Thackeray's memorials of defeat - author William Makepeace Thackeray

Contemporary Review, March, 1993 by Donald Bruce

Thackeray is stumbling after a memory; sometimes after a memory, such as the heyday of the Hotel de Florac, which predates him. Partly because of his life-long habit of self-mockery, which led him to publish his early writings under such clowning pen-names as Ikey Solomons, George Fitz-Boodle, The Fat Contributor, Michael Angelo Titmarsh and James Yellowplush (later Jeames de la Pluche), but more because it served to dramatise his sense of the depredations of time, Thackeray often pretends to be a weary old gentleman. In A Shabby Genteel Story, the novel he left unfinished in 1834 at the age of twenty-nine, he claims to be over fifty. When he took it up again twenty years later, to continue it in The Adventures of Philip, he still had not reached the age of the imaginary narrator. For Thackeray, events are softened by time and distance. Charter-house School (where his nose was broken, like the marble faun's) goes under the scoffing name of Slaughterhouse in his early works, but in The Newcomes it becomes Greyfriars, Colonel Newcome's last refuge. Thackeray was wretched and ill-used there as a boy, yet he attended the Foundation Day ceremony a fortnight before his death (Ray II, p.414).

The Newcomes opens with Pendennis's lament for the time 'when the sun used to shine brighter'. That was in the days of his youth: 'As I recall them, the roses bloom again' (Pendennis, ch. 1). The sentiment is that of Beranger's song. Le Grenier, which Thackeray feelingly translated: In the brave days when I was twenty-one (Imitations of Beranger, no. 2). Pendennis's meditation is followed by a pluperfect of regret. Pendennis, reviewing a past which he mourns, introduces an older character, Colonel Newcome, who misses an antecedent past. The Colonel visits a music-hall he had known before his long absence in India, and deplores its deterioration. What they both miss, of course, is the zest of being young. In the same pluperfect of regret Harry Foker's guest, Lord Colchicum, envies Foker whilst Foker, in fact, is lamenting his wasted life over the melting ices and cut pine-apples at Richmond: '"I wish I was of his age", said the venerable Colchicum with a sigh, as he inclined his purple face towards a large goblet of claret' (Pendennis, ch. 41). Lord Colchicum hopes to rediscover his youth at the bottom of a glass, but he has forgotten, as he eyes Foker over the dessert, that youth too has its regrets. Foker has arrived in dejection at the easily reached limits of a life of pleasure. Whilst Colchicum is serene with his little dancer from the circus, Foker is sighing over his false Blanche Amory.

Misplaced attachments, themselves inducing change and instability, are common in Thackeray's novels. In Henry Esmond he chooses the Jacobite cause, rife in instances of wasted devotion. Looking back on the risks he took for the House of Stuart, Esmond comments on 'the treasures of loyalty they dissipated': If ever men had fidelity, 'twas they; if ever men squandered opportunity, 'twas they; and of all the enemies they had, they were the most fatal (Esmond, Book II, ch. 3). To the worthless Stuarts are added the worthless Castlewoods. Both dynasties misuse what has accrued to them through the romantic fidelity of Esmond, described by Beatrix Esmond in her old age as the only man of the family; an acknowledgement which comes too late, since by that time Esmond is dead (Virginians, ch. 2). Upon Beatrix he turned the whole spate of his ardour for the Castlewoods and because of her, most of all, he learned what he calls 'the silent teachings of adversity' (Esmond, Book 2, ch. 4).