letters from her father, William Makepeace Thackeray (edited by Hester Thackeray Ritchie). London: John Murray, 1924.
• Thackeray and his Daughter: The letters and journals of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, with many letters of William Makepeace Thackeray. New York: Harper, 1924.
• Letters and Private Papers (edited by Gordon Norton Ray). London: Oxford University Press, 1945; Cambridge, MA: arvard University Press, 1945.

*Selected Letters (edited by Edgar F. Harden). Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1996.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

The Mahogany Tree William Makepeace Thackeray audiobook

• List of British poets

At The Zoo a poem written by William Makepeace Thackeray

A Tragic Story by William Makepeace Thackeray

References

• Aplin, John. The Inheritance of Genius: A Thackeray family biography, 1798-1875. Lutterworth, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7188-9224-1
• Catalan, Zelma. The Politics of Irony in Thackeray’s Mature Fiction: Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond, The Newcomes. Sofia, Bulgaria: 2010, 250 pр.
• Ferris, Ina. William Makepeace Thackeray. Boston: Twayne, 1983.
• Monsarrat, Ann. An Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man, 1811–1863. London: Cassell, 1980.
• Peters, Catherine. Thackeray’s Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
•  Pollock, Walter Herries (1911). "Thackeray, William Makepeace". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 716-719.  Wikisource, Web, Apr. 17, 2021.
• Prawer, Siegbert S.: Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray's German Discourse. Oxford : Legenda, 1997.
• Prawer, Siegbert S.: Israel at Vanity Fair: Jews and Judaism in the Writings of W.M. Thackeray. Leiden : Brill, 1992.
• Prawer, Siegbert S.: W. M. Thackeray's European sketch books : a study of literary and graphic portraiture. P. Lang, 2000.
• Ray, Gordon N. Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811–1846. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955.
• Ray, Gordon N. Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, 1847–1863. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957.
• Ritchie, H.T. Thackeray and His Daughter. Harper and Brothers, 1924.
• Rodríguez Espinosa, Marcos (1998) Traducción y recepción como procesos de mediación cultural: 'Vanity Fair' en España. Málaga: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Málaga.
• Shillingsburg, Peter. William Makepeace Thackeray: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
• Williams, Ioan M. Thackeray. London: Evans, 1968.

External links

Poems

• "The Mahogany Tree"
• Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-1863) (2 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
• William Makepeace Thackeray 1811-1863 at the Poetry Foundation
• William Makepeace Thackerary at Public Domain Poetry (3 poems)
• Thackeray in The English Poets: An anthology: "The Age of Wisdom" (from Rebecca and Rowena), "Sorrows of Werther"
• Thackeray in A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895: "At the Church Gate," "The Ballad of Bouillabaisse," "The Age of Wisdom," "Sorrows of Werther," "The Pen and the Album," "The Mahogany Tree," "The End of the Play"
• William Makepeace Thackerary at AllPoetry (88 poems)
• William Makepeace Thackerary at PoemHunter (90 poems)
• William Makepeace Thackeray at Poetry Nook (123 poems)

Prose

• "Bluebeard's Ghost" (1843)
• On Charity and Humor, discourse on behalf of a charitable organization

Audio / video

• William Makepeace Thackeray poems at YouTube

Books

• Works by William Makepeace Thackeray at Project Gutenberg
• Works available at eBooks @ Adelaide
• William Makepeace Thackerary at Amazon.com

About

• William Makepeace Thackeray in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• William Makepeace Thackeray at NNDB
• William Makepeace Thackeray at The Literature Network
• William Makepeace Thackeray on The Victorian Web
• Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W.M. Thackeray by Peter L. Shillingsburg

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Original article is at: Thackeray, William Makepeace