Thackeray, William Makepeace
William Makepeace (1811-1863), an English novelist and satirist. He possessed also considerable artistic talent, illustrating his own works with original drawings. Thackeray was of good family. He was born in Calcutta, but was sent home in childhood to escape the heat of India and to be educated in London at the Charter House School. He was a rather timid boy, sensitive to the rough manners of his mates, and the lack of sympathy on the part of his masters. He once wrote his mother that there were 370 boys in the school, adding, "I wish there were only 369." Later, in Mr. and Mrs. Frank Berry, he referred to the school as the "Slaughter House." At the age of eighteen he went to Cambridge, but remained in the university only one year. He showed no marked ability in his studies, but was a great reader, took a prominent part in a literary society, and was connected with a periodical published by the undergraduates entitled The Snob.
Thackeray left college to travel on the continent. He visited Paris and other European cities. Returning to London, he engaged in the study of law, but soon gave it up and went again to Paris to become, as he hoped, an artist. The conviction that he had not the talent to make a great artist forced itself upon the young man at about the same time that he realized that he must make his own way financially,--his fortune of pound 20,000 having been lost partly in an Indian bank and partly by unwise investments. He bore his losses and disappointments philosophically and began using his pen to gain a livelihood.
Thackeray is compared so often with Dickens that it is interesting to note the difference between the two in respect to their early advantages and their difficulties in getting a foothold in the profession of literature. Dickens' family was poor and he had little schooling. Thackeray was, as a boy and young man, supplied plentifully with money and had the opportunity for an excellent education. Dickens possessed self-confidence, ambition, determination, indefatigable energy. Thackeray was shy and modest, somewhat changeable in temperament, and by nature decidedly averse to work. Dickens won fame in his twenties. Thackeray was thirty-six when he published Vanity Fair, his first notable book. To add to the difficulties of life, his wife--he married in 1836--was early afflicted with hopeless insanity.
Thackeray's early writing was published in Fraser's Magazine, Punch, and periodicals of like character. These articles were signed by various pseudonyms, as George Fitz-Boodle, Ikey Solomons, and Michaelangelo Titmarsh, the latter in humorous allusion to his having once aspired to be a great artist. The Great Hoggarty diamond, exposing the method by which bubble companies impose upon the innocent and inexperienced; The Book of Snobs, satirizing snobbery in all classes of society; The Memoirs of Yellowplush, recounting the experiences of a footman in various genteel families; Fitz-Boodle's Confessions; Men's Wives; Barry Lyndon, the memoirs of a villain and sharper; Novels by Eminent Hands, in which the peculiarities of Bulwer, Disraeli, Cooper, and other novelists are caricatured--these and many others, all satirizing the mistakes, the failings, the sins of mankind, were among his earlier productions.
Vanity Fair appeared in 1848. It is Thackeray's masterpiece and made him at once famous. He warns his readers that he is about to tell a "tale of harrowing villainy." The story has no hero. The heroine is Becky Sharp, an unprincipled young woman, the shrewdest and most unscrupulous adventuress in literature. Pendennis, Henry Esmond, The Newcomes, and The Virginians, appeared during the next dozen years, and comprise the great novels of Thackeray. As his previous work would lead us to expect, the vices and follies of fashionable life are exposed with keen wit and stinging satire.
In Henry Esmond, a historical novel of Queen Anne's time, the author leaves the dashing style and praises the hero of the story for unselfishness and manly actions. It has been said that "no historical novel carries one so completely into the spirit of the age" in which its scenes are laid. It was not, however, as well received as the others. Taine says of it, "Thackeray has not written a less popular nor a more beautiful story." The popularity of Henry Esmond has increased. It has been always a favorite in this country.
In 1851 Thackeray began giving public lectures. The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century and The Four Georges were subjects of lecture courses delivered with success in England and America. Steele, Addison, Swift, Pope, and Goldsmith are among the writers taken under discussion in English Humorists. He writes of the men themselves, rather than of their books, and with pleasing wit and much sympathy gives us vivid pictures of their varied personalities. The Four Georges are sketches in a mildly satiric vein of these four monarchs, their households, and the social life of their respective reigns. Both series of lectures make delightful reading.
In 1857 Thackeray established The Cornhill Magazine. Of the first number, more than 100,000 copies were sold. The Round-about Papers are the most interesting of Thackeray's own contributions to this periodical. They are playful and amiable essays, containing a little autobiography and a good deal of moralizing brightened with touches of imagination.
Thackeray is a master of pure, simple, finished English prose. Although often quaint and sometimes even colloquial, it is always direct, easy, graceful. He does not excel in the invention of episode and incident, nor does he present pictures which make us happy and in love with life. His chief characteristics are a power of observation, of seeing beneath the surface, keen analysis and delineation of character, sharp wit and a use of invective in which he has few superiors. In his satire, it must be admitted that he is too earthy, too abusive, too coarse; but it must be remembered that his object is to make vulgarity, hypocrisy, and immorality hateful. In the conclusion to Catherine, a story which is perhaps more unpleasant than any other he has written, he states that he feels the greatest disgust for the characters he describes and has used his "humble endeavor to cause the public also to hate them.
It has been said that Thackeray's novels show a hatred of humanity and a disbelief in goodness. A study of the man's character will show such a judgment to be without foundation. His life proves him to have been a kindly, honest-hearted man, full of noble impulses and large sympathy, compassionate and tender, superior to all small jealousies and spitefulness. He hated with a deadly hatred all sham and villainy, all humbug and pretentiousness. Not even Dickens himself had a greater reverence for humanity, for the home and family, for love and kindness and charity. The difference between the two men is not so much one of character as it is of attitude, of point of view. Dickens goes among the humble and lowly and finds there purity and nobility of character. Thackeray goes to the high and mighty and finds weakness and vanity, falsehood and villainy. Dickens exalts the true and noble that he may inspire in us a love of virtue. Thackeray abases the false and ignoble and would inspire a hatred for vice and hypocrisy. Both aim to better mankind. Dickens' method is a pleasanter one. Hence he is more popular. We may believe that his method is more efficacious, but Thackeray had his own work to do and he did it well. To be true to himself he must fulfill his mission, not like a Dickens, but like a Thackeray.
QUOTATIONS.
Such people there are living and flourishing in the world--Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless; let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very successful, too, mere quacks and fools; and it was to combat and expose such as these, no doubt, that laughter was made.
Perhaps of all the novel-spinners now extant the present speaker is the most addicted to preaching.
The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness--your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture,--your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy.
TRIBUTES.
Only the shallow and undiscriminating reader fails to see that Thackeray's seriousness is deeper and more vital than his cynicism; that though the smile of the man of the world is on his lips, few hearts are more gentle, more compassionate, more tender; that though he is quick to scorn, few eyes have looked out on this unintelligible world through more kindly or more honest tears. Satirist as he is, he kneels with the genuine and wholesouled devotion of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, and of Milton, before the simple might of innocence and of goodness.--Pancoast.
In all the characteristics of his genius, Thackeray is thoroughly English, and the faults and follies he chastises are those especially characteristic of British society. Good sense and the perception of the ridiculous are amalgamated in him; his satire is a thoroughly British article, a little over-solid, a little wanting in finish, but honest, weighty, and durable. Posterity will go to him for the humors of the age of Victoria, as they go to Addison for those of Anne's.--Britannica.
In Thackeray's later writings, the dark shades no longer preponderate. The mellowing influence of years and sickness and clamor, as well as more extensive observation of life, had sunk the merciless satirist in the genial humorist and philosophic observer. He had still ample scorn for falsehood and vice, and satire for folly and pretence; but he had also smiles and tears, and tenderness and charity, that gave a moral beauty and interest to the last decade of his brilliant career as an author.
--Chambers.