by Gillian Gill
But then, almost despite himself, Leslie Stephen found himself married to a woman who could offer him a lot more than “five hundred pounds a year.” During the eight years of his marriage to Minny Thackeray, Leslie enjoyed a level of domestic comfort and social prominence that he had never before known. He allowed his capable and provident wife the daily management of what was now their joint fortune and then, when she died, he assumed control as well as ownership of Minny’s estate. This included real estate, securities, best-seller manuscripts, and many objets de vertu, as William Thackeray had been a discerning and keen collector. Leslie Stephen sincerely grieved for his wife, but he had always aspired to live as a “gentleman,” by which he meant a man not obliged to work for money, and now a gentleman was what he found himself to be. With the fortune he had inherited from Minny Thackeray, Leslie Stephen was at last able to pursue his scholarly interests in peace and write his book on moral philosophy.
After a few years as a widower, Leslie Stephen found himself more and more attracted to his friend and neighbor Julia Jackson Duckworth. Some ten years earlier, as an impecunious bachelor, Leslie had seen in Julia Jackson his ideal woman and had stood back in the shadows when Herbert Duckworth swept her off her feet. As the daughter of an independently wealthy woman and the wife and widow of a wealthy man, Julia had been accustomed to an affluent lifestyle, and she would lose her widow’s income and the financial support of the Duckworths if she remarried. All the same, Leslie Stephen thought he might have a chance with Julia. Having inherited property from his first wife, he was now a “gentleman” like Herbert Duckworth. And as an aspiring man of letters he could benefit from the valuable literary network that Minny’s famous father, William Makepeace Thackeray, had built up.
George Smith, an influential figure in English literary circles, had been not only William Makepeace Thackeray’s publisher but probably his best friend. Smith & Elder published most of Thackeray’s novels, and as publisher and editor the two men had launched the highly regarded and financially successful literary magazine Cornhill. Smith was deeply attached to the Thackeray daughters, Anny and Minny, and after their father’s tragically sudden and early death he determined to do everything he could for them. When Minny married Leslie Stephen, Smith knew that Stephen would prefer not to live on this wife’s fortune. He recognized that Stephen was a proud and stubborn man, still fighting to make his way in the literary world. And so, in a characteristic act of thoughtfulness and generosity, George Smith offered Leslie Stephen the editorship of Cornhill at five hundred pounds a year. That was a salary to make Stephen’s competitors salivate, and it proved a poor investment for Smith & Elder. Stephen worked hard as an editor, but Cornhill steadily lost subscribers during his tenure. When Stephen suffered a nervous breakdown from stress, he was eased out.
Undeterred by the Cornhill debacle, some years later, when the widowed Leslie Stephen was married to Julia Duckworth, George Smith offered him the editorship of Smith & Elder’s latest venture, the Dictionary of National Biography, again at a generous salary. The DNB was a high-prestige publication that in the end cost George Smith seventy thousand pounds, some twenty thousand pounds more than he had estimated, but it was the making of Leslie Stephen. As his biographer Noel Annan puts it, the DNB was “Stephen’s most important bequest to posterity.” Lord Rosebery, one of England’s prime ministers, declared it “the monumental literary work of Her Majesty’s reign.” If Leslie Stephen today is remembered in literary history as anything more than Virginia Woolf’s father, it is as the first editor of the DNB.
Thanks to the generosity of George Smith, Leslie Stephen gained professional status, the veneration of young male historians, the adoration of his wife, Julia, a knighthood, and, for the first ten years or so of his second marriage before he collapsed again, a regular, guaranteed salary. Editing the DNB put the meat and potatoes and bread and butter on the table of the Stephen family during Virginia Woolf’s childhood. The inheritance from Minny Thackeray provided the gravy and the jam.
Could Leslie and Julia Stephen have managed a private school education for their Stephen sons without his salary as editor of the DNB? Probably not. If he had not had the financial cushion of Minny’s money, would frugal Leslie, while on a walking tour in Cornwall, have felt able, on impulse, to please Julia and the girls by arranging to buy the lease on Talland House? I wonder. And without the Thackeray connection, would there even have been a Stephen family? Would Julia Duckworth have agreed to marry Leslie Stephen if he had been not only the poor, awkward, ill-clad intellectual she had known as a teenager, but also a widower saddled with a child? If his first wife had not been Julia’s Kensington neighbor, the affluent and stylish Minny Thackeray, would Leslie Stephen have gotten within hailing distance of her?
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Along with money and connections, Minny Thackeray bequeathed one more important thing to her husband, Leslie, and to the woman who would be his second wife, her dear friend Julia Duckworth. That bequest was her sister Anne Thackeray. Anne lived with Leslie and Minny for much of their married life and moved back in with Leslie after Minny’s death. She met Julia Jackson when Julia was a young teenager, and the two remained lifelong friends. In the first days after Julia’s death, Anne was the only visitor Leslie would see, and during Leslie’s final illness she visited him often. Virginia Woolf wrote, after Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s own death, “I feel as if we owed more than we can ever say to Aunt Anny for what she was to mother and father as well as what she was to us. I think they loved her better than anyone.”
And, for the aspiring writer Virginia Woolf, Anne Thackeray Ritchie was not just a marvelous auntie. She was also a muse or what we might now label a role model. There, sitting across the tea table at Hyde Park Gate, was a woman like the White Queen in Alice—blinking and squinting and dripping butter on her skirt, yet a witness to Victorian greatness and possessed of a clear memory of everything she had experienced from the age of two. Anne remembered sitting on the knee of Dickens, walking the sands near Farringford with Tennyson, and spending weeks at Casa Guidi with the Brownings. Franz Liszt (on piano) and Joseph Joachim (on violin) had played for her. Charlotte Brontë had sat silently opposite her at dinner. She had risked social opprobrium by exchanging cards and visits with George Eliot in England.
But Anne Thackeray Ritchie was not just a woman who had known famous people. She was a professional writer, someone who produced a steady stream of books, had a small but faithful readership, and who looked anxiously every quarter for her editor’s check to come in the mail. Anne Thackeray Ritchie was living proof that, with enough talent, enough grit, and the right connections, a woman could make it in the misogynistic world of English publishing—and also be a good wife, a wise mother, and a loyal friend.
And deep in the Thackeray past was a story of the tragic madness of Anne’s mother, Isabella Shawe Thackeray, a story that never made it into the carefully scoured pages of Leslie Stephen’s DNB but that Virginia Woolf as a girl may have picked up from snatches of conversation between her mother and Anne. Though not a drop of Thackeray blood ran in Woolf’s veins, that history of insanity would have its baleful influence on Virginia Woolf. It lived on, at a sanitized distance, in the person of Laura Makepeace Stephen, Virginia’s half-sister, the “real” niece whom Anne Thackeray Ritchie loved so much, as we shall see in Chapter 7, and could do so very little to protect.
Virginia Woolf read all of her Aunt Anny’s large literary output. More important, the essays, reviews, and novels of Anne’s father, William Makepeace Thackeray, were foundational texts in Woolf’s literary education. Along with the novels of Walter Scott, Thackeray’s works were read aloud to her by her father when she was a girl, and she in turn would read them aloud as her sister Vanessa painted or sewed. “When I read Dickens and Thackeray,” Vanessa Bell would later recall, “it is Virginia’s voice that I hear.” A quote from Thackeray, inscribed on a piece of chocolate-colored card, hung in the hallway at 22 Hyde Park Gate. As Woolf reca
lled, it began: “What is it to be a gentleman? It is to be tender to women, chivalrous to servants . . .”
As a writer specializing in a mixture of fiction, commentary on contemporary mores, and English social history, Thackeray spoke to Woolf, so directly perhaps that, in a kind female Oedipal rebellion, she wrote almost nothing about him. He was in certain ways a throwback to the England of Sterne and Addison, Defoe and Fielding, that Woolf adored and did write about, but he was also an eminent literary Victorian. Quotations like the one in the Stephen family’s hall made it hard for Woolf and her generation of Edwardian writers to get past the life of bland conventionality and professional plaudits created for Thackeray postmortem by his DNB editor son-in-law Leslie Stephen. As the accredited and lauded chief literary biographer of his day, Leslie Stephen followed a policy of systematic whitewashing and bowdlerization. In all literature, he shied away from any kind of “indecency” and considered any revelation of personal weakness in his subject to be a betrayal of a biographer’s trust.
In recent years, biographers like John Aplin and Henrietta Garnett (Virginia Woolf’s great-niece) have begun the task of stripping off the whitewash and revealing William Makepeace Thackeray as he really was—a witty, sensual, epicurean artist unhappily marooned in Albertian England. Today we can glimpse how much—like his contemporaries Dickens and George Eliot—Thackeray suffered the tyrannies, hypocrisies, and repressions of the Victorian era. Like all Oedipal and Electral struggles against the writers and culture of the parental generation, Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury was the continuation as well as the denial of the high Victorian era. To understand the Bloomsbury society that Virginia Woolf did so much to create, we need to delve back into literary history and tell the stories of her surrogate grandfather, William Makepeace Thackeray; his wife, Isabella; his older daughter, Anne, the sibyl of Kensington; his younger daughter, Minny; and his granddaughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen.
5
William and Isabella
LESLIE STEPHEN, in his black moods, called himself a second-class mind, and he was right. His first wife’s father, William Makepeace Thackeray, on the other hand, was first rate in every way that mattered in a man except looks—a talented artist, a good man of business, a London hostess’s favorite guest, a literary man’s best friend, a redoubtable clubman and bon vivant, a writer of genius, and, on top of it all, a devoted son, loyal husband, and attentive father. Though he never sold as many copies as his friend Dickens, Thackeray in his lifetime was widely adjudged to be the greatest living writer of English prose.
For the English novel, the middle decades of the nineteenth century are a golden age when—to name only some of the most famous—men like Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and William Wilkie Collins and women like George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë churned out masterpieces that won glowing reviews, sold like hotcakes, and are still popular today as books, movies, and television series. But while enjoying the praise of their fellow citizens and earning serious money, the Victorian novelists lived at a time when their creative canvas was severely limited by popular taste, and their private lives were subject to invasive scrutiny and public censure. The urbane realism of Henry Fielding in Tom Jones and the philosophical meandering of Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy were long gone, and an English writer or artist or composer eager to find la vie de Bohème of Balzac, Flaubert, and George Sand had to cross the Channel and speak French.
When Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s first and greatest success, was coming out in serial form in 1848–49, England was schizophrenic about sexual morality. Prince Albert was at the height of his power and influence, busily purging the Court of St. James of lustful aristocrats and with his wife, Victoria, setting a standard to all England of solid, monogamous, patriarchal, big-family, low-church Christian values—all the things Bloomsbury circa 1910 would mock and desecrate. The Methodists in Thackeray’s day were evangelizing the working class and advocating a new puritanism. There was a brisk market in anti-masturbatory devices for young men, and middle-class girls caught touching their genitalia were whipped, put to bed with their hands bound, and even subjected to cruel restraints of leather and iron. Scientists preached the gospel of female frigidity and female fragility. Doctors prospered from an epidemic of hysteria—“womb sickness”—as affluent women opted for the invalid couch over the double bed and flocked to expensive spa hotels that catered to their social and even sexual needs. Prostitution was heavily regulated by the British government, regularly condemned in the press, and minutely analyzed and documented in governmental white papers, yet London had more brothels per square mile than any other capital city, and sadomasochism was known in reportedly libertine France as le vice anglais. Homosexuality was threatened by severe punishment under the law and anathematized from the pulpit but, like the elephant in the room that no one cares to notice, was accepted as an inescapable but unavowable fact of life by polite society, the English press, and the Metropolitan Police.
To any serious observer, these sexual facts on the ground were key features of Victorian psychological and social life, yet they were largely taboo topics for English fiction writers, who were expected to be spotless exemplars of Victorian morality. For Thackeray, even more than for his great rivals Charles Dickens and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), the increasing puritanism of contemporary English society was not just a professional straitjacket but a source of intense personal stress. Thackeray died at fifty-three, Dickens at fifty-eight, and George Eliot at sixty-one.
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William Makepeace Thackeray came from money, and, as for so many of the characters in our story, that money came out of India. Born in Calcutta (the colonial name for Kolkata) in 1811, William was the only child of an ill-suited couple, Anne Becher Thackeray, a beauty and a devout Calvinist, and Richmond Thackeray, an urbane, pleasure-loving man. Richmond Thackeray and his father before him had made a large fortune by assuring the East India Company a regular supply of elephants.
On his magnificent estate, Richmond Thackeray maintained an Indian mistress to whom he was much attached and who bore him at least one child, a daughter, Sarah (Sarah Thackeray Blechynden), whom he remembered lovingly in his will. Richmond’s marriage to Anne Becher seems on his side to have been part caprice, part convention: English men in India were expected to acquire English wives and needed legitimate heirs. On her part, marriage was the only way Anne could escape her mother.
At only fifteen Anne Becher had fallen madly in love with a young officer, Henry Carmichael-Smyth. When Anne Becher was told, by her very respectable grandmother, that her soldier love, Henry, had died in the wars against Napoleon, Anne wept and believed she had been told the truth. When Anne’s very disreputable mother (the wife of two, possibly three, men in India) dragged Anne off to Calcutta to find a husband, the girl agreed to marry Richmond Thackeray, a wealthy man old enough to be her father. Soon after her marriage, things came close to tragedy for Anne, still a teenager, when she went into labor with her first child.
It was the monsoon season, a storm broke out, and her husband, Richmond, was away from home. As the storm became a hurricane, all the servants ran out of the house in fear, and Anne took refuge in a tiny inner room and, after many hours, gave birth to her son, William Makepeace Thackeray, alone and without assistance. William had an unusually large head, and as a result of that tortured birth, Anne was never able to have another child. Adultery, dark-skinned mistresses, difficult childbirths—subjects like these were pushed to the extreme edges of the novels of Dickens and Thackeray, though not, let it be noted, from the novels of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell or the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Sometime after the birth of Anne’s son, who should appear out of the blue at a party in Calcutta but Henry Carmichael-Smyth, the young officer Anne had loved and who had reportedly been killed on some distant battlefield in Europe. Henry was still passionately in love with Anne, despite what seemed to him h
er betrayal of their love, and the pair were joyfully reunited. It is a story worthy of Kipling, and one that Anne Becher Thackeray’s writer granddaughter, also called Anne, would delight in hearing and telling. Richmond Thackeray died of an infectious disease when his son, William, was four, and Anne sent the boy back to England. After observing the accepted period of mourning, Anne married Henry Carmichael-Smyth, and the two returned to England, where mother and son were rapturously reunited. Anne Thackeray Carmichael-Smyth gave her only child the unwavering love and attention that, as Freud would later contend, propel boys toward achievement. As for Henry Carmichael-Smyth, like the noble Dobbin in Vanity Fair, he loved his wife’s son as his own.
A large, plain, indolent, awkward boy of great charm and subtle mind, who loved to draw and was very happy at home in the country doing not very much, William at age ten was, like most boys of his class, sent away to boarding school. Thackeray would later recall his years at Charterhouse as an education in intellectual sterility and physical pain. The two separate disfiguring breaks in Thackeray’s nose, so obvious in photographs, were lasting marks of the fights he was forced into at his exclusive school.
Though an indifferent student of the Greek and Latin that constituted virtually the whole curriculum at school and university in England, William still gained admittance to Trinity College, Cambridge. His father, after all, and many Thackeray relatives were old Cantabrigians. From the father he never really knew, William inherited an appetite for lovely, capricious women and a discriminating palate for beautiful things, which his doting mother and stepfather gave him pretty much free rein to indulge as an undergraduate. Nonetheless, when Thackeray came into the large fortune left him by his father, he promptly left the university. His close Trinity friends Alfred Tennyson and Richard Monckton Milnes had already been obliged to leave Trinity without a degree when their fathers could no longer pay the bill, and they were now embarking, in very different ways, on a literary career. Thackeray was eager to follow their example, confident that in London or in Paris, where he was almost equally at home, he could find success.