by Edward Short
Thackeray also came in for a fair amount of misrepresentation. John Blackwood, the proprietor of Blackwood’s Magazine, rejected a profile of the novelist after his death because, as he said, it was not true to the Thackeray he knew. “I do not much care for the stories you give,” he told the author. Thackeray, he said, “used to tell such stories in a pitying half-mocking way in which it was impossible to say how much was sincerity and how much sham. But when he dropped that vein, and spoke with real feeling of men and things that he liked, the breadth and force of his character came out, and there was no mistake about his sincerity. None of the numerous sketches I have read give to me any real picture of the man with his fun and mixture of bitterness with warm good feeling.”125
Still, the upshot of Thackeray’s meeting with Pollen was to confirm him in his accustomed skepticism. “I have made an acquaintance with a convert, an Oxford man whom I like and who interests me,” he wrote of Pollen to another correspondent. “And I am trying to pick my Oxford man’s brains, & see from his point of view. But it isn’t mine: and old Popery and old Protestantism seem to me as dead the one as the other. Wiseman I have heard and think him a tawdry Italian quack.”126 It is interesting that Thackeray should have used quack to describe Wiseman, because it is the same word that he used to describe the author of Vanity Fair.127 Moreover, Thackeray was not the only English novelist of the time who took a dim view of Wiseman and the renewed English Catholicism he championed. Charlotte Bronte (1816–1855) also came away with an unflattering impression of the Anglo-Irish divine. “He has not merely a double but a treble and quadruple chin,” she recalled, and has “a very large mouth with oily lips, and looks as if he would relish a good dinner with a bottle of wine after it.
He came swimming into the room smiling, simpering, and bowing like a fat old lady, and sat down very demure in his chair, and looked the picture of a sleek hypocrite … The Cardinal spoke in a smooth whining manner, just like a canting Methodist preacher. The audience seemed to look up to him like a god. A spirit of the hottest zeal pervaded the whole meeting … All the speeches turned on the necessity of straining every nerve to make converts to popery. It is in such a scene that one feels what the Catholics are doing. Most persevering and enthusiastic are they in their work! Let Protestants look to it.128
Stock No Popery prejudices of this sort, together with disgust for his mother’s rabid Bible religion always prevented Thackeray from embracing any definite Christianity. Apropos Pollen, he wrote to one correspondent: “I try and understand from him what can be the secret of the religion for which he has given up rank chances and all good things of this life.” But Thackeray had to confess that he was still “so far off believing it,” that he feared that when “poor Pollen … finds that I am only looking at it artistically as at Paganism Mahotmetanism or any other ism [he] will withdraw from me in sorrow, and … our pleasant acquaintance won’t come to much.”129 Here Thackeray’s faith stalled, and although there were times when he wished to advance beyond his tepid skepticism, he never managed it. Consequently, his settled view of Newman’s lectures—and of the Roman Catholicism they recommended—was the view he had first articulated on coming away from them: “It is either Rome or Babylon, and for me it is Babylon,” which was not so much a rejection of the Catholic polemicist in Newman as it was an acceptance of the natural man in Thackeray.130 And yet, that Babylon was Rome according to traditional No Popery gives Thackeray’s statement an unintended ambiguity, which is somehow fitting for this most ambivalent of would-be believers.
Which leads us to our overwhelming question: would Thackeray have taken Kingsley’s part in the controversy over Kingsley’s calumny in Macmillan’s Magazine?131 Before answering the question, it is necessary to revisit the genesis of the Garrick Club affair. It grew out of the rivalry between Thackeray and Dickens. Ever since Thackeray was a young man he had kept an envying eye on the spectacular rise of Dickens. In 1836 he offered to illustrate the Pickwick Papers and he even went twenty miles out of his way to visit Yarmouth to see the coastline associated with the Peggottys.132 Over the course of their careers, both men drank in the same clubs and dined in the same private houses, literary lions only too aware of each other’s literary power. Thackeray might have been more admiring of Dickens’ talents than Dickens was of his, but he was still convinced that the more popular novelist was too sentimental for his own good. Dickens, for his part, disapproved of what he regarded as Thackeray’s worldly cynicism and his want of fellow feeling. Then, again, there was class antagonism between the two men. Thackeray saw the Dickens family at the pier at Ramsgate once and noted how “embarrassingly coarse vulgar and happy” they looked.133 Dickens felt Thackeray went to undignified lengths to ingratiate himself with the upper classes that he had satirized in his youth. He particularly disapproved of Thackeray trying to make them paying customers by appearing to share their philistinism. In his obituary of the novelist, whom he otherwise thought “a man of genius,” Dickens wrote: “I thought that he too much feigned a want of earnestness, and that he made a pretense of under-valuing his art, which was not good for the art that he held in trust,” He was galled to hear other obituaries referring to Thackeray as a “gentleman,” as though the other novelists of Victoria’s reign “were of the tinker tribe.”134 If Thackeray found fault with Dickens because he was an artist but not a gentleman, Dickens found fault with Thackeray because he was an artist and a gentleman. Dickens had something of the same contempt for Thackeray’s social pretensions that G. M. Young had. “The Railway is the great Victorian symbol,” Young wrote in an essay on Thackeray, “and I often picture the people of that age as a railway crowd, all pushing, scrambling, and shoving—backwards or forwards—at once. And what a journey lies before them, what mountains those tunnels will pierce, what valleys those airy viaducts will span, what novelties, what adventures, what delight! And among them I see a passenger whose joy is darkened by one anxiety—he is not quite sure if his ticket entitles him to travel first class.”135
This rivalry between Dickens and Thackeray was the backdrop for the fracas that would erupt between the two men in 1858. It was immediately triggered by Dickens’ falling out with his wife of over twenty years, Catherine, and his taking up with a young actress by the name of Ellen Ternan. This betrayal of the marital vow reached Thackeray’s ears in May 1858. “To think of that poor matron after 22 years going away out of her house! O dear me it’s a fatal story for our trade.”136 When someone at the Garrick Club suggested that Dickens had left his wife for someone other than the actress, Thackeray corrected the man. Dickens, getting wind of the remark, concluded that Thackeray was spreading malicious gossip, even though Thackeray’s comment was clearly not malicious. In fact, Thackeray was studiedly neutral about the affair. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1858, in a paper called Household Words, Dickens published a full article on the affair, blaming his abandoned wife and attempting to justify himself. At the same time, a man signing himself “Lounger in the Clubs” wrote a profile on Thackeray for a little-known paper called Town Talk, in which, after giving an overview of Thackeray’s career, he gratuitously slandered the novelist, much as Kingsley had gratuitously slandered Newman, by charging that Thackeray was not only an overpaid but a hypocritical lecturer. Apropos Thackeray’s American lectures, which were based on his English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, the writer wrote: “The prices were extravagant, the lecturer’s admiration of birth and position was extravagant, the success was extravagant. No one succeeds better than Mr. Thackeray in cutting his coat according to his cloth. Here he flattered the aristocracy, but when he crossed the Atlantic, George Washington became the idol of his worship, the ‘Four Georges’ the object of his bitterest attack …” Moreover, the writer of the piece added, there was a want of charity in what Thackeray wrote, “which is not to be balanced by the most brilliant sarcasm or the most perfect knowledge of the human heart”—a criticism which had a distinctly Dickensian ring about it. When it was revealed th
at the writer of the piece was Edmund Yates, a 27-year-old journalist who was a member of the Garrick Club, of which Thackeray and Dickens were also members, Thackeray took exception not so much because the piece was slanderous as because it was based on conversations overheard at the Club.
Yates was a colorful character. The son of theatrical parents, who secured him a position in the Post Office to keep him off the stage, he became head of the Missing Letter department before pursuing a career on Fleet Street. An unsavory scamp, he made society scandal his stock-in-trade and almost single-handedly invented the modern gossip-column.137 When Thackeray saw Yates’s piece on him, he sensed that it was not a solo performance. As D. J. Taylor points out in his account of the affair: “The appearance of a hostile article on the same day as Dickens’ defense of his conduct in Household Words may have been simply coincidence, but it seemed to Thackeray—almost certainly correctly—that Dickens was using Yates as a cat’s paw to punish him for taking sides in the dispute about his private life”—even though, as Taylor shows, Thackeray did not take sides.138 For Thackeray, Dickens’ part in the slanderous attack was the result of “pent up animosities and long cherished hatred.”139 Within a day of the offending article appearing, Thackeray wrote the vituperative young hack a letter nicely articulating the code of clubland honor that he had so blatantly violated.
We meet at a Club where, before you were born, I believe, I & other gentlemen have been in the habit of talking, without any idea that our conversation would supply paragraphs for professional vendors of ‘Literary Talk,’ and I don’t remember that out of that Club I ever exchanged 6 words with you. Allow me to inform you that the talk wh. you may have heard there is not intended for newspaper remark, & to beg, as I have a right to do, that you will refrain from printing comments upon my private conversation, that you will forgo discussion however blundering on my private affairs; & that you will henceforth please to consider any question of my personal truth & sincerity as quite out of the province of your criticism.140
To the Committee of the Garrick Club, Thackeray wrote on the 19th of June: “Rather than have any further personal controversy with [Mr. Yates] I thought it best to submit our correspondence to you, with a copy of the newspaper which has been the cause of our difference. I think I may fairly appeal to the Club, to decide whether the complaints I have against Mr. Yates are not well-founded, and whether the practice of publishing such articles as that which I enclose will not be fatal to the comfort of the Club, and is not intolerable in a Society of Gentlemen”—an appeal which was reminiscent of Newman’s publication of the correspondence that had passed between Kingsley and himself. The Committee took Thackeray’s point and unanimously resolved that unless Yates apologized, “the Committee will consider it their duty to call a General Meeting of the Club to consider this subject.”141 Yates refused to apologize and the meeting was held. Before the meeting, Thackeray wrote to the Committee explaining that he had decided to make an issue out of Yates’s slander for other club members as much as for himself. “I presume the effect of tomorrows meeting will be to confirm or to reverse that sentence. In the latter case, it may be that the next gentleman attacked will be more patient than I have been; and, for the sake of a quiet life, will suffer, without complaint or protest, indignities put upon him, hints thrown out against his honor and sincerity, & liberties taken with his name …”142 Moreover, Thackeray admitted, “more than one of my friends advised me to say nothing,” just as many still imagine that Newman made too much of Kingsley’s libel. However, Thackeray recognized that he could not leave the libel unanswered. “My duty, perhaps, my temper, caused me to follow a different course: but I shall grieve sincerely if my indignation at the injury wh I conceive has been done me shall have superadded any unnecessary annoyance to the doubt, distrust, division, recrimination, & heart burning, wh conduct like that of wh I complain, must bring upon our or any Society!”143
This solicitude for other club members in light of Yates’s attack recalls Newman’s solicitude for the Catholic priesthood and for Catholics in general in light of Kingsley’s attack. As Newman told one correspondent, “I should not have singled out Mr Kingsley for public notice unless I thought it really worth while to deal a blow against a virulent blasphemer of the Catholic Church. Accordingly I say … that his words are a great affront to myself and a worse insult to the Catholic priesthood …”144 Finally, the 140 Committee members gathered to decide whether Yates should indeed be required to apologize, and although Dickens, Wilkie Collins and the journalist Robert Bell all advocated leniency, the vote went against Yates 70:46. After he failed to respond to the secretary’s letter requiring him to apologize, his name was removed from the club books. In the wake of the expulsion, Yates contemplated bringing a Chancery suit and even hiring Edwin James, the brilliant QC and redoubtable courtroom advocate (Dickens based Mr. Stryver on him in A Tale of Two Cities, describing him in one passage as an attorney whose object was “to smash his witness like a crockery vessel, and shiver his part of the case to useless lumber”), before realizing that he would have no case.145
Nearly a year after Yates’s libelous article appeared, Thackeray wrote to none other than Charles Kingsley to defend his part in the Garrick Club affair. “I have no doubt in my own mind that I was right to be indignant in the matter, and to call the offender before the Club, wh is a social Institution quite unlike other clubs, and where men have been in the habit of talking quite freely to one another (in a room not 15 square feet) for this ¼ of a century or more. If this penny-a-liner is to come in to this sanctum, and publish his comments upon the conversation there held and the people he meets there, it is all over with the comfort and friendliness of our Society … Scores of the pennyaline fraternity have written on his side, and a great number of them are agreed that it’s the description of my nose wh makes me so furious—Not one of them seems to understand that to be accused of hypocrisy [and] base motives for public & private conduct … are the points wh make me angry …”146
In light of this defense of his actions, it seems likely that Thackeray would have seen the same point of honor at stake in Newman’s defense of his actions. It also seems likely that he would have viewed Kingsley in the Macmillan’s Magazine row in much the same light that he viewed Yates in the Garrick Club affair: as a bounder, whose transgression against the code of honor must be called to account. And with his interest in the autobiographical aspects of fiction, with which he played so ingeniously in Pendennis, it also seems likely that Thackeray would have admired the Apologia, which is infinitely more searching than anything his contemporaries managed in their autobiographies, whether Trollope, Ruskin, Pattison, Mill, Darwin, or Harriett Martineau.147
As to Kingsley’s charge that Catholicism ipso facto required the Catholic faithful to be mendacious, Thackeray’s correspondence suggests that he would have seen in this claim something of the same zealotry that he saw in his mother’s Bible Christianity. While it is true that the skeptic in him was unpersuaded by the infallible claims of the Roman Church, Thackeray was entirely free of Kingsley’s belligerent Protestantism. In 1846, Thackeray described an Anglican friend “in a glory of exultation at the newly erected Cheadle (Catholic) Church”—Pugin’s masterpiece, which reminded Newman of the portals of heaven. “But I think Romanism begins to be drawn rather milder,” Thackeray thought, “and the Poop of Room … is not perwhirting so many as fommly.”148 There is a genial fun in this mockery that would have been inconceivable for Kingsley, for whom the sins of the “Poop of Room” were never a joking matter. Thackeray, on the other hand, tended to like the Catholics he met. In one letter to his mother chiding her for assuming that her Evangelical faith had a monopoly on Christian truth, he wrote: “As for Catholicism you may have your fling at it: but I am sure that the Xtian church has existed in it in all ages—it would be an insult to God to say it had not. Recollect that you are a woman with intense organs of love & respect born in Church-of-Englandism—do you think you would not
have had the same love for Catholicism if you had been bred to it? Indeed you would, as I fancy, in any other creed.”149 Later, he returned to the same taunting hypothesis: “If you had been born a Catholic—you know what a good one you would have been: and then you would have been wretched if I had any doubts about the martyrdom of Polycarp or the Invention of the True Cross—and there are thousands of anxious mothers so deploring the errors of their skeptical children—But the Great Intelligence shines far far above all mothers and all sons—the Truth Absolute is God—And it seems to me hence almost blasphemous: that any blind prejudiced sinful mortal being should dare to be unhappy about the belief of another; should dare to say Lo I am right and my brothers must go to damnation—I Know God and my brother doesn’t. And now I’ll stop scolding my dearest old Mother about that favorite propensity of hers to be miserable. God bless us all.”150