Thackeray: man of letters

Contemporary Review, April, 1995 by Richard Mullen

Last month Oxford University Press brought out an excellent paperback edition of The Newcomes (1853-55). This is a vast, sprawling and engaging three volume novel which contains one of the most admired of all Victorian fictional characters, Colonel Newcome. The Oxford edition benefits greatly from the lengthy and informative footnotes as well as the Introduction provided by the editor, Andrew Sandars of Birkbeck College, University of London. He shows how Thackeray is connected to some of the 'experiments and freedoms of twentieth century modernism' and in a perceptive comment notes that 'Thackeray always disconcerts his readers'.

Andrew Sandars in his edition of The Newcomes pays warm tribute to another remarkable piece of scholarship performed by Edgar Harden. This is a two volume Annotations for the Selected Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. This book removes one of the great barriers that prevents Thackeray from achieving the popularity currently enjoyed by Dickens and Trollope. Thackeray was such a well-read writer that he is constantly making allusions to books and events that have long been forgotten. The problem is made even worse by his habit of often doing this with strange spellings to indicate that his characters were making a bad attempt at speaking French or German or even recalling schoolboy Latin. That most devoted of all Thackeray critics, George Saintsbury, even admitted that 'honest persons who were not fools' could be confused by all this.

The Annotations provided by Edgar Harden and a team of eight other American and Canadian scholars makes it possible for any modern reader to understand these allusions in Thackeray's novels and most of his other major writings. One of the most remarkable things about this book is the way in which all the contributors manage to keep the notes as short as possible. Rarely do they stray over more than three lines. This discipline was no doubt necessary or these already massive volumes would have doubled or tripled. Of course, some may say these erudite and expensive volumes are of little value to ordinary readers. The fact that this is not so can be seen by looking at the Andrew Sandars edition of The Newcomes which as he says is built on the notes provided in the Annotations. Andrew Sandars then expands these notes to explain the allusions to the undergraduate or general reader. This is an excellent example of how genuine scholarship works.

The cost of these Thackeray volumes is undoubtedly high, but the work has been extensive and the cost of production must have been great. It amused me to see that my copy of the first two volumes of the Ray edition, which I had bought in York some years ago, had originally been given as a Christmas present in December 1945 to a lady in Richmond, Virginia (a city Thackeray much admired). The original label of the Richmond bookshop is still in these two volumes: $12.50. Yet when one reflects what that might buy in the months after the end of the Second World War, it does not seem that much less than the cost of the present volumes. For libraries and scholars and devoted Thackeray readers it is a cost well worth paying.