Vanity Fair and vexation of spirit

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2002 by Mullen, Alexandra

In 1854, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, a literary lion in London after the successes of Vanity Fair and Pendennis, was enjoying a quiet vacation en famine in Rome where a convalescent young friend of the family needed entertaining. The tale that resulted, The Rose and the Ring, is one of Thackeray's most charming works, with one memorable creation: the Fairy Blackstick. Like your ordinary fairy, she used to turn "numberless wicked people into beasts, birds, milestones, clocks, pumps, bootjacks, umbrellas, or other absurd shapes" and give lovely gifts to her godchildren. But, being Thackeray's fairy, she had second thoughts about what constituted an appropriate present.

It was thought the Fairy, who was asked to be [Prince Giglio's] godmother, would at least have presented him with an invisible jacket, a flying horse, a Fortunatus's purse, or some other valuable token of her favor; but instead, Blackstick went up to the cradle of the child Giglio, when everybody was admiring him and complimenting his royal papa and mamma, and said, "My poor child, the best thing I can send you is a little misfortune," and this was all she would utter, to the disgust of Giglio's parents, who died very soon after.

This jest rests on a solid floor. At Thackeray's birth, he had a far-better-than-average family, education, opportunity, and fortune. But each of these gifts came with at least a little misfortune. Thackeray's story has recently found two worthy tellers in the academic Catherine Peters and the novelist D. J. Taylor.1

Thackeray's family included soldiers, sailors, clerics, scholars, and civil servants, many of whom were associated with either the Indian Civil Service or the East India Company. The marriage between Richmond Thackeray and Anne Becher seemed happy enough-India and elephants spell romance. But when Anne had been a fifteen-year-old in England, she had fallen in love with a dashing lieutenant on leave from the Bengal Engineers. Alas, like too many dashing lieutenants, he was an impoverished younger son. Anne's maternal grandmother, whose own daughter (Anne's mother) had proved a bolter, dealt strictly with the courtship: She told Lieutenant Carmichael-Smythe that Anne wanted nothing to do with him, and she told Anne that he was dead. Then she packed Anne off to India. Mrs. Becher's plan seemed to meet with success, and William Makepeace, born in Calcutta, was the result in 1811. Richmond Thackeray was appointed Collector of the Twenty-Four Pergunnahs in, where else, Bengal. One day Richmond brought an interesting young officer home to meet his wife. All novel readers can, of course, guess who it was. (For the most part, Thackeray's novels eschew such melodrama.)

Conveniently for the separated lovers, Richmond Thackeray died of a fever, and they were married perhaps a little sooner than seemly. Thackeray was fond of his stepfather and hardly remembered his father-a tall man rising out of the bath. But it's certainly safe to say that this triangular back-story gave rise to some odd family dynamics. Even thirty-five years after these events, Thackeray hesitated before hanging his father's portrait on his wall, fearing his mother would not be "over well pleased" to see it.

When Thackeray was five years old, he was sent back on the sixmonth voyage to England to be educated; he didn't see his mother again for three years. His school experiences did not make up for the loss. About his first boarding school, to which he was sent at the age of six, he remembered "hard bed, hard words, strange boys bullying, & laughing, and jarring you with their hateful merriment." He remembered, too, "the brutality of a man who began a Greek grammar with 'Tupto, I thrash!"'

In 1822, Thackeray was sent to Charterhouse, memorialized in his fiction as Slaughterhouse. The school was conveniently located near several London attractions: the trolling prostitutes on Holywell Street, the killing of beasts at the Smithfield slaughterhouses, and the killing of people on the Newgate scaffolds (executions were public until 1868). The school was under a newish, reform-minded headmaster in 1822, but Russell of Charterhouse was no Arnold of Rugby. In the classroom, one old boy recalled, Russell "despotically drilled [the boys] into passive servility and pedantic scholarship"; outside the classroom the boys were left to their own devices. The first words addressed to Thackeray by an older boy were "Come and frig me." Thackeray often drew on his schoolboy experiences in his fiction-Chapter 2 of the autobiographical Pendennis contains a lengthy example of Russell's sarcasm-but scenes such as these were obviously inappropriate for nicely brought-up young ladies and gentlemen. The irony did not escape him.

Thackeray spent most of his time at school avoiding work. A friend did his Greek verses (H. G. Liddell, later coauthor of every Greek student's peerless lexicon and father of Lewis Carroll's Alice). Thackeray drew comic pictures and went to plays. Cambridge proved more of the same, but with an enlarged scope for getting into debt. Thackeray left Trinity without a degree. He played at the law, dabbled in pictures, ventured into journalism and journal proprietorship, and traveled a bit on the Continent. In Paris, he might have caught the venereal disease that came to plague his life (Thackeray called France "the Incontinent"). In Weimar, home to the very elderly Goethe, Thackeray's ambitions changed somewhat. He wrote his mother: "the men here are all in some yeomanry uniform. If hereafter I go to other courts in Germany or in any other part of Europe, something of this sort is necessary as a court dress." His obliging mother bought him a cornetcy in the Devonshire yeomanry. Thackeray was mostly satisfied, "Only I don't think the pink rosettes look well on the leather breeches."