CHAPTER II. A Pedigree and other Family Matters
CHAPTER III. In which Pendennis appears as a very young Man indeed
CHAPTER IV. Mrs. Haller
CHAPTER V. Mrs. Haller at Home
CHAPTER VI. Contains both Love and War
CHAPTER VII. In which the Major makes his Appearance
CHAPTER VIII. In which Pen is kept waiting at the Door, while the Reader is informed who little Laura was.
CHAPTER IX. In which the Major opens the Campaign
CHAPTER X. Facing the Enemy
CHAPTER XI. Negotiation
CHAPTER XII. In which a Shooting Match is proposed
CHAPTER XIII. A Crisis
CHAPTER XIV. In which Miss Fotheringay makes a new Engagement
CHAPTER XV. The happy Village
CHAPTER XVI. More Storms in the Puddle
CHAPTER XVII. Which concludes the first Part of this History
CHAPTER XVIII. Alma Mater
CHAPTER XIX. Pendennis of Boniface
CHAPTER XX. Rake’s Progress
CHAPTER XXI. Flight after Defeat
CHAPTER XXII. Prodigal’s Return
CHAPTER XXIII. New Faces
CHAPTER XXIV. A Little Innocent
CHAPTER XXV. Contains both Love and Jealousy
CHAPTER XXVI. A House full of Visitors
CHAPTER XXVII. Contains some Ball-practising
CHAPTER XXVIII. Which is both Quarrelsome and Sentimental
CHAPTER XXIX. Babylon
CHAPTER XXX. The Knights of the Temple
CHAPTER XXXI. Old and new Acquaintances
CHAPTER XXXII. In which the Printer’s Devil comes to the Door
CHAPTER XXXIII. Which is passed in the Neighbourhood of Ludgate Hill
CHAPTER XXXIV. In which the History still hovers about Fleet Street
CHAPTER XXXV. Dinner in the Row
CHAPTER XXXVI. The Pall Mall Gazette
CHAPTER XXXVII. Where Pen appears in Town and Country
CHAPTER XXXVIII. In which the Sylph reappears
CHAPTER XXXIX. In which Colonel Altamont appears and disappears
CHAPTER XL. Relates to Mr. Harry Foker’s Affairs
CHAPTER XLI. Carries the Reader both to Richmond and Greenwich
CHAPTER XLII. Contains a novel Incident
CHAPTER XLIII. Alsatia
CHAPTER XLIV. In which the Colonel narrates some of his Adventures
CHAPTER XLV. A Chapter of Conversations
CHAPTER XLVI. Miss Amory’s Partners
CHAPTER XLVII. Monseigneur s’amuse
CHAPTER XLVIII. A Visit of Politeness
CHAPTER XLIX. In Shepherd’s Inn
CHAPTER L. In or near the Temple Garden
CHAPTER LI. The happy Village again
CHAPTER LII. Which had very nearly been the last of the Story
CHAPTER LIII. A critical Chapter
CHAPTER LIV. Convalescence
CHAPTER LV. Fanny’s Occupation’s gone
CHAPTER LVI. In which Fanny engages a new Medical Man
CHAPTER LVII. Foreign Ground
CHAPTER LVIII. “Fairoaks to let”
CHAPTER LIX. Old Friends
CHAPTER LX. Explanations
CHAPTER LXI. Conversations
CHAPTER LXII. The Way of the World
CHAPTER LXIII. Which accounts perhaps for Chapter LXI.
CHAPTER LXIV. Phyllis and Corydon
CHAPTER LXV. Temptation
CHAPTER LXVI. In which Pen begins his Canvass
CHAPTER LXVII. In which Pen begins to doubt about his Election
CHAPTER LXVIII. In which the Major is bidden to Stand and Deliver
CHAPTER LXIX. In which the Major neither yields his Money nor his Life
CHAPTER LXX. In which Pendennis counts his Eggs
CHAPTER LXXI. Fiat Justitia
CHAPTER LXXII. In which the Decks begin to clear
CHAPTER LXXIII. Mr. and Mrs. Sam Huxter
CHAPTER LXXIV. Shows how Arthur had better have taken a Return-ticket
CHAPTER LXXV. A Chapter of Match-making
CHAPTER LXXVI. Exeunt Omnes
TO DR. JOHN ELLIOTSON
My Dear Doctor,
Thirteen months ago, when it seemed likely that this story had come to
a close, a kind friend brought you to my bedside, whence, in all
probability, I never should have risen but for your constant
watchfulness and skill. I like to recall your great goodness and
kindness (as well as many acts of others, showing quite a surprising
friendship and sympathy) at that time, when kindness and friendship
were most needed and welcome.
And as you would take no other fee but thanks, let me record them here
in behalf of me and mine, and subscribe myself
Yours most sincerely and gratefully,
W. M. THACKERAY.
PREFACE
If this kind of composition, of which the two years’ product is now
laid before the public, fail in art, as it constantly does and must, it
at least has the advantage of a certain truth and honesty, which a work
more elaborate might lose. In his constant communication with the
reader, the writer is forced into frankness of expression, and to speak
out his own mind and feelings as they urge him. Many a slip of the pen
and the printer, many a word spoken in haste, he sees and would recall
as he looks over his volume. It is a sort of confidential talk between
writer and reader, which must often be dull, must often flag. In the
course of his volubility, the perpetual speaker must of necessity lay
bare his own weaknesses, vanities, peculiarities. And as we judge of a
man’s character, after long frequenting his society, not by one speech,
or by one mood or opinion, or by one day’s talk, but by the tenor of
his general bearing and conversation; so of a writer, who delivers
himself up to you perforce unreservedly, you say, Is he honest? Does he
tell the truth in the main? Does he seem actuated by a desire to find
out and speak it? Is he a quack, who shams sentiment, or mouths for
effect? Does he seek popularity by claptraps or other arts? I can no
more ignore good fortune than any other chance which has befallen me. I
have found many thousands more readers than I ever looked for. I have
no right to say to these, You shall not find fault with my art, or fall
asleep over my pages; but I ask you to believe that this person writing
strives to tell the truth. If there is not that, there is nothing.
Perhaps the lovers of ‘excitement’ may care to know, that this book
began with a very precise plan, which was entirely put aside. Ladies
and gentlemen, you were to have been treated, and the writer’s and the
publisher’s pocket benefited, by the recital of the most active
horrors. What more exciting than a ruffian (with many admirable
virtues) in St. Giles’s, visited constantly by a young lady from
Belgravia? What more stirring than the contrasts of society? the
mixture of slang and fashionable language? the escapes, the battles,
the murders? Nay, up to nine o’clock this very morning, my poor friend,
Colonel Altamont, was doomed to execution, and the author only relented
when his victim was actually at the window.
The ‘exciting’ plan was laid aside (with a very honourable forbearance
on the part of the publishers), because, on attempting it, I found that
I failed from want of experience of my subject; and never having been
intimate with any convict in my life, and the manners of ruffians and
gaol-birds being quite unfamiliar to me, the idea of entering into
competition with M. Eugène Sue was abandoned. To describe a real
rascal, you must make him so horrible that he would be too hideous to
show; and unless the painter paints him fairly, I hold he has no right
to show him at all.
Even the gentlemen of our age—this is an attempt to describe one of
them, no better nor worse than most educated men—even these we cannot
show as they are, with the notorious foibles and selfishness of their
lives and their education. Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no
writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost
power a MAN. We must drape him, and give him a certain conventional
simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art. Many ladies
have remonstrated and subscribers left me, because, in the course of
the story, I described a young man resisting and affected by
temptation.
My object was to say, that he had the passions to feel, and the
manliness and generosity to overcome them. You will not hear—it is best
to know it—what moves in the real world, what passes in society, in the
clubs, colleges, mess-rooms,—what is the life and talk of your sons. A
little more frankness than is customary has been attempted in this
story; with no bad desire on the writer’s part, it is hoped, and with
no ill consequence to any reader. If truth is not always pleasant, at
any rate truth is best, from whatever chair—from those whence graver
writers or thinkers argue, as from that at which the story-teller sits
as he concludes his labour, and bids his kind reader farewell.
KENSINGTON, Nov. 26th, 1850.
PENDENNIS
CHAPTER I.
Shows how First Love may interrupt Breakfast
One fine morning in the full London season, Major Arthur Pendennis came
over from his lodgings, according to his custom, to breakfast at a
certain Club in Pall Mall, of which he was a chief ornament. As he was
one of the finest judges of wine in England, and a man of active,
dominating, and inquiring spirit, he had been very properly chosen to
be a member of the Committee of this Club, and indeed was almost the
manager of the institution; and the stewards and waiters bowed before
him as reverentially as to a Duke or a Field-Marshal.
At a quarter past ten the Major invariably made his appearance in the
best blacked boots in all London, with a checked morning cravat that
never was rumpled until dinner time, a buff waistcoat which bore the
crown of his sovereign on the buttons, and linen so spotless that Mr.
Brummel himself asked the name of his laundress, and would probably
have employed her had not misfortunes compelled that great man to fly
the country. Pendennis’s coat, his white gloves, his whiskers, his very
cane, were perfect of their kind as specimens of the costume of a
military man _en retraite_. At a distance, or seeing his back merely,
you would have taken him to be not more than thirty years old: it was
only by a nearer inspection that you saw the factitious nature of his
rich brown hair, and that there were a few crow’s-feet round about the
somewhat faded eyes of his handsome mottled face. His nose was of the
Wellington pattern. His hands and wristbands were beautifully long and
white. On the latter he wore handsome gold buttons given to him by his
Royal Highness the Duke of York, and on the others more than one
elegant ring, the chief and largest of them being emblazoned with the
famous arms of Pendennis.
He always took possession of the same table in the same corner of the
room, from which nobody ever now thought of ousting him. One or two mad
wags and wild fellows had in former days, and in freak or bravado,
endeavoured twice or thrice to deprive him of this place; but there was
a quiet dignity in the Major’s manner as he took his seat at the next
table, and surveyed the interlopers, which rendered it impossible for
any man to sit and breakfast under his eye; and that table—by the fire,
and yet near the window—became his own. His letters were laid out there
in expectation of his arrival, and many was the young fellow about town
who looked with wonder at the number of those notes, and at the seals
and franks which they bore. If there was any question about etiquette,
society, who was married to whom, of what age such and such a duke was,
Pendennis was the man to whom every one appealed. Marchionesses used to
drive up to the Club, and leave notes for him, or fetch him out. He was
perfectly affable. The young men liked to walk with him in the Park or
down Pall Mall; for he touched his hat to everybody, and every other
man he met was a lord.
The Major sate down at his accustomed table then, and while the waiters
went to bring him his toast and his hot newspaper, he surveyed his
letters through his gold double eye-glass. He carried it so gaily, you
would hardly have known it was spectacles in disguise, and examined one
pretty note after another, and laid them by in order. There were large
solemn dinner cards, suggestive of three courses and heavy
conversation; there were neat little confidential notes, conveying
female entreaties; there was a note on thick official paper from the
Marquis of Steyne, telling him to come to Richmond to a little party at
the Star and Garter, and speak French, which language the Major
possessed very perfectly; and another from the Bishop of Ealing and
Mrs. Trail, requesting the honour of Major Pendennis’s company at
Ealing House, all of which letters Pendennis read gracefully, and with
the more satisfaction, because Glowry, the Scotch surgeon, breakfasting
opposite to him, was looking on, and hating him for having so many
invitations, which nobody ever sent to Glowry.
These perused, the Major took out his pocket-book to see on what days
he was disengaged, and which of these many hospitable calls he could
afford to accept or decline.
He threw over Cutler, the East India Director, in Baker Street, in
order to dine with Lord Steyne and the little French party at the Star
and Garter—the Bishop he accepted, because, though the dinner was slow,
he liked to dine with bishops—and so went through his list and disposed
of them according to his fancy or interest. Then he took his breakfast
and looked over the paper, the gazette, the births and deaths, and the
fashionable intelligence, to see that his name was down among the
guests at my Lord So-and-so’s fête, and in the intervals of these
occupations carried on cheerful conversation with his acquaintances
about the room.
Among the letters which formed Major Pendennis’s budget for that
morning there was only one unread, and which lay solitary and apart
from all the fashionable London letters, with a country postmark and a
homely seal. The superscription was in a pretty delicate female hand,
and though marked ‘Immediate’ by the fair writer, with a strong dash of
anxiety under the word, yet the Major had, for reasons of his own,
neglected up to the present moment his humble rural petitioner, who to
be sure could hardly hope to get a hearing among so many grand folks
who attended his levee. The fact was, this was a letter from a female
relative of Pendennis, and while the grandees of her brother’s
acquaintance were received and got their interview, and drove off, as
it were, the patient country letter remained for a long time waiting
for an audience in the ante-chamber under the slop-bason.
At last it came to be this letter’s turn, and the Major broke a seal
with ‘Fairoaks’ engraved upon it, and ‘Clavering St. Mary’s’ for a
postmark. It was a double letter, and the Major commenced perusing the
envelope before he attacked the inner epistle.
“Is it a letter from another _Jook_,” growled Mr. Glowry, inwardly,
“Pendennis would not be leaving that to the last, I’m thinking.”
“My dear Major Pendennis,” the letter ran, “I beg and implore you to
come to me _immediately_”—very likely, thought Pendennis, and Steyne’s
dinner to-day—“I am in the very greatest grief and perplexity. My
dearest boy, who has been hitherto everything the fondest mother could
wish, is grieving me _dreadfully_. He has formed—I can hardly write
it—a passion, an infatuation,”—the Major grinned—“for an actress who
has been performing here. She is at least twelve years older than
Arthur—who will not be eighteen till next February—and the wretched boy
insists upon marrying her.”
“Hay! What’s making Pendennis swear now?”—Mr. Glowry asked of himself,
for rage and wonder were concentrated in the Major’s open mouth, as he
read this astounding announcement.
“Do, my dear friend,” the grief-stricken lady went on, “come to me
instantly on the receipt of this; and, as Arthur’s guardian, entreat,
command, the wretched child to give up this most deplorable
resolution.” And, after more entreaties to the above effect, the writer
concluded by signing herself the Major’s ‘unhappy affectionate sister,
Helen Pendennis.’
“Fairoaks, Tuesday”—the Major concluded, reading the last words of the
letter—“A d——d pretty business at Fairoaks, Tuesday; now let us see
what the boy has to say;” and he took the other letter, which was
written in a great floundering boy’s hand, and sealed with the large
signet of the Pendennises, even larger than the Major’s own, and with
supplementary wax sputtered all round the seal, in token of the
writer’s tremulousness and agitation.
The epistle ran thus:
“FAIROAKS, _Monday, Midnight_.
“MY DEAR UNCLE,
In informing you of my engagement with Miss Costigan, daughter of J.
Chesterfield Costigan, Esq., of Costiganstown, but, perhaps, better
known to you under her professional name of Miss Fotheringay, of the
Theatres Royal Drury Lane and Crow Street, and of the Norwich and Welsh
Circuit, I am aware that I make an announcement which cannot, according
to the present prejudices of society at least, be welcome to my family.
My dearest mother, on whom, God knows, I would wish to inflict no
needless pain, is deeply moved and grieved, I am sorry to say, by the
intelligence which I have this night conveyed to her. I beseech you, my
dear Sir, to come down and reason with her and console her. Although
obliged by poverty to earn an honourable maintenance by the exercise of
her splendid talents, Miss Costigan’s family is as ancient and noble as
our own. When our ancestor, Ralph Pendennis, landed with Richard II. in
Ireland, my Emily’s forefathers were kings of that country. I have the
information from Mr. Costigan, who, like yourself, is a military man.
“It is in vain I have attempted to argue with my dear mother, and prove
to her that a young lady of irreproachable character and lineage,
endowed with the most splendid gifts of beauty and genius, who devotes
herself to the exercise of one of the noblest professions, for the
sacred purpose of maintaining her family, is a being whom we should all
love and reverence, rather than avoid;—my poor mother has prejudices
which it is impossible for my logic to overcome, and refuses to welcome
to her arms one who is disposed to be her most affectionate daughter
through life.
“Although Miss Costigan is some years older than myself, that
circumstance does not operate as a barrier to my affection, and I am
sure will not influence its duration. A love like mine, Sir, I feel, is
contracted once and for ever. As I never had dreamed of love until I
saw her—I feel now that I shall die without ever knowing another
passion. It is the fate of my life. It was Miss C.’s own delicacy which
suggested that the difference of age, which I never felt, might operate
as a bar to our union. But having loved once, I should despise myself,
and be unworthy of my name as a gentleman, if I hesitated to abide by
my passion: if I did not give all where I felt all, and endow the woman
who loves me fondly with my whole heart and my whole fortune.
“I press for a speedy marriage with my Emily—for why, in truth, should
it be delayed? A delay implies a doubt, which I cast from me as
unworthy. It is impossible that my sentiments can change towards
Emily—that at any age she can be anything but the sole object of my
love. Why, then, wait? I entreat you, my dear Uncle, to come down and
reconcile my dear mother to our union, and I address you as a man of
the world, _qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes_, who will not
feel any of the weak scruples and fears which agitate a lady who has
scarcely ever left her village.
“Pray, come down to us immediately. I am quite confident that—apart
from considerations of fortune—you will admire and approve of my Emily.
“Your affectionate Nephew,
“ARTHUR PENDENNIS, JR.”
When the Major had concluded the perusal of this letter, his
countenance assumed an expression of such rage and horror that Glowry,
the surgeon-official, felt in his pocket for his lancet, which he
always carried in his card-case, and thought his respected friend was
going into a fit. The intelligence was indeed sufficient to agitate
Pendennis. The head of the Pendennises going to marry an actress ten
years his senior,—a headstrong boy going to plunge into matrimony. “The
mother has spoiled the young rascal,” groaned the Major inwardly, “with
her cursed sentimentality and romantic rubbish. My nephew marry a
tragedy queen! Gracious mercy, people will laugh at me so that I shall
not dare show my head!” And he thought with an inexpressible pang that
he must give up Lord Steyne’s dinner at Richmond, and must lose his
rest and pass the night in an abominable tight mail-coach, instead of
taking pleasure, as he had promised himself, in some of the most
agreeable and select society in England.
And he must not only give up this but all other engagements for some
time to come. Who knows how long the business might detain him. He
quitted his breakfast table for the adjoining writing-room, and there
ruefully wrote off refusals to the Marquis, the Earl, the Bishop, and
all his entertainers; and he ordered his servant to take places in the
mail-coach for that evening, of course charging the sum which he
disbursed for the seats to the account of the widow and the young
scapegrace of whom he was guardian.