Thackeray the sentimental sceptic - writer William Makepeace Thackeray

Contemporary Review, June, 1993 by Donald Bruce

Dull and foolish though Amelia is, Dobbin's loyalty to her surrounds her with an aureole of interest; that, and her capacity for devotion, sometimes misplaced. For Thackeray, the trivial or even the paltry is ennobled by faithfulness. He leaves off satirising the Dowager Lady Castlewood when tears of family pride run down her rouged cheeks: 'a couple of rebellious tears made sad marks down those wrinkled old roses' (Esmond, Book II, chapter 15). Her rouge is not so good as Becky Sharp's, which is impervious to tears (Vanity Fair, chapter 48).

Colonel Newcome's death is all the more poignant as being the last affirmation of his constancy to Leonore de Florac, which has lasted for nearly fifty years. Amongst battles and fevers in India, and his marriage to another woman, he could not forget her. By her he is attended in his last hours: 'who would have come, as a work of religion, to any sick couch, much more to this one, where he lay for whose life she would gladly have given her own'. At the end the old man, in his confusion believing he is eighteen again, seizes Ethel Newcome's hand, mistaking it for that of Leonore, of whom Ethel has repeatedly reminded him, and calls out, 'Toujours, toujours'. It has been always for him.

Like Ethel Newcome, Arthur Pendennis abandons worldly schemes, which nearly lead to his marrying Blanche Amory, whom Thackeray characterises with a deadly effectiveness from her first appearance. 'My name is Blanche -- isn't it a pretty name?', she tells Laura Pendennis. 'Call me by it.' (Her name is really Betsy.) She sends Byronic messages on scented writing paper, and constantly wells spurious sensibility (Pendennis, chapter 73). In spite of the maudlin poems she writes in a notebook bound in blue velvet and gilt and labelled Mes Larmes, and although she pretends to be too ethereal to eat much at the dinner table when guests are present, Blanche Amory is as cruel and gluttonous as a Roman lady in Juvenal. She sticks pins in the arms of her maid (enslaved to her by the poverty of the maid's parents) and has plum-cakes and cream puddings sent up to her bedroom, where, according to the servants' gossip, she is visited at night by M. Mirobolant, the French cook employed by her stepfather (Pendennis, chapters 24, 37 and 61). Her origins, like her name, are invented by herself. Summing up Blanche is Laura's 'first lesson in the Cynical philosophy' (Pendennis, chapter 25). Laura concludes that 'she who is always speaking of her affections can have no heart'. Laura herself, who drops her eyes guiltily when she tries to give Mr. Pynsant a flirtatious look at the Ball in Baymouth, is no good at all at insincerity (Pendennis, chapter 28).

Thackeray was suspicious of conscious or uttered sentiment, and shows his dislike of it in his portrayal of such characters as Blanche Amory in Pendennis and Charles Honeyman in The Newcomes. He told his daughter Anne, 'I do not think it right ever to talk sentimentally about one's feelings' (Ray II, p.233). Yet all his admirable characters are recalled in the end to the life of the sentiments, and it is for the absence of feeling that others are condemned. He blames Ethel Newcome for her dulled heart: 'If there is no love more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied. Strew round it the flowers of youth. Wash it with tears of passion' (Newcomes, chapter 66). Her heart revives with the quickening of her pity for Colonel Newcome. It is washed with her own tears; and she is born for the second time in tears. Like Ethel Newcome, Arthur Pendennis returns from the worldly life to the sentimental retreat (Pendennis, chapter 60). His experiences, like those of Ethel, prove a School of the Heart.