Thackeray the sentimental sceptic - writer William Makepeace Thackeray

Contemporary Review, June, 1993 by Donald Bruce

These old families at least observe a continuity of manners, which is something firm, and therefore admirable, to Thackeray amid the flux of rich middle-class innovation and pretentiousness during the reign of Queen Victoria. Sir Pitt Crawley entertains Becky Sharp shabbily enough, but she does not suffer at his house the brutish inhospitality of Old Sedley, who howls with glee at her discomfiture when eating curry, and teases her with a tradesman's aggressive banter (Vanity Fair, chapter 3). Worse still is Old Osborne, with his great florid, bogus coat-of-arms. Thackeray is remorseless in exposing moral or social pretence: the assumed heartiness of Hobson Newcome, the cold-blooded banker who acts the part of a jovial country squire, and rides every morning from nowhere more rural than Bryanstone Square into Threadneedle Street, where he remarks that it is good weather for hay, or too frosty for hunting (Newcomes, chapter 6). Barnes Newcome professes to hate King Henry VII for a wrong done to his supposed ancestor, invented for him by the College of Heralds (Newcomes, chapter 28). But the worst snobs in Thackeray are the lackeys, and near-lackeys such as Barry Lyndon. George Osborne's valet sneers at the Fulham lodging into which Old Sedley has been driven by his financial losses. He looks on 'in a very supercilious manner' as the shirt-sleeved landlord waters his roses, and pockets Old Sedley's over-lavish tip with 'a mixture of wonder and contempt' (Vanity Fair, chapter 34).

Thackeray is reluctant to say goodbye to any of his characters, and if he cannot preserve the character, at least tries to perpetuate the family. Becky Sharp, later Lady Crawley, writes hymns for Charles Honeyman's chapel, and Dobbin dines with Colonel Newcome, in The Newcomes. In The Virginians Henry Esmond's grandson is rescued from Indians by the Comte de Florac, and later earns a living as tutor to Harry Foker's grandfather (Virginians, chapters 51 and 84).

By such means Thackeray created the order within his fiction which he lacked in his own experience and, like Balzac, Trollope and Proust, peopled his inner world with a complete society. But it is a paper society, as he gloomily admits in The Newcomes. In that society he can, in spite of his first intentions, yield to his daughters and marry Ethel to Clive Newcome. He can provide Clive Newcome and Philip Firmin, by means of long-lost wills, with the income they are signally incapable of earning themselves. At the end of The Newcomes Thackeray bids a wry farewell to what he calls Fable-land:

And the poet of Fable-land rewards and punishes absolutely. He splendidly deals out bags of sovereigns, which won't buy anything; belabours wicked backs with awful blows, which do not hurt; endows heroines with preternatural beauty, and creates heroes, who, if ugly sometimes, yet possess a thousand good qualities, and usually end by being immensely rich; makes the hero and heroine happy at last, and happy ever after. Ah, happy, harmless Fable-land, where these things are (Newcomes, chapter 80)!