William Makepeace Thackeray

English novelist

• Born: July 18, 1811
• Birthplace: Calcutta, India
• Died: December 24, 1863
• Place of death: London, England

Thackeray wrote two fictional masterpieces, Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond, Esq., along with many other books and essays that rank him among the leading writers of mid-Victorian England.

Early Life

William Makepeace Thackeray (THAHK-er-ee) was the only child of Richmond Makepeace Thackeray and his wife, Anne Becher Thackeray. He was born in India, where his English father worked for the East India Company. When William was four, his father died, leaving an estate worth about seventeen thousand pounds—an immense sum in the early nineteenth century. In December, 1816, William was sent back to England for schooling, while his mother remained in India to marry her first love, Captain Henry Carmichael-Smyth. William was not reunited with his mother until July, 1820.

In January, 1822, Thackeray entered London’s Charterhouse School, where he remained for six years before matriculating at Trinity College, Cambridge in February, 1829. Sixteen months later, he left Cambridge without a degree but with gambling debts amounting to fifteen hundred pounds. Thackeray’s first publications were several poems that appeared the Western Luminary, a Devon newspaper, in 1828. During his brief tenure at the university he helped start a literary magazine called The Snob. After it collapsed, he contributed to the Gownsman.

Seeking a career after leaving Cambridge, Thackeray entered the Middle Temple (London) in June, 1831, to study law but left the following year, once again without a degree. (He was called to the bar in 1848 but never practiced law.) In May, 1833, he used some of his inheritance to buy the National Standard and Journal of Literature, Science, Music, Theatricals, and the Fine Arts, to which he contributed as Paris correspondent. Bank failures in India in late 1833 essentially wiped out his inheritance from his father and left him in serious need of earning a living for the first time. He returned to London in the hope of saving his recently acquired magazine, but it failed in February, 1834.

Life’s Work

With his inheritance mostly gone and his magazine dead, the twenty-three-year-old Thackeray returned to Paris, where he hoped to become an artist. There he married seventeen-year-old Isabella Shawe on August 20, 1836. His wife’s mother would later serve as the model for many an unpleasant mother-in-law in Thackeray’s fiction. To support his wife, Thackeray began writing for the Constitutional and Public Ledger. After it failed in July, 1837, he turned to other magazines and wrote about ninety pieces for periodicals through the end of 1840. During the period between January, 1841, and January, 1847, he was even more prolific, producing 386 magazine articles and three books.

Among Thackeray’s first books was his first novel, The Luck of Barry Lyndon , which was serialized in Fraser’s Magazine in 1844; it was not well received and did not appear in book form until 1852-1853. Barry Lyndon, as the book is better known, is modeled on the eighteenth century English author Henry Fielding’s The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild (1743) and satirizes both the vogue for novels about rogues and a society that admired success above morality. During that period, Thackeray was also reviewing books for the Morning Chronicle and writing both fictional and nonfiction pieces for Fraser’s Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, and Punch.

Thackeray’s literary apprenticeship ended in January, 1847, with the beginning of the serialization of Vanity Fair , which was published in book form the following year with Thackeray’s own illustrations. In his journalism Thackeray satirized materialism and pretension, which are the subjects of this novel as well. Set in England during the Napoleonic era, Vanity Fair offers a detailed portrait of the age; its subtitle in serialization was “Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society.” The work presents a set of unforgettable if not necessarily likable characters; in book form it bore the subtitle, “A Novel Without a Hero.” Again imitating Henry Fielding, Thackeray as narrator inserts sardonic comments in the course of his work.

Thackeray’s next novel introduced Arthur Pendennis, the eponymous hero modeled on the author. Pendennis (1848-1850) presents a critical portrait of contemporary England as its protagonist gains insights and maturity. As the author’s alter ego, Pendennis would also serve as narrator for The Newcomes (1853-1855), Thackeray’s most popular novel during his lifetime, and The Adventures of Philip (1861-1862). Although the success of Vanity Fair ended Thackeray’s pressing financial needs, over the next four years he wrote nearly 250 pieces for various magazines. Although most critics and readers regard Vanity Fair as Thackeray’s greatest achievement, Henry Esmond, Esq . (1852) is a close rival and was more highly regarded by his contemporaries.

Thackeray was an admirer of the eighteenth century, and in 1851 he began lecturing on the comic writers of the period. His lectures were collected in The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853), and a second set of lectures about the eighteenth century appeared as The Four Georges: Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court and Town Life (1860). Henry Esmond Esq. , set in the reign of Queen Anne (1701-1714), might share that subtitle, offering a lively picture of the age. The first edition was printed in eighteenth century Caslon typeface and incorporated some eighteenth century spellings. Esmond retires to Virginia at the end of this work; The Virginians (1857-1859), set during the American Revolution, was a less successful sequel.

When the Cornhill Magazine began in January, 1860, Thackeray became its first editor. In that capacity, he attracted to the magazine the leading writers of the day, including Anthony Trollope and poet laureateAlfred, Lord Tennyson. He also used that magazine to serialize his own final fictional works, Lovel the Widower (1860), The Adventures of Philip , and the unfinished Denis Duval (1863). Only the last of these, set in late eighteenth century England, presents Thackeray at his best. At the same time he was writing occasional essays for the magazine, “The Roundabout Papers,” which are replete with wit and astute observation.

In 1860, Thackeray bought a Queen Anne-style house at 2 Palace Green, Kensington, London. It was a fitting choice, given his admiration of the eighteenth century and its writers. There he died of a stroke on December 24, 1863. He was buried in London’s Kensal Green cemetery, and his bust stands in Poet’s Corner in London’s Westminster Abbey.

Significance

William Makepeace Thackeray’s reputation rests primarily on two novels, Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond, Esq. which rival the best works of his contemporaries Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope. In those two book he succeeded in achieving his goal of producing realistic fiction that showed the form and pressure of the era and at the same time pointed a moral. In his lecture on Richard Steele, he declared:

Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life of the time; of the manners, of the movement, the dress, the pleasures, the laughter, the ridicules of society—the old times live again, and I travel in the old country of England.

The same may be said of Thackeray’s work. As a youth he enjoyed eighteenth century British authors as well as the historical fiction of the early nineteenth century Sir Walter Scott. He even wrote a sequel to Ivanhoe (1819): Rebecca and Rowena (1850). It is not coincidental that both of his best novels are historical fiction.

In his own day, Thackeray was regarded primarily as a satirist, and Vanity Fair’s social commentary applies as much to the Victorian age in which it was written as to the Napoleonic age in which it is set. Much of Thackeray’s other writing has not worn as well, focusing as it does on issues of his day. However, some of his other work, such as the sketches collected in The Book of Snobs (1848) can still amuse. That particular book not only provides astute judgments of his contemporaries but also contains sound observations about the role of the writer and the function of literature. Even in his own day Thackeray did not enjoy the same popularity as his contemporary Charles Dickens. When Dickens died, his estate was estimated at something under eighty thousand pounds—four times that of Thackeray’s estate. Moreover, Thackeray’s reputation has not worn as well as that of Dickens or George Eliot (who regarded him as the leading writer of the time). Nevertheless, his best writing rivals that of any of his contemporaries.

Thackeray’s Novels

1839-1840

• Catherine: A Story (as Ikey Solomons, Jr.)

1841

• The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond (published as The Great Hoggarty Diamond in 1848)

1844

• The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century

1847-1848

• Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero

1848-1850

• The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy

1850

• Rebecca and Rowena: A Romance upon Romance (as M. A. Titmarsh)

1852

• The History of Henry Esmond, Esquire, a Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Ann

1853-1855

• The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family

1857-1859

• The Virginians: A Tale of the Last Century

1860

• Lovel the Widower

1861-1862

• The Adventures of Philip on His Way Through the World, Shewing Who Robbed Him, Who Helped Him, and Who Passed Him By

1864

• Denis Duval

Bibliography

Harden, Edgar F. Thackeray the Writer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998-2000. 2 vols. A study of Thackeray’s literary career, beginning in 1833, with individual chapters devoted to each of the major novels. Written for the general reader.

Shillingsburg, Peter L. Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Examines Thackeray’s relationships with his various publishers in Great Britain and America, with financial and bibliographic information about his writings.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. William Makepeace Thackeray: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Not a full-fledged biography but a good introduction that relates the writings of Thackeray to his life.

Taylor, D. J. Thackeray. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. Drawing on Thackeray’s letters, other contemporary documents, and subsequent scholarship, Taylor provides an admiring and detailed account of the author’s life.

Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, and Contents, Criticism. Edited by Peter Shillingsburg. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Authoritative edition of Thackeray’s most widely read novel that offers extensive annotations and many related writings that illuminate Thackeray’s life and authorship.