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Thackeray Biography

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THACKERAY, William Makepeace (1811–63). A famous English novelist. He was born in Calcutta, where his father was at the time in the service of the East India Company, July 18, 1811. At the age of six he was sent to England, his father having died, and placed in the care of an aunt; but in 1821 his mother returned with her second husband and settled near Ottery Saint Mary in Devonshire. The boy regarded her as "a daughter of the gods" and his stepfather, it is asserted, was the original of Colonel Newcome, whom, in certain traits, he did as a matter of fact resemble. After attending two small schools, Thackeray entered Charterhouse, also vividly described in The Newcomes, and remained there six years (1822–28). Then he spent a little over a year at Cambridge as a member of Trinity College and of the brilliant society of which Tennyson (q.v.) was one. Then during two years abroad he met Goethe at Weimar. On his return to England he studied law for a while at the Middle Temple, which furnished material for Pendennis. On his coming of age, he inherited a fortune of now indeterminate size, but variously estimated at £20,000 and £500. At all events, much of it was lost by the failure of an Indian bank, and a quantum of it at play, and he had to depend on his own exertions for a living. In 1833 he became editor and proprietor of the National Standard, a periodical devoted to art and literature, but it lived only about a year, after which he spent some time in Paris studying art. He offered to illustrate Pickwick, but his services were declined by Dickens. In 1836 he became Paris correspondent for the Constitutional, and married there Isabella, daughter of Colonel Shawe of Doneraile, County Cork.

After his marriage he settled in London and contributed regularly to Frazer’s Magazine, and was busy with his pencil also. His first book was Flore et Zéphyre by Théophile Wagstaff (1836), with nine comic plates from his own drawings. To Fraser’s he contributed The Yellowplush Papers in 1838. Then followed The Paris Sketchbook (1840), and The Irish Sketchbook (1843). In 1842 he began writing for Punch, to which he contributed nearly four hundred sketches. The most successful were "Jeames’s Diary" (1845–46), the "Prize Novelists" (1847), and the "Snob Papers" (1846–47). Thackeray had now proved himself a master of burlesque, and an acute critic of contemporary manners. In their kind nothing could be better than the "Prize Novelists," in which he exaggerates the weaknesses of Bulwer, Disraeli, Lever, Cooper, and Scott. Barry Lyndon (1844) was slow in winning the recognition which later criticism has given it in justly declaring it to be, in the concentrated power of its satire, in its literary economy and in other literary qualities one of his very finest achievements. He had also begun, as he continued throughout life, to write occasional verse, commonly in the ballad measure, at will grave and pathetic or richly humorous.

In 1847–48 Vanity Fair appeared in monthly parts, and Thackeray assumed his place in English literature by the side of Fielding. This, with his other great novels, Pendennis (1848–50), Henry Esmond (1852), and The Newcomes (1853–55), shows him at the height of his power. Like Vanity Fair, the last three named novels appeared in monthly installments. Somewhat inferior, but still to be mentioned in this context, are The Virginians (in monthly parts (1857–59) and The Adventures of Philip (1862). Henry Esmond, especially, has taken rank by universal consent at the head of English historical fiction. With its other merits, it is on the whole a wonderfully faithful reproduction, not only of the language, but of the thought and the manners of the early eighteenth century. This was a period by which Thackeray was always strongly attracted; Addison, Swift, Steele, and the eighteenth century novelists were his masters in literature. He even thought of writing a history of the century; and his studies took shape in the delightful lectures on The English Humorists. These he delivered in America in 1852 and 1853 with such success that he came again in 1855 with The Four Georges. In 1857 he tried for Parliament, standing for Oxford in the Liberal interests, but was fortunately defeated. In 1860 he became the first editor of the Cornhill Magazine, for which he wrote his last novels, Lovel the Widower (1860), The Adventures of Philip (1862), and the beautifully written Denis Duval (1864). In the Cornhill appeared (1860–63) the Roundabout Papers, models of the familiar essay, which represent his style in its ripest perfection.

Though not far beyond middle life, Thackeray felt the burden of years, and resigned the editorship of the Cornhill in April, 1862. On the morning of Dec. 24, 1863, he was found dead in his bed. He was admirable both as a man and as a novelist. Tennyson called him lovable and noble-hearted. So said Carlyle and all who knew him well. He has been often called a cynic; and indeed he was unsparing in the fierceness with which he plied the lash on anything which savored of sham or pretense, and his keen vision detected alloy in the finest natures. Yet there is a tremendous contrast between his satire and that of Swift, a cynic in truth, who hated and despised human nature and rejoiced in laying bare its weaknesses. Thackeray wrote always with a noble tenderness and with reverence for all that was good and true. Yet it must be admitted that, almost without exception, the strongest characters in his novels are the bad ones, and that he has drawn scarcely a woman whom we can love and admire without qualification.

Thackeray described the life of the upper classes, with its fringe of servants and retainers, as Dickens that of the lower; and between them they give an unrivaled picture of English life in the middle of the nineteenth century, with its characteristic notes, one may say, for the first time in the history of literature, a picture of a society whose chief concern is the making or the spending of money. The interest in social questions which he was among the first to import into fiction has never died out; though Charlotte Brontë’s enthusiastic picture of him (in the preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre) as a prophet who conies before the great ones of society much as the son of Imlah came before the throned kings of Judah and Israel, and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophetlike and as vital, a mien as dauntless and as daring, may seem to us overdrawn. The most indisputable of his qualities is his mastery of a singularly pure, flexible, varied, and simple style—the natural unstrained expression of his thoughts, however lofty or however homely they may have been. "He blew on his pipe, and words came tripping round him, like children, like pretty little children who are perfectly drilled for the dance; or came, did he will it, treading in their precedence, like kings, gloomily."

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XXII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 156-157.