by Edward Short
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) was born in Calcutta, the only child of Richmond Thackeray, an official of the East India Company, and his wife Anne Becher, the second daughter of another East India Company employee and his wife Harriet, a high-toned old Evangelical lady. In 1812, Richmond invited Captain Carmichael-Smythe to dinner, without knowing that this dashing Bengal Engineer, the younger son of a good Scottish family, was his wife’s former lover, whom she had planned to marry before going out to India but presumed dead—a coincidence which the novelist in Thackeray must have seen as an unmistakable omen of his future profession. Duly, after his father’s death in 1815, as if in accordance with the most hackneyed romantic fiction, Thackeray’s mother married the captain and from 1838 until 1861 the reunited lovers lived in Paris. Many keys to Thackeray’s religious views can be found in his copious correspondence with his mother, who shared her own mother’s devotion to a fierce Evangelical faith. Thackeray would begin distancing himself from this faith as a young man at Cambridge but it would nonetheless color all of his later views on religion, including his view of Newman’s Catholicism.
Educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge, where he left in 1830 without a degree, Thackeray entered the Middle Temple in 1831, but after coming of age he gave up the law for journalism. At Cambridge, he befriended the future translator of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Edward Fitzgerald, a scoffing, idle, charming young man, whose Anglo-Irish eccentricities appealed to the bohemian in Thackeray. It was also Fitzgerald who turned him against the Bible Christianity that his mother had sought to instill in him. In the last year of his life, when his daughter Anne asked which of his friends he had cared for most, Thackeray replied “Old Fitz,” before adding, “We shall be very good friends in hell together.”5 In 1830, after leaving Cambridge, Thackeray went to Weimar, where he met Goethe. Interestingly enough, he was in Germany only a few years after Pusey, and he reported back to his mother how “The doctrine here is not so strict as in England—many of the dogmas by which we hold are here disregarded as allegories or parables—or I fear by most people as fictions altogether”—the very concern that prompted the Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Charles Lloyd, to send Pusey there.6 In 1833, Thackeray bought The National Standard, for which he was at once proprietor, contributor and illustrator. After the paper folded, he went to study art in Paris, where, at a masked ball, he met the enterprising adventuress on whom he would base his most brilliant heroine, Becky Sharp. On a subsequent trip to the city, in a boarding house in the Rue Ponthieu, Faubourg-St-Honoré, he met a 17-year-old Irish girl from Cork named Isabella Shawe, “a simple, girlish girl,” as one of his friends recalled, with whom the novelist fell in love at the proverbial first sight.7 In 1836, after an intensely epistolary courtship in which Thackeray played Pygmalion to Isabella’s Galatea, they were married in the British Embassy. D. J. Taylor nicely describes the character of their love (from Thackeray’s standpoint) as “a kind of grand passion hedged about with sentimental whimsy, in which the desired object [was] regarded as a wayward schoolgirl.”8 After returning to London, Thackeray and Isabella set up house in 18 Albion Street. For four years, they were happily married, with three daughters on whom they doted, and this despite the meddling of Mrs. Shawe, Thackeray’s noisome mother-in-law, of whom he drew one of his funniest caricatures. Then in September 1840, while on shipboard with her husband from London to Cork, Isabella leaped overboard and was only rescued after she had been in the water for twenty minutes. Several additional suicide attempts followed. When it became clear that no cure for her madness would be forthcoming, Thackeray became a haunted man. “Has it never occurred to you,” he asked one of his American friends, “how awful a thing the recovery of lost reason must be, without the consciousness of the lapse of time? She finds the lover of her youth a grey-haired old man, and her infants young men and women. Is it not sad to think of this?”9 With these thoughts ravaging his mind, he rediscovered the Christian faith of his childhood. Amelia Sedley does the same in Vanity Fair, after her father goes bankrupt. Thackeray describes how “She went and knelt down by the bedside; and there this wounded and timorous, but gentle and loving soul, sought for consolation, where as yet, it must be owned, our little girl had but seldom looked for it. Love had been her faith hitherto; and the sad, bleeding disappointed heart began to feel the want of another consoler.”10 A month after Thackeray’s wife made her suicidal leap from the steamer’s water-closet, Thackeray also shared with his mother how he had sought consolation from the same neglected source: “God was so wonderfully gracious to me. Indeed I have a thankful spirit to him, & see good in the midst of all this misfortune …”11 Eventually Thackeray had no alternative but to send Isabella to live with a nurse in Camberwell, though she outlived him by thirty years. Later, he would tell a friend, “Though my marriage was a wreck, I would do it over again, for behold love is the crown and completion of all earthly good.”12 One reason why he gave himself up so intently to journalism was to escape the guilt he felt for his wife’s derangement, which appears to have developed from post-natal depression. Another reason was to pay his abounding debts.13 Before marrying, Thackeray lost the bulk of his fortune when his Indian bank failed; he was also an extravagant gambler. To keep his creditors at bay, he became a consummate literary journalist, contributing regularly to Punch, Fraser’s Magazine, the Morning Chronicle, the New Monthly Magazine and The Times. The number of first-rate comic pieces that he had to show for this prolific journalism is impressive, including The Yellowplush Correspondence (1837), A Shabby Genteel Story (1840), The Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841) and The Book of Snobs (1842). For George Orwell, what was admirable about Thackeray’s work leading up to and including Vanity Fair was how well it captured the “atmosphere of surfeit” that hovered around this rackety, grasping, desolate world, “an atmosphere compounded of oysters, brown stout, brandy and water, turtle soup, roast sirloin, haunch of venison, Madeira and cigar smoke …”14 Vanity Fair (1847–1848), his first major success and the culmination of all that he had done as a comic journalist, is an unsparing portrait of the fallen world from a man who knew the follies and the sorrows he described inside out.15 In this respect, it exemplified the truthful record of sinful man that Newman thought secular literature should exemplify. The book’s psychological insight also met with Newman’s approval, since this was something at which he excelled as well.16 Nowhere else does one get a better sense of the frenzied insecurity that characterized early nineteenth-century England, or its ruthlessness. “In this vast town one has not the time to go and seek one’s friends,” the narrator observes; “if they drop out of the rank they disappear, and we march on without them. Who is ever missed in Vanity Fair?”17 And yet Thackeray showed his characters remarkable sympathy, which was a mark of the fellow feeling that suffused his psychological insight. In 1998, Andrew Davies brilliantly adapted the novel to the screen in a six-episode BBC production, in which he captured the thwarted love that gives so much of the book’s comedy its pathos.
Thackeray followed the success of Vanity Fair with several other novels, which, taken together, chart what John Carey persuasively characterizes as a “history of capitulation,” in which Thackeray succumbed to the very snobbery that he had written his early journalism and Vanity Fair to mock. “The novels after Vanity Fair,” Carey argues, “are full of people not only of a higher class but nicer—noble fellows, angelic ladies. It is a condition of their insipidity.”18 The History of Pendennis (1848–1850) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852) have an interest, above and beyond their aesthetic flaws, because of their autobiographical import and the light they shed on Thackeray’s thinking; but The Newcomes (1853–1855) and The Virginians (1857–1859) are painfully dull reads.19 Before his death, Thackeray was at work on Denis Duval, an historical novel which, coincidentally, was set in Rye among England’s French Huguenots, who doubtless reminded Newman of the Huguenots of his mother’s family, the Fourdriniers, who were famous French paper-makers.
After Isabella lost her reason, Thackeray became infatuated with Jane Octavia Brookfield, a literary hostess, whose father had been the friend of Coleridge and Lamb. Since she was also the wife of one of his old Cambridge friends, Thackeray had to content himself with entering into a strenuously chaste ménage a trois. “However much I may love her & bless her and admire her, I can’t forgive her for doing her duty,” he confessed after putting a stop to what he referred to as his “uncouth raptures.”20 When Thackeray learned that his devotion to this handsome, intelligent, trifling woman had never been in the least reciprocated, he saw his sentimental adoration come to smash, though the experience proved useful for his fiction—and for his wonderfully funny pastiche, “The Sorrows of Werther.”21 In summing up William Dobbins’ similarly abject devotion to Amelia Sedley, who throughout Vanity Fair remains devoted to the memory of her deceased husband, George Osborne, whom Becky Sharp calls “that selfish humbug, that low-bred Cockney dandy, that padded booby,” the narrator echoes what Thackeray felt vis-à-vis Mrs. Brookfield: “He had placed himself at her feet so long that the poor little woman had been accustomed to trample upon him. She didn’t wish to marry him, but she wished to keep him. She wished to give him nothing, but he should give her all. It is a bargain not unfrequently levied in love.”22 Fortunately, Thackeray did not live to see the Brookfield–Thackeray triangle reproduced in two of Mrs. Brookfield’s vapid novels, Only George (1866) and Not Too Late (1868). On 23 December 1863 he returned home from dining, had a stroke and dropped dead.
Years of stalwart drinking hastened his end. In addition to having matutinal brandies and soda to rouse his appetite, he would have three or four glasses of wine with lunch, and then two bottles of wine with dinner, in addition to various drams and punches after dinner. William Allingham (1824–1889), the Anglo-Irish diarist who captured the table-talk of so many eminent Victorians, from Carlyle and Tennyson to Ruskin and Browning, described the novelist’s delight in the rituals of the table. “Thackeray took me to dine with him at the Palais Royal. He noticed with quiet enjoyment every little incident—beginning with the flourish with which our waiter set down the dishes of Ostend oysters. After tasting his wine Thackeray said, looking at me solemnly, through his large spectacles, ‘One’s first glass of wine in the day is a great event.’”23 During the course of his adult life, he told one friend, he had imbibed enough to float a 74-gun battleship. In Vanity Fair good drink jokes abound: “Had he drunk a dozen bottles of claret,” the narrator observes of James Crawley, “the old spinster could have pardoned him. Mr. Fox and Mr. Sheridan drank claret. Gentlemen drank claret. But eighteen glasses of gin consumed among boxers in an ignoble pot-house—it was an odious crime and not to be pardoned readily.”24 Newman could also be witty on the subject of drink. The response he made to his brother Frank on one occasion has become justly renowned. Attending a temperance rally where Manning shared the platform with Protestants “filled me with enthusiasm and joy,” Frank recalled, “but I was merely a type of the thousands who listened in deep rapt silence to his magnificent speech.” For Frank, something had to be done to address “the sights that make the streets on Saturday evenings in England [such] a degrading scene.” Newman, however, would not be dragooned into this crusade against the bibulous poor and sent off one of his more memorable rebuffs: “As to what you tell me of Archbishop Manning, I have heard that some also of our Irish bishops think that too many drink-shops are licensed. As for me, I do not know whether we have too many or too few.” Frank affected to find the reply callous. “The more I dwelt on this icy message, the less it seemed worthy, not only of a Christian, but of one who cared for human sin and human misery.”25 But there was more self-congratulatory posturing than conviction in Frank’s indignation. Simply because Newman declined to harangue the crapulent did not make him indifferent to sin and misery. He tackled such things in the confessional, not on temperance platforms.
Thackeray and Newman had a number of things in common. They were on the receiving end of grievous personal loss. Thackeray, of course, lost his wife to madness and Newman lost scores of friends and loved ones to early death, including John Bowden, his closest friend at Trinity, and Hurrell Froude, his closest friend at Oriel. Both Thackeray and Newman were fond of women, whom they often made their confidantes—Thackeray, Mrs. Brookfield and his mother, and Newman, Mrs. Froude, Emily Bowles and Mrs. Bowden. Both men had a good sense of the ridiculous. They were keen social commentators. They both had decided views of Lord Brougham, the oleaginous Whig politico against whose Tamworth Reading Room Newman wrote with such witty polemical zest. For Thackeray, Brougham was “the best and wickedest old fellow” he had ever met, “enormously good fun,” and “boiling over with humour & mischief.”26 Newman could never see him as anything but the “great sophist.”27 If their preferences as regards public men differed, Thackeray and Newman had distinct literary similarities. They were inspired satirists. They were inspired letter-writers. They both wrote an elegant, conversational English which owed as much to Addison as to Swift, whom Newman considered “the most native and natural of our writers.”28 They were gregarious men who had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. They took as critical an interest in truth as they did in humbug. They paid lifelong mind to Vanity Fair.
They were also good travel writers. Thackeray could be wonderfully funny on America. In 1856, he wrote one of his friends, during a punishing, if lucrative lecture tour of the country: “Over a thousand miles of railroad I have not seen a beautiful prospect—only swamp, sand, pines, wood cabins or villages and negroes reposing here and there—on the Alabama river a view about as mournful as if it was a tributary to the Styx, on this Mississippi the same dreariness on a wider scale, in the taverns dirt stenches dreadful swearing in the bars gongs banging night & day to plentiful filthy meals, every mans & womans knife in the mouth or the dish alternately—I was drawing a picture for home & only made men performing this feat, but looking down the table at dinner to day every single woman was occupied so—and when we had done there came a giantess (we are both going to perform at the same fair no doubt) to eat alone—and when I looked down she had her knife down her great throat. I can hardly bear it.”29 Newman was equally vivid in the accounts he sent home of his travels. From Deal, where he had gone on holiday in 1862, he wrote William Neville: “Three days I have fed on an expensive old tough gander — never making a meal. Yesterday I attempted veal cutlets — they were made up of stringy, gristly, and sinewy meat, parts not quite done. I am now wild how to get a dinner. I am told there is an Hotel here better than the Clarendon, which was hardly better than a pothouse. My first entrance into the Coffee Room was attended by the simultaneous exit from it of two girls running, apparently from a young gentleman who was over his wine and walnuts. I shall go and try the Royal Hotel, though with sad trepidation. Another scheme I have is to go over to Ramsgate. It is a nice morning, and a return ticket is only 3 shillings. I can look about for lodgings. You see, I had laid in a stock of wine, and I did not know what to do with it. Else, I should have gone off to an Hotel at Ramsgate or Dover for the week till Austin came. Now I have been drinking it against time. I hope I shall not make myself drunk. Why has not one a bag like the Camel to keep wine in? — then, it would be laying in a stock for next week.”30
Thackeray and Newman had a mutual friend in Mary Holmes, the governess, who first corresponded with Newman in the 1830s after reading his sermons but confessed to being disappointed when they finally met: Newman was too young and too unromantic. Thackeray first began corresponding with Miss Holmes after his wife went mad—he needed someone to teach his daughters their music lessons—but after finding her a sympathetic correspondent, he was disappointed to find that she was a small, unsightly woman in person, with red hair and a red nose. Miss Holmes also corresponded with Anthony Trollope, who wrote to her niece after her death: “I found her letters to be full of piety, good sense, and of most excellent literary criticism … . She was an honest, re
ligious, and a high-minded lady, and I feel that her death has robbed me of a friend …”31 When Newman learned of Thackeray’s sudden death, he wrote to Miss Holmes: “I … write … to express the piercing sorrow that I feel at Thackeray’s death. You know I never saw him – but you have interested me in him – and one saw in his books the workings of his mind – and he has died with such awful suddenness.
A new work of his had been advertised – and I had looked forward with pleasure to reading it – and now the drama of his life is closed, and he himself is the greatest instance of the text, of which he was so full, Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. I wonder whether he has known his own decay – for a decay I think there has been. I thought his last novel betrayed lassitude and exhaustion of mind – and he has lain by apparently for a year. His last (fugitive) pieces in the Cornhill have been almost sermons – one should be very glad to know that he had presentiments of what was to come.