Part 2

is known that at Lord Bagwig’s the Honourable Algie won from young Tom Rook the sum of thirty pounds; that with his friend Mr. Ringwood (who, with the invaluable assistance of his hostess, trapped the commercial traveller, Pogson, into the signing of bills for huge amounts at the house of Madame la Baronne de Florval-Delval, _née_ de Melval-Norval) he won heavily at the card-table from Mr. Vanjohn; and that with Blundell-Blundell (who was up at Oxford with Arthur Pendennis) he contrived to swindle Colonel Altamont. Then there is the paragraph in “_Galignani’s Messenger_,” quoted in the last chapter of “A Shabby Genteel Story”: “Married at the British Embassy, by Bishop Luxcombe, Andrew Fitch, Esq., to Marianne Caroline Matilda, widow of the late Antony Carrickfergus, of Lombard Street, and Gloucester Place, Esquire.... Miss Runt officiated as bridesmaid; and we remarked among the company Earl and Countess Crabs, General Sir Rice Curry, K.C.B., Colonel Wapshot, Sir Charles Swang, the Hon. Algernon Percy Deuceace and his lady, Count Punter, and others of the _élite_ of the fashionables now in Paris. The bridegroom was attended by his friend Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Esq., and the lady was given away by the Right Hon. the Earl of Crabs....” Had the Hon. Mrs. Deuceace forgiven her husband the blow in the _Bois_, with the account of which the adventure of Mr. Deuceace at Paris concluded? Was the younger couple reconciled to the elder? and if so, by what means? As the author does not solve the problem, each reader must do so for himself.

“Catherine,” a satire upon the “Newgate Novels,” naturally contains a collection of jail-birds; and these, of course, are not treated as they would have been by Ainsworth or Bulwer Lytton, but are shown in all their hideousness. “A Shabby Genteel Story” is a very fine piece of work, but its theme is unpleasant--the trapping into a mock marriage of trusting Cinderella--and the characters objectionable: Mr. and Mrs. Gann and the Misses Macarty; Brandon, Tufthunt, and Cinqbars. Fitch is the one honest person, save the heroine, and he is vulgar. Tufthunt is, perhaps, the worst man Thackeray ever depicted, for Sir Francis Clavering is weak rather than vile, and Brandon--the Dr. Firmin of “Philip”--suffers from a moral sense so perverted that he cannot realise his own weakness.

The rascal Fitz-Boodle is a humorist of the first water. His iniquity was the writing of those scandalous chronicles of his friends’ private lives, “Men’s Wives,” which tell of the scoundrel Walker, the blackguard Boroski, and the selfish, vain, and terribly vulgar Mrs. Dennis Haggarty. The stories of “Dorothea” and “Ottilia,” however, are agreeable enough. Even “Barry Lyndon,” one of the author’s masterpieces, is a disagreeable story. This, indeed, Thackeray fully realised. “You need not read it,” he said to his eldest daughter; “you would not like it.” The villain Barry, who never realises that he is not a hero, and his foolish wife, are only in part counterbalanced by Barry’s vulgar, loving mother, who goes to him in the day of his ruin and nurses him until he dies of _delirium tremens_ in the nineteenth year of his residence in the Fleet prison.

After “Barry Lyndon” appeared “Vanity Fair,” “Pendennis,” “The Newcomes,” “Esmond,” and “The Virginians,” which contain so vast a number of characters that it is impossible to treat of them one by one.

“Wherever shines the sun, you are sure to find Folly basking in it. Knavery is the shadow at Folly’s heels,” Thackeray wrote in the character sketch of “Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon.” It seems as if he had not quite grasped the fact that there were other things than folly and knavery to write about, and that a surfeit of rogues has an unpleasant after-effect. “Oh! for a little manly, honest. God-relying simplicity, cheerful, affected, and humble!” he had prayed in one of his earliest reviews; but it was only with “Vanity Fair” that he began to _give_ it.

It has been stated by more than one critic that Thackeray could not depict a good woman, and that those that were without blemish were also without any attractive qualities. Yet Helen Pendennis was a good woman, a good wife, and a good mother; and Laura Bell was clever as well as good; and certainly Ethel Newcome

was not a fool; nor Theo and Kitty Lambert other than good and true women. It seems strange that while his female readers can forgive him Becky Sharp, greatest of adventuresses, and can tolerate even Blanche Amory of “Mes Larmes,” they cannot pardon him Amelia Sedley. There are many other admirable sketches. Mrs. Peggy O’Dowd, lion-hearted, loyal and wise enough; the Dowager Countess of Southdown, Mrs. Bute Crawley, Miss Briggs, Miss Crawley, the lovable Catherine (the “Little Sister” of “Philip”); Miss Fotheringay and Fanny Bolton, who ensnared the affections of young Pendennis--what man has not met one or both of these?--Madame de Florac, the old lady with the beautiful face; the terrible Campaigner; Mrs. Warrington, who preferred to be known as Madame Esmond; Lady Castlewood, tender, loving, unreasoning, who can rise to the dignity of a great situation: “My daughter may receive presents from the Head of our House; my daughter may thankfully take kindnesses from her father’s, her mother’s, her brother’s dearest friend; and be grateful for one more benefit besides the thousand we owe him”; and, above all, irresistible, wayward Trix--that contradiction in words, an ambitious woman. So alluring is Beatrix that it is absurd to expect any man to think that she was ever all bad. Who knows but that if Harry Esmond had been a little less sensitive of his own demerits, and had let her see him as he was, they might have married and lived as happy as most couples? But her chance of redemption passed, and Beatrix became the Madame de Bernstein of “The Virginians.”

Thackeray’s men are no whit less successful. George Osborne and his purse-proud father; old Mr. Sedley and Jos; Sir Pitt Crawley--that most daring piece of character drawing--and his sons, Pitt and Rawdon; Pendennis and “Bluebeard,” as Lady Rockingham called George Warrington; little Bows; the valet, Morgan; Clive Newcome and his cousin, the little bounder, Sir Barnes; the Virginians, Harry and George; the inimitable Foker and the irrepressible Costigan. Thackeray drew gentlemen in a way that has never been excelled and rarely equalled. “They [the Kickleburys] are travelling with Mr. Bloundell, who was a gentleman once, and still retains about him some faint odour of that time of bloom.” “It is true poor Plantagenet [Gaunt] is only an idiot ... a zany, ... and yet you see he is a gentleman.” And the author makes the reader see it is so. In spite of the debaucheries and his behaviour to his family, the Marquis of Steyne is always _grand seigneur_. Esmond is a gentleman, and so is the intriguing Major Pendennis, Half-Pay; and Florac and Dobbin, and the little-worldly-wise Colonel Newcome. It has been said that the Colonel is too good for this world, too innocent, too ignorant, too transparently a child of nature, yet surely the noble-hearted man is human and true. Indeed, by this one character alone Thackeray could take his place among the masters. The whole gallery of his creations places him at the head of the

English novelists of the nineteenth century.

A paper dealing with Thackeray’s characters may not ignore the question of the “originals.” Great interest has always been taken in Thackeray’s originals. Much has been written about them which is worth reading; much also has been written that is misleading. The novelist was personal sometimes, but it was seldom that he modelled a character on a man or woman of his acquaintance. He told his daughters that he never wilfully copied anyone; and there is no reason to disbelieve his statement. The Marquis of Steyne was a sublimation of half a dozen characters, and so were Captain Shandon and Costigan; and Becky, Dobbin, Jos Sedley, and Colonel Newcome were wholly original--from the celebrity point of view at least. Many of the people in “Esmond” are portraits of historical personages--the Duke of Hamilton, Lord Mohun, and

Beatrix, for instance--but in the tales of modern life there are few characters that can be traced to any particular source. “You know you are only a piece of Amelia. My mother is another half; my poor little wife--_y’est pour beaucoup_,” the author wrote to Mrs. Brookfield. Edmund Yates always insisted that Wagg in “Pendennis” stood for Theodore Hook; that Lord Lonsdale was the original of Major Pendennis’s noble friend Lord Colchicum; and that Bunn was the model for Dolphin, the theatrical manager. It has been said that Mr. J. M. Evans, the publisher, was portrayed in “The Kickleburys on the Rhine”; that Mr. Flam in “Mrs. Perkins’s Ball” was a portrait of Abraham Hayward; that the Rev. W. H. Brookfield stood for the curate, Frank Whitestock; that Leigh Hunt was the original of Gandish in “The Newcomes”; and that the third Marquis of Hertford was the prototype of Lord Steyne. Mrs. Ritchie once saw the young lady who was supposed to have suggested Becky Sharp to her father; and Carlyle and his wife knew--and disliked--the original Blanche Amory.

Thackeray was not topographical in the

sense that Dickens was. Often the briefest mention of a street satisfied him. Yet somehow the places of the principal scenes of his novels linger in the memory. As a young man he studied at Weimar, and later, while serving his apprenticeship both to art and letters, he resided from time to time at Paris. Had he never visited Germany, perhaps Amelia and Jos and Dobbin would not have gone Am Rhein, and the chapter about Becky and the Pumpernickel students would never have been written. Many of his characters went to Paris, which had for him a strong personal interest. It was there he wooed and won his wife. It was at Paris that he wrote the autobiographical verse in the ballad which tells of the Bouillabaisse served at Terré’s Tavern in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs:

Ah me! how quick the days are flitting! I mind me of a time that’s gone, When here I’d sit, as now I’m sitting, In this same place--but not alone. A fair young form was nestled near me, A dear dear face looked fondly up, And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me, --There’s no one now to share my cup.

“I have been to the Hotel de la Terrasse, where Becky used to live, and shall pass by Captain Osborne’s lodgings,” he wrote from Paris to Mrs. Brookfield. “I believe perfectly in all these people, and feel quite an interest in the inn in which they lived.” It was at Brussels, in the Church of St. Gudule, the church in which he was christened, that Esmond met the inveterate intriguer, Father Holt, masquerading in a green uniform as a captain in the Bavarian Elector’s service; and in the convent cemetery knelt before the cross which marked the grave of Sœur Mary Madeleine, the unhappy Lady Castlewood, who was his mother. In that same city many years later the author of “Vanity Fair,” not claiming to rank among the military novelists, took his place with the non-combatants while the armies marched to the field of Waterloo, and portrayed many folk with anxious hearts awaiting news that must bring them happiness or misery. “No more firing was heard at Brussels--the pursuit rolled miles away. The darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.”

Thackeray was pre-eminently the novelist of the upper classes, and as a natural result the majority of his characters lived in the West End of London, chiefly in the area enclosed by Park Lane, Oxford Street, Bond Street, and Piccadilly, known as Mayfair. But no part of the metropolis escaped him. The Sedleys lived in Russell Square before they removed to St. Adelaide’s Villas, Anna Maria Road, West, “where the houses look like baby-houses; where the people looking out of the first floor windows must infallibly, as you think, sit with their feet in the parlours; where the shrubs in the little gardens in front bloom with a perennial display of little children’s pinafores, little red socks, caps, etc. (polyandria polygyria); whence you hear the sound of jingling spirits and women singing; whither of evenings you see city clerks plodding wearily....” Dr. Firmin practised in Old Parr Street; and Colonel Newcome and James Binnie, on their return from India, rented a house in Fitzroy Square. Bungay and Bacon carried on their business in Paternoster Row, and lived over their shops. It was to the sponging house in Cursitor Street that Rawdon

Crawley was taken after the ball at Gaunt House. Among others, Pendennis and Warrington lived in the Temple; while Colonel Newcome and his son, Dr. Firmin and Philip, Pendennis, young Rawdon--to name a few--were educated at the Charterhouse. “The Newcomes” immortalised that public school, and earned for the author the well-deserved title of “Carthusianus Carthusianorum.” The clubs and Bohemian resorts of the day were introduced into the various stories: the visit of Colonel Newcome to the “Cave of Harmony” is not easily forgotten. In Mayfair was situated Gaunt House, and in Curzon Street, near by, Becky and Rawdon practised the art of living on nothing a year. It was in the Curzon Street house that Becky is made to admire her husband, when he gives Lord Steyne the chastisement that _ruins_ her for life. “When I wrote that sentence,” Thackeray remarked subsequently, “I slapped my fist on the table and said, ‘That is a stroke of genius.’”

LEWIS MELVILLE.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

[Sidenote: =William Makepeace Thackeray=

_see frontispiece_]

[Sidenote: =Richmond Thackeray, Father of the Novelist=

_see page 3_]

[Sidenote: =Thackeray at the age of three, with his father and mother=

_see page 5_]

William Makepeace Thackeray, the only child of Richmond and Anne Thackeray, was born at Calcutta on July 18th, 1811. He was descended from Yorkshire yeomen who for several generations had been settled at Hampsthwaite, in the West Riding. In 1766 his grandfather, likewise named William Makepeace Thackeray, sailed for India at the age of seventeen, to enter the service of the East India Company. Under Cartier, the predecessor of Warren Hastings as Governor of Bengal, his promotion was very rapid. In 1776 he married Amelia Richmond, and the same year returned to England. His fourth son, Richmond Thackeray, father of the novelist, went to India in 1798 also in the service of the Company. In 1807 he became Secretary to the Board of Revenue at Calcutta, and undoubtedly possessed brilliant gifts for administration and public work. He married on October 13th, 1810, the reigning beauty of Calcutta, Anne, daughter of John Harman Becher. The painting by Chinnery, executed in 1814, gives a glimpse of the Thackerays at the time when their son had reached the age of three years. He is drawn perched on a large pile of books, with his arms round his mother’s neck, his father stiffly seated in a chair close by.

[Sidenote: =The Charterhouse in the time of Thackeray=

_see page 2_]

[Sidenote: =Thackeray, from the replica of a plaster cast by J. Devile=

_see page 4_]

Richmond Thackeray was at this time Collector of the district called the Twenty-four Pergunnahs. Two years later he died, and in 1817 his son was sent to England to be educated, and was placed in the charge of his aunt Mrs. Ritchie, who first sent him to a school in Hampshire, and then to the establishment of Dr. Turner at Chiswick. About 1818 Mrs. Richmond Thackeray married a second time, and in 1821 returned to England with her husband, Major Carmichael Smyth, and settled at Addiscombe. The following year Thackeray was sent to the Charterhouse, where he remained until 1828. This famous school figured largely in his writings as “Greyfriars.” It was here that Colonel Newcome and Clive, Pendennis, George Osborne, Philip Firmin, and Rawdon Crawley were educated. Charterhouse was the scene of Thackeray’s fight with Venables, in which he sustained the unfortunate accident to his nose that caused a permanent disfigurement in his otherwise handsome countenance. Evidence of this is noticeable in the plaster cast executed by J. Devile, which represents Thackeray at the age of eleven.

[Sidenote: =Larkbeare, the home of Thackeray’s mother=

_see page 2_]

In 1825 Thackeray’s mother removed to Larkbeare, a house situated a mile and a half from Ottery St. Mary, where her son used to spend his holidays. On leaving school he remained at Larkbeare until he took up his residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, in February 1829. The scenery surrounding his mother’s home is described in “Pendennis,” Ottery St. Mary, Exeter, and Sidmouth figuring respectively as Clavering St. Mary, Chatteris, and Baymouth.

While at Cambridge Thackeray contributed to a small paper called _The Snob, a literary and scientific journal not conducted by members of the University_. In it appeared “Timbuctoo,” a mock poem on the subject chosen for the Chancellor’s medal, won that year by Alfred Tennyson. In 1829 Thackeray spent the long vacation in Paris, and left college after the following Easter term.

Having inherited a fortune from his father, it was arranged that he should finish his education by travelling abroad for a couple of years. Accordingly he spent several months at Dresden, Rome, Paris, and Weimar, and finally resolved to study for the Bar on his return to England. In 1831 he entered the Middle Temple, and by November of that year was settled in chambers in Hare Court. On coming of age, however, he abandoned all pretence of following the profession he had chosen, and made his way to Paris, whence he wrote letters for _The National Standard_, and collected material for miscellaneous articles. Having speedily lost the greater part of his fortune, he turned his thoughts seriously to painting as a means of livelihood, and at this period frequented various studios, probably working in the atelier of Gros. Later he copied pictures assiduously at the Louvre, but though he delighted in the art he failed to acquire any great technical skill as a draughtsman.

[Sidenote: =Thackeray among the Fraserians=

_see page 6_]

In January 1835 Thackeray appeared as one of the Fraserians in a sketch drawn by Maclise and published in _Fraser’s Magazine_. This celebrated cartoon depicts the Fraser writers at one of the frequent banquets held at 212, Regent Street. It was in this company that Thackeray first gained distinction as an author.

[Sidenote: =Rue Neuve St. Augustin, Paris=

_see page 7_]

In 1836 he was appointed Paris correspondent of _The Constitutional_, and in August of the same year he married Miss Shawe. The wedding took place at the British Embassy, Bishop Luscombe, at that time chaplain, officiating at the ceremony. The newly married couple lived in apartments in the Rue Neuve St. Augustin, a street quite close by the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, where is situated the restaurant made famous in the “Ballad of Bouillabaisse.”

[Sidenote: =No. 18, Albion Street, Hyde Park=

_see page 10_]

[Sidenote: =No. 13, Great Coram Street, Brunswick Square=

_see page 11_]

_The Constitutional_ came to an end in 1837, and Thackeray returned to London and took up his abode for a time at 18, Albion Street, Hyde Park, where his mother was then living, and where he had stayed in 1834 when first contributing to _Fraser’s Magazine_. Anne Isabella Thackeray, his eldest daughter, was born at this house. A removal was made not long afterwards to No. 13, Great Coram Street, Brunswick Square, where the Thackerays lived for some years. During this period “The Paris Sketch-Book” was written, being published in 1840 by Macrone. Owing to the misfortune of his wife’s illness the author’s household became unsettled, and about 1843 the home at Great Coram Street was given up.

[Sidenote: =“Comic Tales and Sketches”=

_see page 13_]

Thackeray had published in 1841 a collection of “Comic Tales and Sketches, edited and illustrated by Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh,” with a preface dated “Paris, April 1st, 1841,” from which the following is an extract:

When there came to be a question of republishing the tales in these volumes, the three authors, Major Gahagan, Mr. Fitzroy Yellowplush, and myself, had a violent dispute upon the matter of editing; and at one time we talked of editing each other all round. The toss of a halfpenny, however, decided the question in my favour.... On the title-page the reader is presented with three accurate portraits of the authors of these volumes. They are supposed to be marching hand-in-hand, and are just on the very brink of Immortality.

[Sidenote: =Drawing from “Punch”: “Authors’ Miseries”=

_see page 12_]

During the same year “The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond” commenced to run its course in _Fraser’s Magazine_. _Punch_ had been started on July 17th, and Thackeray’s first contributions appeared the following June. In the course of his ten years’ connection with this periodical he contributed something like 500 sketches irrespective of letterpress. One of these, reproduced on page 12, is taken from a series entitled “Authors’ Miseries,” and represents Jerrold and the artist himself in a railway carriage listening to the other occupants discussing the members of the _Punch_ staff:--

_Old Gentleman, Miss Wiggets, Two Authors._

_Old Gentleman_: “I am so sorry to see you occupied, my dear Miss Wiggets, with that trivial paper, _Punch_. A railway is not a place, in my opinion, for jokes. I never joke--never.”

_Miss W._: “So I should think, sir.”

_Old Gentleman_: “And besides, are you aware who are the conductors of that paper, and that they are Chartists, Deists, Atheists, Anarchists, to a man? I have it from the best authority, that they meet together once a week in a tavern in St. Giles’s, where they concoct their infamous print. The chief part of their income is derived from threatening letters, which they send to the nobility and gentry. The principal writer is a returned convict. Two have been tried at the Old Bailey; and as for their artist--as for their artist....”

_Guard_: “Swin-dun! Station!”

[_Exeunt two Authors._

In the latter half of 1842 Thackeray made a tour in Ireland, and recorded his experiences in “The Irish Sketch-Book,” which made its appearance the following year.

[Sidenote: =The Strangers’ Room, Reform Club=

_see page 17_]