William Makepeace Thackeray

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William Makepeace Thackeray, detail of an oil painting by Samuel Laurence; in the National Portrait … (credit: Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London)

(born July 18, 1811, Calcutta, India — died Dec. 24, 1863, London, Eng.) English novelist. He studied law and art but soon became a prolific writer for periodicals, using a variety of pen names. His early writings appear in such volumes as The Book of Snobs (1848), a collection of his articles from Punch; and Miscellanies (1855 – 57), which includes the historical novel Barry Lyndon (1844). His fame rests chiefly on the novels Vanity Fair (1847 – 48), a panoramic survey of English manners and human frailties set in the Napoleonic era, and Henry Esmond (1852), set in the early 18th century. Pendennis (1848 – 50) is a partly fictionalized autobiography. In his time he was regarded as the only possible rival of Charles Dickens for his pictures of contemporary life, but his popularity declined in the 20th century.

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The British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) created unrivaled panoramas of English upper-middle-class life, crowded with memorable characters displaying realistic mixtures of virtue, vanity, and vice.

When William Makepeace Thackeray began his literary career, English prose fiction was dominated by Charles Dickens. Thackeray formed his style in conscious reaction against Dickens's programmatic indictment of social evils and against the artificial style and sentimental falsification of life and moral values of the popular historical romances. The familiar, moralizing commentaries of Thackeray's narrators, as integral a part of his novels as the characters themselves, expressed their author's detached moral disillusionment - usually touched with sentimentality. Although critical of society, Thackeray was never a radical intellectual, remaining basically conservative. He initiated a tendency toward plainer style and greater realism in the portrayal of the commonplace, a manner carried on in the English novel by Anthony Trollope.

Thackeray was born on July 18, 1811, in Calcutta, India, into a family that had made its fortunes in the East India Company for two generations. He was sent to England at the age of 5 after the death of his father. The Anglo-Indian community in which Thackeray grew up was alienated by prejudice from the English upper-class society, of which, however, it felt itself rightfully a part by reason of its achievements and wealth, and whose values it imitated. A sympathy for similar alienation manifested itself in his later attitudes.

Educated at the prestigious Charterhouse School, Thackeray acquired there the class conception of gentlemanly conduct that he later both criticized and upheld. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he was only a mediocre student, and he left the university after little more than a year in June 1830, convinced that it was not worth his while to spend more time in pursuit of a second-rate degree under an uncongenial curriculum. A 6-month stay in Weimar, Germany, where he enjoyed the intellectual life of the former home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller, gave Thackeray some cosmopolitan polish and a more objective view of English manners.

After his return to London, Thackeray drifted idly about, making a desultory gesture toward studying law at the Middle Temple. But he seemed more devoted to the expensive habits of fashionable dissipation and gambling he had acquired at Cambridge. When he came into his inheritance, debts forced him to consume part of his capital, and most of the rest was soon lost in the collapse of the Indian trading agency in which it had been invested. Financial misfortune effected a morally beneficial change in his way of life, however, and after an abortive attempt at painting he turned to journalism as a means of support.

Magazine Writing

Between 1837 and 1844 Thackeray wrote critical articles on art and literature for numerous papers and journals, but he contributed most of his fiction of this period to Fraser's Magazine. The Memoirs of C. J. Yellowplush, which appeared serially in 1837-1838, parodied the high-flown language of "fashnabble" novels through the Cockney malapropisms of a gentleman's gentleman. In Catherine (1839-1840) Thackeray began by parodying the popular criminal novel, but he soon became interested in his characters for their own sakes. "A Shabby Genteel Story" (1840) and other short compositions explored the world of rogues and fools in a spirit of extreme and bitter disillusionment. The Irish Sketch Book (1843) and Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cario (1845), purportedly written by the confirmed Londoner Mr. M. A. Titmarsh, were in a lighter vein. His placement of the narrator as a personality firmly in the foreground of his works has led critics to accuse him of Cockney Philistinism.

In the fall of 1840, Thackeray's wife, Isabella Shawe, whom he had married in 1836, suffered a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. This experience profoundly affected his character and work, widening his sympathies, mellowing his judgments, and bringing him to value domestic affection as life's greatest good. These new attitudes emerged clearly in the best of his early stories, "The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond" (1841), a tale of an obscure clerk who rises to sudden prosperity but finds true happiness only after ruin has brought him back to hearth and home. Adopting the mask of an aristocratic London bachelor and clubman, George Savage Fitz-Boodle, Thackeray next wrote a number of papers satirizing his way of life and a series called "Men's Wives," of which "Mr. and Mrs. Frank Berry" and "Denis Haggarty's Wife" show a maturing sense of comedy and tragedy. With The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844) Thackeray arrived as a novelist. He returned to an earlier subject, the gentleman scoundrel; his central theme is the ruin of a young man's character by false ideals of conduct and worldly success.

As a regular contributor to the satiric magazine Punch between 1844 and 1851, Thackeray finally achieved widespread recognition. His most famous contribution was The Snobs of England, by One of Themselves (1846-1847). Through a series of satiric character sketches, it made a critical survey of the manners of a period in which old standards of behavior and social relationships had been shaken by the redistribution of wealth and power effected by industrialism.

Thackeray's Novels

Vanity Fair (1847-1848) established Thackeray's fame permanently. Set in the time just before and after the Battle of Waterloo, this novel departed from convention in having no hero or heroine and no plot in the conventional sense. It is a portrait of society centered on three families interrelated by acquaintance and marriage, the events of whose lives are organized by the broad movement of time rather than artificial complication and resolution. This "formlessness" helps to create an illusion of reality, given substance by an infinitude of authentic details in the description of the actions of daily life and in the differentiation of character by style of speech. In the irrepressibly resourceful, though amoral, Becky Sharp, Thackeray created one of fiction's most engaging characters.

In Pendennis (1849-1850) Thackeray concentrated on one character. The story of the development of a young writer, it draws in the first part on his own life at school, at college, and as a journalist. The second half, which he wrote after a severe illness, lost the novel's focus. Its ostensible theme, Pen's struggle to choose between a practical, worldly life and domestic virtue, presents only a superficial analysis of character and a doubtful moral accommodation.

The History of Henry Esmond (1852), Thackeray's most carefully planned and executed work, is a historical novel set in the 18th century. He felt a temperamental sympathy with this age of satire and urbane wit, and he had made a significant contribution to a revival of interest in it the year before in a popular series of lectures, The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. Esmond presents a vivid and convincing realization of the manners and historical background of the period and contains some of his most complex and firmly controlled characters.

The Newcomes (1854-1855) returns to the method of serial improvisation used for Vanity Fair. Supposedly written by the hero of Pendennis, it chronicles the moral history of four generations of an English family. The most massive and complex of Thackeray's social panoramas, it is also the darkest in its relentless portrayal of the defeat of humane feeling by false standards of respectability.

Feeling that he had written himself out, Thackeray returned to earlier works for subjects for his later novels, and his narrators became increasingly garrulous in their familiar moralism. The Virginians (1858-1859) follows the fortunes of Henry Esmond's grandsons in the United States, and The Adventures of Philip (1862) continues "A Shabby Genteel Story."

Thackeray's later career was varied by an unsuccessful campaign for Parliament as a reform candidate in 1857 and by two lecture trips to the United States in 1852 and 1855. A founding editor of the Cornhill Magazine, he served it from 1859 to 1862. A massive person, 6 feet 3 inches tall, Thackeray was a genial and modest man, fond of good food and wine. In the years of his success he candidly took great pleasure in the amenities of the society that he portrayed so critically in his novels. He died on Dec. 24, 1863, in London.

Further Reading

Gordon N. Ray edited Thackeray's Letters and Private Papers (4 vols., 1945-1946) and wrote the comprehensive, standard biography, in two volumes: Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (1955) and The Age of Wisdom (1958). A reliable shorter biography with a more consecutive narrative is Lionel Stevenson, The Showman of Vanity Fair: The Life of William Makepeace Thackeray (1947; repr. 1968). Good critical studies are Geoffrey Tillotson, Thackeray the Novelist (1954), and John Loofbourow, Thackeray and the Form of Fiction (1964).

Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-63). Novelist. Born in Calcutta, he was educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge. This Indian background and his public school were to figure prominently in The Newcomes (1853-5). He was a notable early contributor to Punch (founded 1841) and to Fraser's Magazine (founded 1830) and in 1860 became the editor of the dynamic new Cornhill Magazine. His real breakthrough came with the monthly part serialization of Vanity Fair (1847-8), a novel set at the time of Waterloo and its aftermath.

Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–63), English novelist and author of The Rose and the Ring (1855). This satirical fairy story, subtitled ‘a fireside pantomime for great and small children’, was written to amuse his two daughters who were in Rome with him in 1853. The preface describes how they wanted to give a Twelfth Night party, but that no shop in Rome could provide ‘the characters—those funny painted pictures of the King, the Queen, the Lover, the Lady, the Dandy, the Captain, and so on, with which our young ones are wont to recreate themselves at this festive time’. Thackeray thereupon drew the characters and wove a story round them. We see King Valoroso and his queen on facing pages—‘Here behold the monarch sit | With her majesty opposite’; this running commentary in couplets continues through the book. Valoroso has usurped the throne of his nephew, Prince Giglio, who has been encouraged to lapse into a state of unambitious indolence. At Giglio's christening the gift of Fairy Blackstick—bored with necromancy after two or three thousand years—merely had been that he should have ‘a little misfortune’. She had made a similar wish at the christening of Princess Rosalba of Crim Tartary, whose identity is lost when she is a small child, and who becomes maid to Princess Angelica, Valoroso's daughter. The rose and the ring are gifts that Blackstick had once bestowed on godchildren, and have been passed on; they have the power of making wearers seem attractive—even the lumpish Prince Bulbo who comes to woo Angelica.

There are many subsidiary comic characters, among them the hideous Countess Gruffanuff and her husband, porter at Valoroso's palace, who is turned into a door knocker by Blackstick as a punishment for his insolence. The story is labyrinthine in its complexity, and the only moral is a flippant one; Giglio grasps that to be attractive he must have education. He departs for ‘Bosforo’ (Oxford) where he studies assiduously, then discards his books and goes off to win back his throne. The story finishes with the marriages of Giglio and Rosalba (their respective misfortunes now ended) and of Bulbo and Angelica, Gruffanuff's husband having ceased to be a door knocker just in time to prevent the marriage of the Countess to Giglio, who had once unguardedly proposed to her.

Bibliography

• Sorensen, Gail D., ‘Thackeray's “The Rose and the Ring”: A Novelist's Fairy Tale’, Mythlore, 15.3 (spring 1989).
• Tremper, Ellen, ‘Commitment and Escape: The Fairy Tales of Thackeray, Dickens, and Wilde’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 2.1 (1978).

— Gillian Avery

Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-1863), English novelist, essayist, and travel writer, who visited Ireland in 1840 and then in 1842, under contract to produce The Irish Sketch Book (1843). Charles Lever, in whose home it was completed, claimed that the author avoids passing judgement on the dominant political questions of the day; however, Thackeray persistently points out examples of sectarian prejudice on both sides, while a preface supporting Home Rule [see Irish Parliamentary Party] was suppressed by the publisher. Thackeray's journey took him to all the major towns and scenic places. He warmed to the Irish people, making much of their good humour and intelligence. The Adventures of Mr James Freney (1764), a chap-book life of a rapparee found in a Galway hotel, gave him a model for The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844). His friendship with Lever broke down when he produced a parody of the latter's prose and verse in ‘Phil Fogarty, by Harry Rollicker’, one of the Novels from Eminent Hands (1847), and he was caricatured as Elias Howle in Roland Cashel (1850) in return.

This noted novelist was introduced to the phenomena of Spiritualism during a lecture tour in the United States, when he attended a séance with the famous medium D. D. Home. He also observed the rapping phenomena of Ann (Leah) Underhill, one of the Fox sisters. His sympathetic reaction was described in Underhill's book The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (1885). This experience and subsequent observations with Home led Thackeray to endorse the sincerity of the anonymous account (written by Robert Bell) "Stranger Than Fiction." It was published in the Cornhill Magazine and edited by Thackeray. He was severely criticized for this apparent endorsement of Spiritualism.

However, it seems that, in fact, his attitude was somewhat ambiguous. In a letter to his friends Mrs. Thomas F. Elliot and Kate Perry, he states: "Yes I have seen the Rappers, and the table moving, and heard the Spirits. The moving of tables is undoubted, the noises and knocks (continual raps following the person who has the gift of eliciting them) some natural unexplained phenomenon but the Spirits is of course dire humbug and imposture. They try to guess at something and hit or miss as may be. 1000 misses for one hit—It is a most dreary and foolish superstition…. But the physical manifestations are undoubt ed—Tables moving lifted up and men even lifted off the ground to the ceiling so some are ready to swear—but though I do not believe in this until I see it; I wouldn't have believed in a table turning 3 weeks ago—and that I have seen and swear to…."

Both Thackeray and his friend Charles Dickens had the highest regard for John Elliotson, a pioneer of mesmerism who was later converted to Spiritualism after initial skepticism. Thackeray based his character "Dr. Goodenough" in Pendennis and The Newcomes on Elliotson, and dedicated the former novel to him.

Sources:

Goldfarb, Russell M., and Clare R. Goldfarb. Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century Letters. New Brunswick, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1978.

Underhill, A. Leah. The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism. New York: Thomas R. Knox, 1885. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1976.

Quotes:

"Except for the young or very happy, I can't say I am sorry for anyone who dies."

"Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you."

"When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise."

"It's not dying for faith that's so hard, it's living up to it."

"'Tis not the dying for a faith that's so hard... 'Tis the living up to it that's difficult."

"Those who forgets their friends to follow those of a higher status are truly snobs."

See more famous quotes by William M. Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray
Born	William Makepeace Thackeray 18 July 1811 (1811-07-18) Calcutta, India
Died	24 December 1863 (1863-12-25) London, England
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	English
Writing period	1829-1864 (published posthumously)
Genres	Historical Fiction
Notable work(s)	Vanity Fair
Spouse(s)	Isabella Gethin Shawe
Influences John Bunyan
Influenced George Orwell, Charlotte Brontë

William Makepeace Thackeray (pronounced /ˈθækəri/; 18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Works 3 Family life and background 4 Reputation and legacy 5 See also 6 List of works 7 References 8 References 9 External links

Biography

Thackeray, an only child, was born in Calcutta, India, where his father, Richmond Thackeray (1 September 1781 – 13 September 1815), held the high rank of secretary to the board of revenue in the British East India Company. His mother, Anne Becher (1792–1864) was the second daughter of Harriet and John Harman Becher who was also a secretary (writer) for the East India Company.

William had been sent to England earlier, at the age of five, with a short stopover at St. Helena where the imprisoned Napoleon was pointed out to him. He was educated at schools in Southampton and Chiswick and then at Charterhouse School, where he was a close friend of John Leech. He disliked Charterhouse,^[1] parodying it in his later fiction as "Slaughterhouse." (Nevertheless Thackeray was honored in the Charterhouse Chapel with a monument after his death.) Illness in his last year there (during which he reportedly grew to his full height of 6'3") postponed his matriculation at Trinity College, Cambridge, until February 1829. Never too keen on academic studies, he left the University in 1830, though some of his earliest writing appeared in university publications The Snob and The Gownsman.^[2]

He travelled for some time on the continent, visiting Paris and Weimar, where he met Goethe. He returned to England and began to study law at the Middle Temple, but soon gave that up. On reaching the age of 21 he came into his inheritance but he squandered much of it on gambling and by funding two unsuccessful newspapers, The National Standard and The Constitutional for which he had hoped to write. He also lost a good part of his fortune in the collapse of two Indian banks. Forced to consider a profession to support himself, he turned first to art, which he studied in Paris, but did not pursue it except in later years as the illustrator of some of his own novels and other writings.

Thackeray portrayed by Eyre Crowe, 1845

Thackeray's years of semi-idleness ended after he met and, on 20 August 1836, married Isabella Gethin Shawe (1816-1893), second daughter of Matthew Shawe, a colonel, who had died after extraordinary service, primarily in India, and his wife, Isabella Creagh. Their three daughters were Anne Isabella (1837-1919), Jane (1837; died at 8 months) and Harriet Marian (1840-1875). He now began "writing for his life," as he put it, turning to journalism in an effort to support his young family.

He primarily worked for Fraser's Magazine, a sharp-witted and sharp-tongued conservative publication, for which he produced art criticism, short fictional sketches, and two longer fictional works, Catherine and The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Later, through his connection to the illustrator John Leech, he began writing for the newly created Punch magazine, where he published The Snob Papers, later collected as The Book of Snobs. This work popularized the modern meaning of the word "snob".

Tragedy struck in his personal life as his wife succumbed to depression after the birth of their third child in 1840. Finding he could get no work done at home, he spent more and more time away, until September of that year, when he noticed how grave her condition was. Struck by guilt, he took his ailing wife to Ireland. During the crossing she threw herself from a water-closet into the sea, from which she was rescued. They fled back home after a four-week domestic battle with her mother. From November 1840 to February 1842 she was in and out of professional care, her condition waxing and waning.

Caricature of Thackeray by Thackeray

In the long run, she deteriorated into a permanent state of detachment from reality, unaware of the world around her. Thackeray desperately sought cures for her, but nothing worked, and she ended up confined in a home near Paris. She remained there until 1893, outliving her husband by thirty years. After his wife's illness, Thackeray became a de facto widower, never establishing another permanent relationship. He did pursue other women, in particular Mrs. Jane Brookfield and Sally Baxter. In 1851 Mr. Brookfield barred Thackeray from further visits to or correspondence with Jane. Baxter, an American twenty years his junior whom he met during a lecture tour in New York City in 1852, married another man in 1855.

In the early 1840s, Thackeray had some success with two travel books, The Paris Sketch Book and The Irish Sketch Book. Later in the decade, he achieved some notoriety with his Snob Papers, but the work that really established his fame was the novel Vanity Fair, which first appeared in serialized instalments beginning in January 1847. Even before Vanity Fair completed its serial run, Thackeray had become a celebrity, sought after by the very lords and ladies he satirized; they hailed him as the equal of Dickens.

He remained "at the top of the tree", as he put it, for the remaining decade and a half of his life, producing several large novels, notably Pendennis, The Newcomes, and The History of Henry Esmond, despite various illnesses, including a near fatal one that struck him in 1849 in the middle of writing Pendennis. He twice visited the United States on lecture tours during this period.

Thackeray

Thackeray also gave lectures in London on the English humourists of the eighteenth century, and on the first four Hanoverian monarchs. The latter series was published in book form as The Four Georges. In Oxford, he stood unsuccessfully as an independent for Parliament. He was narrowly beaten by Cardwell (1070 votes, against 1005 for Thackeray).

In 1860, Thackeray became editor of the newly established Cornhill Magazine, but was never comfortable as an editor, preferring to contribute to the magazine as a columnist, producing his Roundabout Papers for it.

His health worsened during the 1850s and he was plagued by the recurring stricture of the urethra that laid him up for days at a time. He also felt he had lost much of his creative impetus. He worsened matters by over-eating and drinking and avoiding exercise, though he enjoyed horseback riding and kept a horse. He could not break his addiction to spicy peppers, further ruining his digestion. On 23 December 1863, after returning from dining out and before dressing for bed, Thackeray suffered a stroke and was found dead on his bed in the morning. His death at the age of fifty-two was entirely unexpected, and shocked his family, friends, and reading public. An estimated 7000 people attended his funeral at Kensington Gardens. He was buried on 29 December at Kensal Green Cemetery, and a memorial bust sculpted by Marochetti can be found in Westminster Abbey.

Works

Thackeray began as a satirist and parodist, with a sneaking fondness for roguish upstarts like Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Barry Lyndon in The Luck of Barry Lyndon and Catherine in Catherine. In his earliest works, writing under such pseudonyms as Charles James Yellowplush, Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Savage Fitz-Boodle, he tended towards the savage in his attacks on high society, military prowess, the institution of marriage and hypocrisy.

Title-page to Vanity Fair, drawn by Thackeray, who furnished the illustrations for many of his earlier editions.

One of his very earliest works, "Timbuctoo" (1829), contained his burlesque upon the subject set for the Cambridge Chancellor's medal for English verse, (the contest was won by Tennyson with "Timbuctoo"). His writing career really began with a series of satirical sketches now usually known as The Yellowplush Papers, which appeared in Fraser's Magazine beginning in 1837. These were adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2009, with Adam Buxton playing Charles Yellowplush.^[3]

Between May 1839 and February 1840, Fraser's published the work sometimes considered Thackeray's first novel, Catherine, originally intended as a satire of the Newgate school of crime fiction but ending up more as a rollicking picaresque tale in its own right.

In The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a novel serialized in Fraser's in 1844, Thackeray explored the situation of an outsider trying to achieve status in high society, a theme he developed much more successfully in Vanity Fair with the character of Becky Sharp, the artist's daughter who rises nearly to the heights by manipulating the other characters.

He is best known now for Vanity Fair, with its deft skewerings of human foibles and its roguishly attractive heroine. His large novels from the period after this, once described unflatteringly by Henry James as examples of "loose baggy monsters", have faded from view, perhaps because they reflect a mellowing in the author, who became so successful with his satires on society that he seemed to lose his zest for attacking it.

The later works include Pendennis, a sort of bildungsroman depicting the coming of age of Arthur Pendennis, a kind of alter ego of Thackeray's who also features as the narrator of two later novels: The Newcomes and The Adventures of Philip. The Newcomes is noteworthy for its critical portrayal of the "marriage market", while Philip is noteworthy for its semi-autobiographical look back at Thackeray's early life, in which the author partially regains some of his early satirical zest.

Also notable among the later novels is The History of Henry Esmond, in which Thackeray tried to write a novel in the style of the eighteenth century. In fact, the eighteenth century held a great appeal for Thackeray. Not only Esmond but also Barry Lyndon and Catherine are set then, as is the sequel to Esmond, The Virginians, which takes place in America and includes George Washington as a character who nearly kills one of the protagonists in a duel.

Family life and background

Anne Becher and William Makepeace Thackeray, c.1813

Thackeray's father, Richmond, was born at South Mimms and went to India in 1798 at the age of sixteen to assume his duties as writer (secretary) with the East India Company. Richmond fathered a daughter, Sarah Redfield, born in 1804, by Charlotte Sophia Rudd, his native and possibly Eurasian mistress, the mother and daughter being named in his will. Such liaisons were common among gentlemen of the East India Company, and it formed no bar to his later courting and marrying William's mother.^[4]

Anne Becher, born 1792, was "one of the reigning beauties of the day", a daughter of John Harmon Becher (Collector of the South 24 Parganas district d. Calcutta, 1800), of an old Bengal civilian family "noted for the tenderness of its women". Anne Becher, her sister Harriet and widowed mother Harriet had been sent back to India by her authoritarian guardian grandmother, widow Ann Becher, in 1809 on the Earl Howe. Anne's grandmother had told her that the man she loved, Henry Carmichael-Smyth, an ensign of the Bengal Engineers whom she met at an Assembly Ball in Bath, Somerset during 1807, had died & Henry was told that Anne was no longer interested in him . This was not true. Though Carmichael-Smyth was from a distinguished Scottish military family, , Anne's grandmother went to extreme lengths to thwart their marriage; surviving family letters state that she wanted a better match for her Granddaughter. .^[5]

Anne Becher and Richmond Thackeray were married in Calcutta on 13 October 1810. Their only child, William, was subsequently born on 18 July 1811.^[6]

c.1813 there was a fine miniature portrait of the exuberant and youthful Anne Becher Thackeray and William Makepeace Thackeray at about age 2, done in Madras by George Chinnery.^[7]

Her family's deception was unexpectedly revealed in 1812, when Richmond Thackeray unwittingly invited to dinner the supposedly dead Carmichael-Smyth. After Richmond's death of a fever on 13 September 1815, Anne married Henry Carmichael-Smyth on 13th March 1817, but they did not return to England until 1820, though they had sent William off to school there more than three years before. The separation from his mother had a traumatic effect on the young Thackeray which he discusses in his essay "On Letts's Diary" in The Roundabout Papers.

He is British comedian Al Murray's great-great-great-grandfather.^[8]

Reputation and legacy

During the Victorian era, Thackeray was ranked second only to Charles Dickens, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair. In that novel he was able to satirize whole swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It also features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp. As a result, unlike Thackeray's other novels, it remains popular with the general reading public; it is a standard fixture in university courses and has been repeatedly adapted for movies and television.

In Thackeray's own day, some commentators, such as Anthony Trollope, ranked his History of Henry Esmond as his greatest work, perhaps because it expressed Victorian values of duty and earnestness, as did some of his other later novels. It is perhaps for this reason that they have not survived as well as Vanity Fair, which satirizes those values.

Thackeray saw himself as writing in the realistic tradition and distinguished himself from the exaggerations and sentimentality of Dickens. Some later commentators have accepted this self-evaluation and seen him as a realist, but others note his inclination to use eighteenth-century narrative techniques, such as digressions and talking to the reader, and argue that through them he frequently disrupts the illusion of reality. The school of Henry James, with its emphasis on maintaining that illusion, marked a break with Thackeray's techniques.

Though Edward Bulwer-Lytton is credited with originating the phrase "the Great Unwashed", the earliest citation of it to be found in his oeuvre is in "The Parisians" of 1872, while Thackeray used it as early as 1850 in "Pendennis", in an ironic context implying the phrase would be known to his readers.

2 Palace Green, a house built for Thackeray in the 1860s, is currently the permanent residence of the Israeli Embassy to the United Kingdom.[1]

See also

• Anne Isabella Thackeray
• Barry Lyndon, the film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick

List of works

Wikisource has original works written by or about: William Makepeace Thackeray

• The Yellowplush Papers (1837) - ISBN 0-8095-9676-8
• Catherine (1839-40) - ISBN 1-4065-0055-0
• A Shabby Genteel Story (1840) - ISBN 1-4101-0509-1
• The Irish Sketchbook (1843) - ISBN 0-86299-754-2
• The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), filmed as Barry Lyndon by Stanley Kubrick - ISBN 0-19-283628-5
• The Book of Snobs (1848), which popularised that term- ISBN 0-8095-9672-5
• Vanity Fair (1848) - ISBN 0-14-062085-0
• Pendennis (1848–1850) - ISBN 1-4043-8659-9
• Rebecca and Rowena (1850), a parody sequel of Ivanhoe - ISBN 1-84391-018-7
• The Paris Sketchbook (1852), featuring Roger Bontemps
• Men's Wives (1852) - ISBN 0-14-062085-1
• The History of Henry Esmond (1852) - ISBN 0-14-143916-5

• The Newcomes (1855) - ISBN 0-460-87495-0
• The Rose and the Ring (1855) - ISBN 1-4043-2741-X
• The Virginians (1857–1859) - ISBN 1-4142-3952-1

• The Adventures of Philip (1862) - ISBN 1-4101-0510-5
• Denis Duval (1864) - ISBN 1-4191-1561-8
• Sketches and Travels in London
• Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo
• Stray Papers: Being Stories, Reviews, Verses, and Sketches (1821-1847)

References

• Sheldon Goldfarb Catherine: A Story (The Thackeray Edition). University of Michigan Press, 1999.
• Ferris, Ina. William Makepeace Thackeray. Boston: Twayne, 1983.
• Monsarrat, Ann. An Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man, 1811-1863. London: Cassell, 1980.
• Peters, Catherine. Thackeray’s Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• Prawer, Siegbert S.: Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray's German Discourse. Oxford : Legenda, 1997.
• Prawer, Siegbert S.: Israel at Vanity Fair: Jews and Judaism in the Writings of W. M. Thackeray. Leiden : Brill, 1992.
• Prawer, Siegbert S.: W. M. Thackeray's European sketch books : a study of literary and graphic portraiture. P. Lang, 2000.
• Ray, Gordon N. Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955.
• Ray, Gordon N. Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, 1847-1863. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957.
• Ritchie, H.T. Thackeray and His Daughter. Harper and Brothers, 1924.
• Shillingsburg, Peter. William Makepeace Thackeray: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
• Williams, Ioan M. Thackeray. London: Evans, 1968.

References

1. ^ Dunton, Larkin (1896). The World and Its People. Silver, Burdett. p. 25. 
2. ^ Thackeray, William Makepeace in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
3. ^ "The Yellowplush Papers". British Comedy Guide. http://www.comedy.org.uk/guide/radio/the_yellowplush_papers/. Retrieved 2009-02-09. 
4. ^ Menon, Anil (29 March 2006). "William Makepeace Thackeray: The Indian In The Closet". Round Dice. Anil Menon. http://yet.typepad.com/round_dice/2006/03/william_makepea.html. Retrieved 2009-02-10. 
5. ^ Alexander, Eric (2007). "Ancestry of William Thackeray". Henry Cort Father of the Iron Trade. henrycort.net. http://www.henrycort.net/hrthack.htm. Retrieved 2009-02-10. 
6. ^ Gilder, Jeannette Leonard; Joseph Benson Gilder (15 May 1897). The Critic: An Illustrated Monthly Review of Literature, Art, and Life (Original from Princeton University, Digitized 18 April 2008 ed.). Good Literature Pub. Co.. pp. 335. http://books.google.com/books?id=MTMZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PT346&lpg=PT346&dq=%22Richmond+Thackeray%22+died&source=web&ots=wUoXo_Ce50&sig=yMGjd8JuUg7p1deKfy2dblNrseM&hl=en&ei=D9SRSf-CCY-ctwe-pcTgCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result. 
7. ^ Ooty Well Preserved & Flourishing
8. ^ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/comedy/3663518/Prime-time-gentlemen-please.html

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: William Makepeace Thackeray

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: William Makepeace Thackeray

• The Thackerays in India and Some Calcutta Graves By William Wilson Hunter
• Works available at eBooks @ Adelaide
• Works by William Makepeace Thackeray at Project Gutenberg
• On Charity and Humor, discourse on behalf of a charitable organization
• Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray by Peter L. Shillingsburg
• "Bluebeard's Ghost" by W. M. Thackeray (1843)
• PSU's Electronic Classics Series William Makepeace Thackeray site

Persondata
NAME	Thackeray, William Makepeace
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Novelist
DATE OF BIRTH	18 July 1811
PLACE OF BIRTH	Calcutta, India
DATE OF DEATH	24 December 1863
PLACE OF DEATH	London, England

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