William Makepeace Thackeray

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

Life

Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India, where his father, Richmond Thackeray, worked as secretary to the board of revenue for the British East India Company. William Thackeray's mother, Anne née Beacher, married Richmond on 13 October, 1810 after being sent to India in 1809 by her grandmother. She was sent abroad after her grandmother told her that the man she loved, Henry Charmichael-Smyth, had died. This was a lie on the part of her grandmother, who wished a better marriage for her than a mere ensign, but the lie was revealed in 1812 when Richmond unwittingly invited to dinner the supposed dead man. This shock reunion seems to have weakened their marriage beyond repair and Richmond Thackeray died shortly afterwards on 13 September, 1815. Henry Charmichael-Smyth married Anne in 1818 and they returned to England shortly after.

William was sent to England earlier, at the age of five, with a short stop over at St. Helena where the prisoner Napoleon was pointed out to him. He was educated at schools in Southampton and Chiswick and then at Charterhouse School, where he was a close friend of John Leech. Although an able student he disliked the regimes and masters, parodying them in his later fiction and calling Charterhouse "Slaughterhouse" as at that time it was close to Smithfield Market. He then studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, but his academic performance waned in his second year at Cambridge and he dropped out in 1830.

He travelled for some time on the continent, visiting Paris and Weimar, where he met Goethe. He returned to England and began to study law at the Middle Temple, but on reaching twenty-one he came into his inheritance, which proved to be a disaster for him. He squandered the money on poor foreign investments, gambling and funding The National Standard and The Constitutional, two newspapers which he planned to write for but which rapidly closed down. Art was the next direction he took when he studied it in Paris, but he seems to have had no great talent for it aside from satirical caricatures which were the artistic equivalent of many of his writings. He later wrote of the disgust at the low company he had become a part of, but what focused his mind on improving his situation was his attraction for Isabella Gethin Shaw.

The couple married on 20 August 1836 and Thackeray began writing again. They had three daughters; Jane who died in infancy, Harriet and Anne, who would marry her cousin Richmond Ritchie, becoming Lady Ritchie and a published author. The family was blighted when Isabella developed mental illness in 1840. At first she suffered from depression and attempted suicide at least once, but she soon lapsed into a detached state. She remained ill for the rest of her life and outlived William, dying in 1893. Thackeray blamed himself, in part, and felt guilty for the hard financial situation he had put her through in their early marriage. The tragedy affected his later writings, with the stress and difficulties that wives and women in general have to endure at the hands of thoughtless men being a noticeable theme in many of his books. Thackeray remained a virtual widower from that point on: although he was romantically linked with several women, the relationships were unable to progress.

The family came back to England in 1837 and Thackeray worked as a journalist, contributing to Fraser's Magazine. Later, through his connection to the illustrator John Leech, he began writing for the newly formed Punch magazine. The work which would cement his fame was The Snob Papers, a series of articles written in Punch and later collected as The Book of Snobs. From then on he became more financially stable and was able to concentrate on writing the long novels he is now best known for. He also stopped writing for Punch in 1851 after political disagreements with the editors. In 1849 he suffered from a life threatening illness (possibly typhoid) and in 1852/1853 he visited America, lecturing and meeting presidents Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce.

In 1859 Thackeray became editor of the newly formed Cornhill Magazine. He died of a stroke in 1863 and such was his personality, his funeral was attended by as many as seven thousand people. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, and a memorial bust sculpted by Marochetti can be found in Westminster Abbey.

Works

Thackeray wrote a prolific amount of journalism and fiction with a particular emphasis on pastiches and satires many of which he illustrated with his own caricatures. Particularly early on he wrote under a number of amusing pseudonyms: "Charles James Yellowplush, a footman"; "Michael Angelo Titmarsh"; and "George Savage Fitz-Boodle". His earliest published work was written in 1828 for the Western Luminary, a local Devon newspaper, and in the following two years he contributed to The Snob a Cambridge University magazine. Owing to financial straits and the uncertain home life due to his wife's illness he wrote many short stories and articles rather than long novels common at the time. Of particular note were his Punch Prize Novelists in which he mercilessly copied and parodied the styles of major established novelists such as Benjamin Disraeli and Edward Bulwer Lytton, a writer whose works he particularly seems to have disliked. He called this period, a time of "odious magazinary".

The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. was Thackeray's first major novel—serialised in Fraser's—but it was not greatly popular as the central character was not particularly likeable. It shows his influences in the comic misadventure tales of Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett. Thackeray's long stint at writing very different styles of work under multiple pseudonyms allowed him to adopt a variety of authorial voices so that Barry's failure to understand how he is received and his self delusions are clearly depicted and give the tale extra depth. This technique is taken a step further in some of his later novels which are narrated by Pendennis, the author character whose progress is related by Thackeray in an earlier work. Pendennis is rather like a younger Thackeray himself: rather self-regarding and arrogant, although better bred than Lyndon, and in his talent for mimicry, Thackeray may be parodying himself in his own fiction.

He is best known now for Vanity Fair with his other works less often read or adapted. After the Fair he was at the peak of his writing career and many fans regard Pendennis or The History of Henry Esmond as his masterpiece with The Newcomes also popular. His later books are less appreciated, with The Adventure of Philip at best erratic and The Virginians regarded as a poor sequel to Henry Esmond. The three parts of his unfinished Denis Duval appear to be an improvement and more to the reading public's taste but he died before the majority of the work was published.

Thackeray's connection with Royal Tunbridge Wells is of special interest and value from the fact that The Wells figures largely in his novel The Virginians; and in the "Roundabout Papers", one of his sketches, entitled "Tonbridge Toys", describes his visits here and his early and later impressions of the place. The house, "Rock Villa", at which he stayed in 1860 still stands and preserves its original features. It bears a plaque denoting his visit there and is known as Thackeray's house, with a brass plate to that effect on its gatepost. His first visit as a boy was in 1823, when he travelled there by coach from London, arriving at a small house on the Common where his parents were staying for a time. When he paid his final visit to The Wells in 1860, he was accompanied by his daughter, Lady Ritchie. He was then Editor of The Cornhill Magazine and wrote "Tonbridge Toys" and "de Gwentive" at Rock Villa. It has also been stated that a part, if not all, of The Virginians was written here.

Reputation

Then, as now, Thackeray is most often compared to one other great novelist of Victorian literature, Charles Dickens. While at the time Dickens was only marginally more popular of the two, Thackeray has since lost a lot of ground compared to Dickens and is now much less read. Both writers were primarily satirists but they were also both campaigning journalists at times. There was a great animosity between the two writers; they respected each other's abilities but had very different styles, and they criticised the other's treatments of subjects. Dickens lapsed often into sentimentality while Thackeray's writings were seen as far more cynical and detached. He tended to see bad in all his characters and he had none of the simple, good characters common in Dickens (such as Oliver Twist). This perceived cynicism was for Thackeray more an attempt to inject a greater level of realism into his fiction and to acknowledge that even his heroes had faults. Dickens also took his commitment to literature very seriously whereas Thackeray appeared to take his talent and responsibilities much more lightly.

Thackeray and Dickens had one important trait in common: their snobbery. They had both had to work hard to achieve their positions as the foremost writers of the day, drawing themselves out of poverty. While Thackeray's penury had been largely self-inflicted, Dickens was the son of a bankrupt and he had not the distinguished family background of his rival. Although they rarely argued openly, both seemed to resent the other. Thackeray held the unassailably higher social position and appeared, at least to Dickens, to lord it over him, while Dickens was undeniably more popular. Two significant points of contention between the two authors were Thackeray's accidental confirmation of Dickens' affair with Ellen Ternan and Dickens taking Edmund Yates' side after Yates wrote several impolite things about Thackeray.

Many critics have praised Thackeray's writing for its lack of intrusive moralising, which was present in many of the other novels of the period. He used a realistic approach to recording events in a story offering neither complaint nor praise for a character's actions but instead allowing the reader to decide their own opinion of the case. Sometimes he compounded this by undercutting his narrator's own veracity. He was also notorious for making errors while writing his stories but how much was his own slackness and how many were deliberate is unclear, as he researched diligently for his historical novels. Charlotte Brontë was one of his admirers and dedicated to him the second edition of Jane Eyre.

Trivia

Thackeray's daughter was the first wife of Sir Leslie Stephen founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. With his second wife, Stephen was the father of Virginia Woolf.
William Makepeace Thackeray is the great great (great?) grandfather of British comedian Al Murray, who allegedly owns the rights to much correspondence between Thackeray and Dickens.

List of works

Catherine (1839)
A Shabby Genteel Story (1840)
The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. (1844), filmed as Barry Lyndon by Stanley Kubrick
The Book of Snobs (1848), which popularised that term
On Being Found Out
Vanity Fair (1848), featuring Becky Sharp
Pendennis (1848–1850)
Rebecca and Rowena (1850), a parody sequel of Ivanhoe
The Wolves and the Lamb
The History of Henry Esmond (1852)
The Newcomes (1855)
The Virginians (1857–1859)
The Adventures of Philip (1862)
Denis Duval (1864)

External links