Thackeray

Thackeray, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE, novelist, was born on July 18, 1811, at Calcutta, where his father was employed in the Company's civil service. His mother had been Miss Anne Becher, and, her first husband having died five years after the novelists birth, she afterwards married Major Carmichael Smyth. Soon after his father's death Thackeray came to England, where he was put under the care of his aunt, Mrs. Ritchie, and when eleven he was sent to Charterhouse school, which figures in so many of his books. In 1829 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had among his contemporaries and friends Tennyson, Spedding, and Edward Fitzgerald. Leaving the university without taking his degree, he travelled for some time on the Continent, making long stays at Weimar, Rome, and Paris, which latter city always remained one of his favorite haunts. He read for the bar, though apparently not with great energy, and contemplated making painting his profession, but want of success in his work and the loss or a comfortable fortune, through the failure of an Indian bank and the collapse of newspaper speculations, induced him to turn to literatnre as a means of livelihood. In 1836 he had married Isabe11a, the daughter of Colonel Shawe (who, becoming insane in 1840, died early in 1894), and his circnmstances appear to have been straitened for many years after. All his early work is not known, but he became a regular contributor to Fraser, The New Monthly, and later on Punch, pouring out a vast quantity of sketches, stories criticisms and poetry but making no name with the general public. In 1840 he published his first book, The Paris Sketch Book, in 1841 Comic Tales and Sketches, while in the same year appeared The Hoggarty Diamond, The Shabby Genteel Story, which was afterward expanded into Philip, Barry Lyndon, a work full of powerful sarcasm, and Men's Wives. In 1843 he brought out his diary of a tour in Ireland as The Irish Sketch Book, and in 1846 the record of a journey to the East, From Cornhill to Cairo. It is not, however, by his early works, clever and able as they often are, that Thackeray has earned a place among great writers, but by his novels, of which the first commenced to come out in monthly parts in 1847 under the title of Vanity Fair. This first success, which firmly placed the author in popular favour, was followed by Pendennis (1848), Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1853), The Virginians (1857), Philip (1862), and Denis Duval (incomplete, 1863). Thackeray paid two visits to the United States, where he was cordially welcomed, in 1852 lecturing on The English Humorists of the 18th Century, and in 1855 on The Four Georges, the profits of these lectures, which he also delivered in England, placing him in comfortable circumstances. In 1857 he stood as a Liberal for Oxford city, but was beaten by Mr. Cardwell. In 1860 he was appointed the first editor of The Cornhill, in the pages of which magazine appeared The Roundabout Papers, Lovel the Widower, Philip, and Denis Duval, upon which he was at work when he died suddenly on Christmas Eve, 1863. Of plot there is little in his novels, which are valuable rather for their author's profound insight into human nature, his hatred of all shams and his sympathy with all that is pure and true, his humour and wit; and his limpid style.