Vanity Fair and vexation of spirit

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2002 by Mullen, Alexandra

This isn't exactly despair, or fatalism, or condemnation, or stoicism. Is it disinterest? indifference? accidie? I find this voice very attractive, but unsettling: Something's wrong, but now what should I do? As guides to how we should lead our lives, Dickens offers more energy, Oliphant more sympathy, Eliot more wisdom. In passages such as these, his most distinctive, Thackeray comes perilously near abnegating his responsibility as a human being, let alone as a moralist or satirist.

Thackeray's reputation now? He wrote one inimitably brilliant work (Vanity Fair), one wryly enjoyable one (Pendennis), some amusing pieces, and everything else is admirable but largely unreadable. Unlike Dickens, he was always smart, but only once a genius. In the final analysis, Thackeray too had a booth in Vanity Fair; he was not uncompromising. And he felt it.

Compared to Dickens-Mr. Popular Sentiment, as Trollope dubbed him-Thackeray has always been a more specialized taste. But he's been fortunate in his readers. Exemplary scholarly work has been done in the last half century by Gordon Ray, John Sutherland, Catherine Peters, and, on his witty illustrations, Joan Stevens. D. J. Taylor's Thackeray is not markedly different from the Thackeray of other authors-since Ray disinterred the middle-aged Thackeray's passion for Jane Brookfield there hasn't been much new to discover-and he draws on those earlier studies. But his book is responsible, intelligent, and-no small compliment these days-readable. Besides being a critic and editor (of some Everyman editions of Thackeray), Taylor is a novelist. This fact might partly explain the periodic interpolations of invented voices from various onlookers in Thackeray's life, such as a Frenchman who ran a hostelry where Thackeray once brought Isabella on a day trip from the asylum. I blame the biographer/novelist Peter Ackroyd for this sort of thing. If you share my distaste, you can be grateful that Taylor's imaginative pieces are short and placed between chapters and thus easy to avoid.

Taylor's being a novelist might also explain his eye for character and ear for tone. His selections from Thackeray's letters are wonderful. Appropriately for someone writing about Thackeray, Taylor can pen a good line: about Thackeray's Irish Sketch Book, he comments, "There is nothing quite so tedious as a Victorian travel book if you don't happen to be a Victorian"; on Thackeray's generosity later in life, "His letters from this time are full of stealthy acts of charity and schemes to set lame ducks back on their feet." Most impressive, Taylor is straightforward about a central problem in reading Thackeray, or any figure from the past. He acknowledges our inevitable difficulties in evaluating them without shortchanging either our reactions or the original feelings that inspired them. Here, for instance, is what Taylor has to say about Thackeray's courting letters to Isabella:

Rereading these letters over a century and a half after they were written, one notes what to a modern sensibility is a paradox-deeply felt affection contrasting with relentless patronage-but to an early Victorian would have seemed an appropriate tone for a young man to address the woman he intended to marry. A potential husband was expected to stamp his personality on a relationship, to make clear what he wanted in advance so that he could expect to receive it. Running through Thackeray's exhortations, however lumpenly expressed they may seem, is a feeling that Isabella needs to be kept up to the mark, is prone to a kind of congenital laziness that can only be kept at bay by constant stimulation. This produces a curious view of their relationship-a kind of grande passion hedged about with sentimental whimsy, in which the desired object is regarded as a wayward schoolgirl.... Where does this leave Isabella? Presumably restricted to attributes such as humility and loyalty, and, so far as one can make out, forbidden to take the steps that would have enabled her to grow up.