Thackeray's memorials of defeat - author William Makepeace Thackeray

Contemporary Review, March, 1993 by Donald Bruce

She too is the dupe of her affections and hopes. The aged Beatrix of The Virginians goes over, in her dreams and her delirium, the happenings recounted at the end of Henry Esmond. Shunning Esmond, to her later regret, she was childish enough to believe the Stuart prince's promises of marriage (Virginians, ch. 85). 'I will see the prince,' she exclaims in her sleep fifty years later, 'I have a right to see him' (Virginians, ch. 35). Equally simple in her worldliness is Leonore de Blois, who marries the elderly Comte de Florac in order to please her father, while retaining a reticent love, unspoken for forty years, for Colonel Newcome. 'There are some laws so cruel that nature revolts against them and breaks them', Mme. de Florac finally tells Ethel Newcome, 'or we die in keeping them. I have been fifty years dying' (Newcomes, ch. 47). As Mme. de Florac writes to the Colonel himself, 'One supports the combats of life, but they are long, and one comes from them very wounded' (Newcomes, ch. 53). When she sees the Colonel's son Clive, who resembles his father, it is as if she has retraced her footsteps: 'Hope almost wakes up again out of the grave' (Newcomes, ch. 45).

Thackeray's characters sometimes relish their sentimental defeats too much. Emerging from his distemper in prison, Esmond becomes 'perhaps secretly vain of the sacrifice he had made' in renouncing his title as the true Lord Castlewood (Esmond, Book III, ch. 3). He writes a comedy called The Faithful Fool about his entanglement with Beatrix. When it is printed, merely nine copies are sold. Only John Dennis, the least respected critic of his age, praises it (Esmond, Book III, ch. 3). Esmond heads one chapter of his memoirs, 'An old story about a fool and a woman' (Esmond, Book II, ch. 10). His faithfulness and his foolishness tend so greatly towards outright dotage, in such episodes as that in which he gives Beatrix his ancestral diamonds for her marriage to his rival, that he nearly loses the reader's respect (Esmond, Book III, ch. 4). Even taking into account Rachel Esmond's jealousy, her impatience with Esmond's maudlin behaviour towards her daughter seems justified, especially when Esmond craves permission to kiss Beatrix's stockinged feet (Esmond, Book III, ch. 2).

The defeats, at least by preventing the disillusion which attends accomplished desires, allow dreams to continue. As Dobbin's wife, Amelia renews in Dobbin the misgivings she herself felt at the time of her marriage to George Osborne. She is described as being, after that marriage, the winner who has gained the prize and remains doubtful and unsatisfied (Vanity Fair, ch. 26). Her lot is 'already to be looking sadly and vaguely back; always to be pining for something which, when obtained, brought doubt and sadness rather than pleasure'. She is alarmed by the 'vast and dingy' state bedroom she shares with Osborne at the Cavendish Hotel, and misses her little white bed at Fulham, where she used to weep all night long because she despaired of marrying him. It is not that Amelia is fickle: she is beginning to find Osborne out. She, and later Dobbin, are cast down by their successes. They are like the winners at the casino in Rougetnoirbourg in Thackeray's The Kickleburys on the Rhine: 'the winners have the most anxious faces'. Until Mr. Titmarsh loses his winnings he is 'feverish, excited and uneasy'.