Thackeray: man of letters

Contemporary Review, April, 1995 by Richard Mullen

It is just half a century since the late Professor Gordon Ray published the first two volumes of The Letters and Private Papers of William Make-peace Thackeray. Two further volumes followed in 1946 and since then these four large volumes have been one of the most frequently read, or at least frequently cited, sources for an understanding of the Victorian world. For many years it was known that more Thackeray letters were now available in manuscript libraries. This presented a potential editor and his publisher with a problem. Should they produce an entirely new collection of letters or some form of a supplement? Naturally the size of the previous edition will be the crucial factor with any new collection of an author's correspondence. Thus in 1983, when Professor N. John Hall produced his superb edition in two volumes of The Letters of Anthony Trollope he and his publishers (Stanford University Press) found it feasible to include all of Trollope's then known letters and this totally replaces Bradford Booth's one-volume Oxford edition of 1951. However such a course was impossible with Thackeray, given both the size of the previous edition and the number of new letters.

To compile an edition of the letters of a great author is no easy task and an editor opens himself to all sorts of criticism from mis-reading a scribbled word or neglecting to include a brief note or making a minor mistake in some footnote. It is an even harder chore when an editor has to merge his edition with an earlier one, particularly if that one has enjoyed wide acclaim. Professor Edgar Harden of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia faced all these problems but he has surmounted them with great energy and outstanding scholarship and has produced a two-volume Supplement to the Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray. Anyone with the slightest interest in Thackeray or in Victorian literature will be for ever in Edgar Harden's debt for this splendid edition.

The only criticism that I could make is that Professor Harden's use of the term 'Supplement' does not indicate the amazing extent of his achievement. Not only has he tracked down and recorded hundreds of new Thackeray letters, but he has given complete texts of letters that were only available in parts to Gordon Ray. In many cases Ray - who did his work in the days before the outbreak of war and during his own time in the US Navy - was dependent on printed sources, in many cases not wholly accurate, for some of his texts. In many of these cases the original manuscripts have now been found by Edgar Harden and he includes these corrected letters in his Supplement.

The letters discovered or included by Edgar Harden range from short social notes about dinner invitations to long letters revealing much about the deepest sorrow of Thackeray's life. There is one letter without a word in the text: all it contains is a large question mark. Even Edgar Harden's scholarship has not yet explained what that meant. Someone only glancing through volumes like this may wonder what is the purpose of including a short sentence about the time of a dinner. However this type of letter can sometimes show a pattern of friendships or date a meeting between people. In Thackeray's case it also gives clues to his health, which was so precarious in his last decade. ('I am 1/2 dead in bed with spasms' says one typical letter.) That is why an editor like Edgar Harden searches through scores of libraries and mounds of manuscripts to find even such a small scrap of information. Many of these letters come from that great repository of Thackeray manuscripts, the Morgan Library in New York. Anyone who has had the privilege of working there and examining the resplendent collection of Thackeray manuscripts, such as the opening chapters of Vanity Fair, knows that at least Edgar Harden could do his work in congenial surroundings. He also had a great benefit in Thackeray's handwriting. It seems so clear and easy to anyone used to the much more difficult handwriting of Anthony Trollope or the far worse one of the elderly Queen Victoria.

Professor Harden has organised his edition in a useful way so that a reader can use it easily in conjunction with the Ray edition. Gordon Ray assigned a number to every letter in his four volumes. The Harden Supplement employs the same numbers so one need only look at the number of a letter in the Ray edition and then see if the same number appears in the Harden volumes. If Professor Harden has found a letter that does not exist in Ray, he puts a letter, A, B, C and so forth behind Ray's number. Thus letter 10 in Ray is from February 1828 while letter 11 is another schoolboy letter by Thackeray written in January 1829. Therefore Professor Harden assigns the number 10A to the letter he has found from June 1828. It is a system easier to use than to describe. Among the many useful Appendices is one giving Professor Ray's corrections over the years to his own edition.

What, a reader may ask, does such a collection of letters tell us about Thackeray? It shows first of all how busy he was in his life and how he fought his way through several disasters: the loss of his fortune, the decline in his health, the long and frustrating ascent to literary celebrity and the difficulties of keeping his place at the top of Victorian literary world. We get a better idea of his later political opinions from a letter in 1861 where he says that his experiences in France and America developed his belief in 'a very moderate sensible aristocratic government' for, as he says, 'the politics of gentlemen are pretty much alike'. Most of all these new letters give us a greater understanding of the central tragedy of Thackeray's life: the complete mental breakdown of his young wife, Isabella, in 1840 after the birth of their third child.