Thackeray the sentimental sceptic - writer William Makepeace Thackeray

Contemporary Review, June, 1993 by Donald Bruce

OPPRESSED as he was by his sense of a lost past and a solitary present spent in either defeat or disillusion, W. M. Thackeray was readily attracted by whatever was stable in an age of uncertainty. Although there is little distinct landscape in his novels, and even in his travel books his response to scenery is largely anecdotal, his heart warms to the substantially unchanging streets, each having its own social tradition, of such places as London, Brighton and Paris. Like his cockney excursionist in Vanity Fair, Thackeray is 'a lover of human nature rather than of prospects of any kind'.(1) In spite of that, Thackeray remains a poet and a scholar of the urban scene. He is acute in the distinctions implied by different London addresses: between Becky Sharp's Brompton and Amelia Sedley's Fulham, geographically adjoining suburbs, but socially quite disparate. Nobody understood better than Thackeray the dividing line drawn through London by Regent Street and its continuations. To the west of the line lived the four or five hundred people who constituted fashionable society in 1847.(2)

The opposition of western to eastern London is as marked in Thackeray's novels as it is in Restoration Comedy. Like the hero of a play by Congreve, Rawdon Crawley exclaims of George Osborne, whom he is modishly bilking at cards, 'Hang these City fellows, they must bleed; and I've not done with him yet, I can tell you' (Vanity Fair, chapter 14). Major Pendennis, although he has lived in London for much of his life, cannot find his way to a district so unfashionable as the Temple and, when he is forced to go there, sends his manservant to plot a route for him (Pendennis, chapter 29).

Thackeray never moved into patrician Mayfair, although he did reside immediately north of it in Albion Street and a little south of it in Jermyn Street; which is appropriate to his position as a social commentator. He observes Mayfair from a distance, not as an admirer but as a spy. He belongs to neither high life nor to low. As he claims, he 'is just as familiar with Newgate as with the palaces of our revered aristocracy, and has seen the outside of both' (Vanity Fair, chapter 6). He settled in the remote purlieus of Kensington, haunted as it was by the ghosts of the late Stuarts who had cast such a spell over him. It is true that he is more in sympathy, although it is a teasing sympathy, with Major Pendennis and Rawdon Crawley than with James Yellowplush or the Mosses of Wardour Street. He identifies himself with Henry Esmond and Arthur Pendennis, certainly; but also with the humbly born artist John James Ridley, in whose person he once planned to write a novel (Ray II,p.265). Thackeray's mightiest aristocrat, the Marquis of Steyne, also lives outside Mayfair, in one of the squares north of Oxford Street, as if as scornful as Thackeray himself of such foolish demarcations. He and Thackeray are wilful outsiders in their contempt for mere fashion.

London was important to Thackeray as providing a firm setting, at least, for his flitting mutabilities: London as Colonel Newcome witnessed it between two disappointed retreats to India, where he was supporting London's opulence, on a summer evening at five o'clock:

Horses under the charge of men in red jackets are pacing up and down St. James's Street. Cabmen on the stand are regaling with beer. Gentlemen with grooms behind them pass towards the Park (Newcomes, chapter 6).

Mere place-names become evocative. The impoverished paterfamilias vacates his house in Harley Street and subsides into lodgings in Pentonville or Kensington, yet finds that his neighbours respect him more in those outlying districts: 'If I cannot be first in Piccadilly, let me try Hatton Garden, and see whether I cannot lead the ton there' (Newcomes, chapter 9). But these traditions and associations do not last forever. Certain districts become fashionable or unfashionable. Thackeray contemplates the decline, in Victorian times, of such quarters as Portland Place and Bedford Square, and compares their downfall to that of conquered cities in India -- Agra, Benares and Lucknow -- where shahs and sultans once ruled (Newcomes, chapter 8). The Hon. Frederick Deuceace's house in Curzon Street is bought out of his savings by Miss Crawley's former butler, Raggles, who rents it to Miss Crawley's disinherited nephew, Rawdon. Major Pendennis's valet enriches himself by extortionate money-lending and becomes his master's landlord by acquiring the house in which Major Pendennis lodges.

Thackeray views such changes of ownership as evidence of the shift of power from land-owners to financiers: these transactions are signs of the erosion of an old order. The financiers had been quietly gaining an ascendancy for more than two centuries, as Thackeray's Bayhams and Warringtons well knew. In 1851, the year before the publication of Henry Esmond, the national income from industry and trade was more than twice that from landed property.(3) As George Warrington, Henry Esmond's descendant, rightly although boastfully tells the banker Barnes Newcome, George's ancestor drank claret 'and wore a motto round his leg long before a Newcome showed his pale face in Lombard Street' (Newcomes, chapter 36). Not until the Victorian period, which Thackeray deplores as a combination of insolence and bankruptcy among the great folk and cringing and flattery among the small, did plutocracy take the place, beyond question, of aristocracy (Christmas Books: 'The Kickleburys on the Rhine'). Jeames de la Pluche, called James Yellowplush in his days as a footman, makes a fortune by investing in railway shares and, as a result, becomes the patron of the Earl of Bareacres and his family. Lord Bareacres offers Jeames his daughter in marriage on the understanding that Jeames will pay off her brother's debts. Although 'as proud as Lucifer', Lord Bareacres endures Jeames's familiarities: 'I call him, "Bareacres, my old buck!" and I see him wince. It does my 'eart good' (The Yellowplush Correspondence, chapter 24). 'Our higher orders,' Thackeray explains, 'are not such mere haughty aristocrats as the ignorant represent them: on the contrary, if a man has money they will hold out their hands to him, eat his dinners, dance at his balls, marry his daughters' (Pendennis, chapter 38). Old-fashioned Colonel Newcome greets the swindler Rummun Loll with extreme haughtiness but later ruins himself by loyalty to him. The facile people of the world of fashion prostrate themselves to Loll for as long as they believe him to be wealthy. The men make themselves sick smoking hookahs with him. Their daughters hang over him, their blonde ringlets brushing his shoulders. 'By Gad,' exclaims Barnes Newcome, 'a fellow who's rich in London may have the pick of any gal' (Newcomes, chapter 8).