by Gillian Gill
Within a couple of years, Thackeray had run through almost all of his inheritance in the cafés, alehouses, theaters, gambling dens, and brothels that proliferated in both great capital cities. He then proceeded to waste most of his parents’ savings too on some bad Indian bank investments and an ill-conceived radical newspaper. By the age of twenty-five he was essentially bankrupt and decided what he needed was a wife and children to steady him. There was a deeply romantic and familial side to Thackeray’s character, rooted perhaps in the strange love story of his mother and Henry Carmichael-Smyth, and while eyeing the stunningly beautiful Sophia and Virginia Pattle and deciding regretfully they would never eye him, William went in hot pursuit of a young Irish woman, Isabella Gethin Shawe.
No one could understand why William Thackeray was so determined to marry eighteen-year-old Isabella Shawe. She had no money and, indeed, nothing to recommend her aside from a sweet face and a light touch on the clavichord. Very shy, very innocent, and very ignorant, Miss Shawe simply could not hold a candle to William’s mother—tall, imposing, brilliant, still exceptionally beautiful in her forties and now the uncrowned queen of the tiny self-absorbed Francophobic Anglo-Indian community in Paris. Like the Carmichael-Smyths, the Shawes had moved to Paris because it was cheap and out of the reach of English debtor law. The impoverished widow of an officer in the Indian army, Isabella’s mother, Mrs. Shawe, had been forced to rent out Doneraile Court, her family estate in County Cork, and she was depending upon her older daughter, Isabella, to marry money. Young Thackeray, with all his debts and his hazy-crazy plans to be a writer and illustrator, was exactly the kind of son-in-law she did not want.
Given Mrs. Shawe’s strong opposition and the tyrannical hold she had over her daughters, Isabella and Jane, the courtship went nowhere for a while. A slip of a girl who barely reached the shoulder of her tall, bulky suitor, Isabella was initially intimidated by the idea of becoming Mrs. William Thackeray. She once asked William whether she would still be able to sleep with her sister if she married him. But William wooed with passion and poetry and funny drawings, and as the two were of age, they were married at the British embassy in Paris.
Sex proved after all not a problem between Isabella and William—earlier sowing of wild oats can have its pluses for a bridegroom—and in the first weeks both were happy to spend the day in bed. When money problems became too pressing to ignore, William and Isabella moved to rented accommodation in London, where he could be close to the publishing industry. Isabella proved to have no taste or talent for housekeeping, so the couple lived in bohemian squalor as well as constant fear of the bailiffs. Nonetheless, William was beginning to make a name for himself as a writer and cartoonist, and Isabella played her piano in the middle of the domestic chaos and joyfully felt her baby kick inside. William Makepeace Thackeray would remember those first years of marriage as the happiest in his life, which tells us something about the unhappiness he felt in the years of his fame.
When Isabella went into labor with her first child, she was at first attended by her husband’s mother, who, alongside her Calvinism, had become a devout believer in homeopathy. Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth had managed to birth her son, William, in India without any assistance, and she saw no reason why, with her help, her daughter-in-law should not produce a healthy child. But Isabella was little and her husband was a big man with a very big head, and the baby got stuck in the birth canal. Mother and daughter might both have died if William had not arrived on the scene, sized up the problem, and gone out to find a doctor with forceps. The Thackerays called their daughter Anne Isabella, and they adored and spoiled her. As a toddler, little Anny was chubby and plain of face but precocious and affectionate and voluble, the image of her brilliant, exuberant father.
But even as Thackeray was finding a public and seeing his way out of debt, things began to go very wrong at home. Isabella became pregnant almost immediately after her difficult first delivery, and when Jane, the Thackerays’ second child, died before her first birthday, Isabella plunged into grief and depression. She was almost immediately pregnant again, however, and in 1840, a third daughter, Harriet, to be known thereafter as Minny, was born many weeks premature. Swaddled in cotton wool according to the medical practice of the time, Minny seemed all too likely to follow baby sister Jane to the cemetery. She survived, thanks to Jessie Brodie, the young Scots woman who devotedly served the Thackerays as both nurse to the infants and maid of all work. For the rest of her life, Minny Thackeray would be seen as a fragile being, forever wrapped in metaphorical cotton wool by her adoring father and older sister.
By this time, William had set indolence aside as a single man’s luxury and put his broad shoulder to the journalistic wheel. He was publishing a steady stream of articles, satirical essays, and travelogues, many of them illustrated with his own drawings, but still he had more debt than income. Since even a palatable Irish stew was beyond Isabella, William felt justified in fleeing domestic chaos, but his increasingly frequent absences made his wife only more depressed and more angry. Things became explosive between the two in 1839, when, claiming that he had to meet an urgent magazine deadline, William went off to Belgium. According to Henrietta Garnett, who has combed the Thackeray family archive, his former French mistress was waiting for him there. William at this point was about twenty-eight, Isabella about twenty-one.
The result of this Belgian escapade was disastrous. On his return to London, William found Isabella alternately raving and catatonic. A visit to the seashore being seen at this time as a sovereign remedy, Thackeray duly removed his wife, almost-three-year-old Anny, and baby Minny to Margate, a pleasant holiday resort on the south coast of Kent made famous by the painter J.M.W. Turner. Walking along Margate beach one day, Isabella suddenly rushed into the waves with little Anny and pushed her down under. Suddenly recalled to her senses, the mother pulled her terrified, sputtering child out of the sea, and walked back to the sand. Astonishingly precocious, Anne Thackeray had a clear memory of that day but never blamed her mother for what had happened.
Unable to manage a wife who was raving and threatening to harm her children, Thackeray borrowed more money to take his family to Ireland. The Shawe women were back at Doneraile Court, and Thackeray assumed that his mother-in-law would wish to take charge of her daughter and infant granddaughters. At sea, the nightmare only got worse. Somehow, somewhere in the strait between Southampton and the Isle of Wight, soon after the Irish ferry had left port, Isabella Thackeray managed to throw herself out the window of the privy into the sea. As William wrote in anguish to his parents in Paris the next day, for some twenty minutes no one on board missed Isabella. But then she was spotted, floating on her back and calmly paddling with her hands, and the crew was able to fish her out. After this, William never left Isabella’s side during the day, and before he fell asleep at night, he attached to his wrist a cord that was also wrapped around her waist.
Once in Ireland, the sad little family trekked to the mother’s childhood home and were obliged to take lodgings nearby, since Mrs. Shawe would not receive them at Doneraile Court. In a fury that poor Thackeray was beginning to recognize, his mother-in-law hurled imprecations, blaming him for her daughter’s condition and barely deigning to look at her granddaughters. Madness, Thackeray was discovering to his cost, ran in the Gethin Shawe family.
Driven away by his mother-in-law, William took his family back over the Irish Sea, managed to borrow more money in London, and then set off across the English Channel to Paris, where the help of his parents could be counted on. Anne Thackeray Ritchie retained a clear memory of the long coach journey at night from the French coast to Paris. An energetic and voluble three-year-old, she kept talking and fidgeting. Fearing Anny would wake her troubled mother and fractious baby sister, William lost patience. He told little Anny that, if she did not stop being naughty, he would snuff out the lantern and leave her in the dark. It was a terrible lesson in obedience, if understandable, given the situation. From this point on, Anne Tha
ckeray determined that, if she could only be by her father’s side and be sure of his love, she would strive to please him and be the perfect daughter.
Over the next months, William took his wife to a series of notable sanatoriums in Europe, often taking Anny to visit her mother in the institution, hoping that the madness was temporary and that love for him and her child could bring Isabella back. Nothing worked. The mental disease specialists of the day proved unable to do anything for Mrs. Thackeray and declared her incurably insane. William was now faced with a terrible choice. As long as Isabella lived—and her leap into the sea had proved that her body was strong if her mind was deranged—William under English law could not get a divorce. The easy thing to do would have been to consign Isabella to the asylum at Chaillot just outside Paris, return to London, and ask his parents to keep an eye on his wife. No one would have blamed Thackeray for doing this. He needed to earn money for his family, and Chaillot had an excellent reputation in the medical world.
But William saw with his own eyes how dirty and ragged Isabella became within weeks of being institutionalized. It seemed all too likely that her life would be made wretched and even cut short if she was left in an asylum. Though he had renounced the Protestant orthodoxy of his mother, William Thackeray had a strong faith in God and followed a code of ethics. He retained a clear and present memory of Isabella as a lovely young woman, singing and dancing about the house with her baby, so he brought her back to England, where he could watch over her. William established Isabella in a home of her own, under the care of an English couple who proved loving and capable.
For a time, William confided his daughters to the care of his mother and stepfather in France, returned to London, and buckled down to writing. The lives of his wife and his young daughters, as well as the financial well-being of his parents, depended on his finding success as a novelist and journalist. He wrote in spurts, putting himself under immense deadline pressure, and over the next twenty-five years he produced a flood of novels, essays, and articles, and made a great deal of money. He coped with the stresses of his life by eating too much and drinking even more.
But even as he found success with the reading public, Thackeray was faced with difficult decisions as a father and as a man. He was a pleasure-loving, cosmopolitan man who liked to have sex with women and loved the company of handsome, intelligent people of both sexes. He was, in fact, very like his father, Richmond Thackeray, but he found himself in an increasingly puritanical England, not in easygoing India circa 1800. After sampling the great smorgasbord of sexual delicacies laid out for men in London and Paris, William had in his mid-twenties decided in favor of loving conjugal sex—with tragic results. Now, barely thirty, he found himself tied to a wife who was incapable of satisfying his needs while he competed in a literary market that expected its authors, male and female, to lead blameless lives.
Internationally, the best money in literature came from fiction, but the large and lucrative English market for novels included a higher percentage of women than in any other country except the United States. To succeed in fiction writing circa 1845, you had to cater to the tastes and understand the values of a wide range of female readers. There were the aristocratic women who aspired to be fashionable in literature as well as hats. There were the wives and daughters of the affluent bourgeoisie who had too much time on their hands. There was the small but growing cadre of educated women who were hammering at the doors of the great universities and the learned professions. There was the large group of newly literate, curious, and ambitious factory girls and lady’s maids who had access to books and magazines through their employers and their local libraries. All these female readers embraced, or claimed to embrace, the new doctrine on heterosexual morality promulgated by Prince Albert and his queen wife.
If he had left his two daughters permanently in the care of his mother, William could probably have followed his pleasures and been publicly commended to boot. The streets of central London at night, one gathers from historians of the era, were patrolled by literary gents, hats pulled down over the eyes, wrapped up to the nose in mufflers, taking notes on lowlife in the slums for the edification—or so they claimed—of their middle-class readers. Thackeray could also have sent his daughters to boarding school at a very young age: Anny and Minny were bright little girls, and unlike many men of his time, he was not opposed in principle to educating women. Boarding school, my readers will remember, was the solution to domestic problems arrived at by the widowed Reverend Patrick Brontë in 1824. Unable, in his remote Yorkshire parish, to find a wife willing to take on the care of his six young children, Brontë thought it best to send his four oldest daughters to Cowan Bridge School. There, freezing, psychologically abused, and chronically malnourished, the two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, quickly succumbed to tuberculosis at the ages of eleven and ten.
For William Makepeace Thackeray, in the end there was no choice. Both fastidious and traditionalist in his views, Thackeray felt a strong if critical allegiance to his caste; the raffish life of his good friend Wilkie Collins, who had two mistresses and a serious opium habit, held no appeal for him. He could not imagine being happy without his daughters, so, as soon as he had the means, he rented a house in leafy Kensington, hired a servant or two, bought a little furniture and some bits of crockery, and wrote to his mother to bring the girls to their new home. Minny missed her grandparents, for she was their pet, but Anny, reunited at last with her father, felt from the first day that finally all was right again in her world.
Today William Makepeace Thackeray would win praise as a model single father, a man who worked hard for his family, adored his kids, and showed a rare understanding of their needs. Instead, Thackeray’s refusal to be separated from his children brought the full glare of public scrutiny upon him. England expected its writers to respect the contemporary sexual shibboleths not only in the words they printed but in their private lives. The idea that a man in the prime of life, with, rumor had it, a checkered past, and known to be permanently separated from his wife, should dare to live with his minor female children, superintend their education, and form their characters was unacceptable to the English public.
The English press, which found it highly lucrative to combine moralism with sensationalism, claimed a duty to protect those young motherless Thackeray girls, so journalists were on the lookout for anything that might suggest William Makepeace Thackeray was not leading a spotlessly celibate life. Thus, when Thackeray rushed into print to praise Jane Eyre, the controversial new novel by the unknown Currer Bell, people jumped to the conclusion that Thackeray, under a pseudonym, had written the book himself, basing it upon his own conjugal life. When Charlotte Brontë came forward as the author of Jane Eyre and dedicated the second edition of her successful novel to Thackeray, this was seen by some as further proof that, while keeping his mad wife under restraint in Camberwell, William Makepeace Thackeray had engaged in an adulterous relationship with his children’s governess.
Events like the Jane Eyre fracas confirmed for Thackeray that any hint of misconduct would affect sales of his books and place him and his family in financial jeopardy. His irony, his hatred of cant, his religious skepticism, his cynical take on contemporary life all jarred with the increasingly sectarian, sentimental, jingoistic temperament of even the male readers of his time. Furthermore, as his many aunts and cousins and female friends impressed upon him, any hint of immorality on their father’s part would cast a shadow over the reputation of Anny and Minny. Thackeray’s solution was twofold. As a professional writer, he would give the English reading public what it expected. As a private citizen, with the active support of his male friends who were committed to secrecy—theirs as well as his—he would satisfy his legitimate sexual needs behind the anonymous doors of London houses where discretion was factored into the price and on the Continent, where an Englishman of means could fade into anonymity.
Thackeray, his friends, his family, his daughter Anne who became his literary executo
r, and his (eventual) son-in-law Leslie Stephen, first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, guarded the secrets of his personal life successfully, even more successfully than the comparable set of people did for Thackeray’s friend and rival Charles Dickens. It is only thanks to the adventitious discovery of a coded diary and some advanced literary sleuthing that we can state, as a fact, that Charles Dickens had a secret life, maintaining his mistress Ellen Ternan in secret locations in England and traveling on the Continent with her incognito. It seems eminently possible that William Thackeray, whose sexual and familial situation was much more dire than that of Dickens and whose livelihood also depended on conforming to the sexual prudery of the English reading public, also had a secret life.
In the nineteenth century, evidence of that secret life became public only once, at Thackeray’s funeral. Some two thousand soberly clad men arrived at the cemetery to pay tribute to the great man and were shocked to see a group of gaily dressed women, hair flying in the wind, gathered around the open grave. The painter John Millais confided to his diary that the women were from Thackeray’s favorite brothel, women who had loved him and also wanted to pay their last respects.