THACKERAY
No other literary Londoner has taken root as Carlyle did in Cheyne Row and
remained for nearly half a century without once changing his address.
Thackeray shifted about from place to place nearly as much as most of
them. He went to school at the Charterhouse, and for a year or two had
lodgings over a shop in Wilderness Row, Clerkenwell; in the first years
after his marriage he lived in Albion Street; he had chambers in the
Temple, at Hare Court, in Crown Office Row, and at Brick Court. _The Paris
Sketch Book_ was written whilst he was living at 13 Great Coram Street, in
1840, and it was there that his wife began to suffer from the sad mental
disorder that was presently to take her from him for the rest of his days.
In August 1846 he gave up his lodgings in St. James's Chambers, and drew
his broken home life together again at 16 Young Street, Kensington. "I am
beginning to count the days now till you come," he wrote to his mother,
with whom his two little daughters were staying in Paris; "and I have got
the rooms all ready in the rough, all but a couple of bedsteads, and a few
etceteras, which fall into their place in a day or two. As usual, I am
full of business and racket, working every day, and yet not advancing
somehow." He was industriously turning out drawings and jokes and
articles and verses for _Punch_ and _Fraser's Magazine_, and hard at work
on the great novel that was to make him famous--_Vanity Fair_.
[Illustration: THE CHARTERHOUSE. FROM THE SQUARE.]
"It was not till late in the autumn that we came to live with my father in
Kensington," writes Lady Ritchie, in one of her delightful prefaces to the
Centenary Edition of Thackeray's works. "We had been at Paris with our
grandparents--while he was at work in London. It was a dark, wintry
evening. The fires were lighted, the servants were engaged, Eliza--what
family would be complete without its Eliza?--was in waiting to show us our
rooms. He was away; he had not expected us so early. We saw the
drawing-room, the empty study; there was the feeling of London--London
smelt of tobacco, we thought; we stared out through the uncurtained
windows at the dark garden behind; and then, climbing the stairs, we
looked in at his bedroom door, and came to our own rooms above it.... Once
more, after his first happy married years, my father had a home and a
family--if a house, two young children, three servants, and a little black
cat can be called a family. My grandmother, who had brought us over to
England, returned to her husband in Paris; but her mother, an old lady
wrapped in Indian shawls, presently came to live with us, and divided her
time between Kensington and the Champs Elysees until 1848, when she died
at Paris."
Thackeray's first name for _Vanity Fair_ was _Pencil Sketches of English
Society_. He offered the opening chapters of it under that title to
Colburn for his _New Monthly Magazine_. Thereafter he seems to have
reshaped the novel and renamed it, and even then had difficulty to find a
publisher. At length, Messrs. Bradbury & Evans accepted it, and it was
arranged that it should be published after the manner that Dickens had
already rendered popular--in monthly parts; and the first part duly
appeared on the 1st January 1847, in the familiar yellow wrappers that
served to distinguish Thackeray's serials from the green-covered serials
of Dickens. But the sales of the first half-dozen numbers were by no means
satisfactory.
"I still remember," writes Lady Ritchie, "going along Kensington Gardens
with my sister and our nursemaid, carrying a parcel of yellow numbers
which had been given us to take to some friend who lived across the Park;
and as we walked along, somewhere near the gates of the gardens we met my
father, who asked us what we were carrying. Then somehow he seemed vexed
and troubled, told us not to go on, and to take the parcel home. Then he
changed his mind, saying that if his grandmother wished it, the books had
best be conveyed; but we guessed, as children do, that something was
seriously amiss. The sale of _Vanity Fair_ was so small that it was a
question at the time whether its publication should not be discontinued
altogether."
[Illustration: THACKERAY'S HOUSE. KENSINGTON.]
At that critical juncture he published _Mrs. Perkins's Ball_, which caught
on at once, and this and a favourable review in the _Edinburgh_ are
supposed to have sent the public after the novel, for the sales of _Vanity
Fair_ rapidly increased, and the monthly numbers were soon selling briskly
enough to satisfy even the publishers, and so in his thirty-seventh year
Thackeray found himself famous. James Hannay first saw him when the
book was still unfinished but its success assured. He says that Thackeray
pointed out to him the house in Russell Square "where the imaginary
Sedleys lived," and that when he congratulated him on that scene in
_Vanity Fair_ in which Becky Sharp cannot help feeling proud of her
husband whilst he is giving Lord Steyne the thrashing that must ruin all
her own chances, Thackeray answered frankly, "Well, when I wrote that
sentence I slapped my fist on the table and said, 'That is a touch of
genius!'" Which reminds one of the story told by Ticknor Fields of how,
when he was making a pilgrimage around London with Thackeray in later
years, and they paused outside 16 Young Street, which was no longer his
home, the novelist cried with a melodramatic gesture, "Go down on your
knees, you rogue, for here _Vanity Fair_ was penned, and I will go down
with you, for I have a high opinion of that little production myself!"
His letters of 1847 and the early half of 1848 are full of references to
the strenuous toil with which he is writing his monthly instalments of
_Vanity Fair_, and in one of them, to Edward Fitzgerald, he mentions that
he is giving a party: "Mrs. Dickens and Miss Hogarth made me give it, and
I am in a great fright." Perhaps that was the famous party to which
Charlotte Brontë, Carlyle and his wife, and other of his great
contemporaries came, and things went wrong, and he became so uncomfortable
that he fairly bolted from his guests, and went to spend the rest of the
evening at the Garrick Club.
_Pendennis_ was written at the Young Street house, and Thackeray put a
good deal of himself into that hero of his. Pen had chambers at Lamb
Building, in the Temple, and there is some likeness between his early
journalistic experiences and Thackeray's own. The opening chapters of
_Pendennis_, though, were written at Spa. Thackeray had wanted to get away
to some seaside place where he could set to work on his new book, and had
asked his mother, who was going to Brighton, if she could not get a house
for £60 that would have three spare rooms in it for him. "As for the
dignity, I don't believe it matters a pinch of snuff. Tom Carlyle lives in
perfect dignity in a little £40 house at Chelsea, with a snuffy Scotch
maid to open the door, and the best company in England ringing at it. It
is only the second or third chop great folks who care about show."
In _Pendennis_ there is an allusion to Catherine Hayes, the dreadful
heroine of Thackeray's _Catherine_, that had been published a few years
before, and a hot-tempered young Irishman, believing the reference was to
Miss Catherine Hayes, the Irish vocalist, chivalrously came over to
England, took lodgings opposite Thackeray's house in Young Street, and
sent him a warning letter that he was on the watch for him to come out of
doors, and intended to administer public chastisement by way of avenging
Miss Hayes's injured honour. After getting through his morning's work,
Thackeray felt the position was intolerable, so he walked straightway out
across the road, knocked at the opposite door, and boldly bearded the lion
in his den. The young Irishman was disposed to bluster and be obstinate,
but Thackeray explained matters, calmed him, convinced him that he had
made a mistake, parted from him amicably, and had the satisfaction of
seeing the young fire-eater come forth on his way back home that evening.
[Illustration: W. M. THACKERAY]
Writing of _Pendennis_, Lady Ritchie says, "I can remember the morning
Helen died. My father was in his study in Young Street, sitting at the
table at which he wrote. It stood in the middle of the room, and he used
to sit facing the door. I was going into the room, but he motioned me
away. An hour afterwards he came into our schoolroom, half laughing and
half ashamed, and said to us, 'I do not know what James can have thought
of me when he came in with the tax-gatherer just after you left and found
me blubbering over Helen Pendennis's death.'"
At Young Street, Thackeray wrote also his _Lectures on the English
Humorists_, and having delivered them with gratifying success at Willis's
Rooms, he journeyed to America in 1852, and was even more successful with
them there. Meanwhile, he had written _Esmond_, and it was published in
three volumes just before he left England. "Thackeray I saw for ten
minutes," Fitzgerald wrote to Frederick Tennyson concerning a flying visit
he had paid to London; "he was just in the agony of finishing a novel,
which has arisen out of the reading necessary for his lectures, and
relates to those times--of Queen Anne, I mean. He will get £1000 for his
novel; he was wanting to finish it and rush off to the Continent to shake
off the fumes of it." His two daughters, both now in their teens, were
sent out to join their grandparents before he sailed for the States, and
in a letter to Anne (Lady Ritchie) he explains his motive in crossing the
Atlantic: "I must and will go to America, not because I want to, but
because it is right I should secure some money against my death for your
poor mother and you two girls."
There are several drawings made by Thackeray in those Young Street days of
his daughters and himself, and one of his study at breakfast time, and
here is a word-picture of the study given by Lady Ritchie in her preface
to _Esmond_: "The vine shaded the two windows, which looked out upon the
bit of garden and the medlar-tree, and the Spanish jasmines, of which the
yellow flowers scented our old brick walls. I can remember the tortoise
belonging to the boys next door crawling along the top of the wall where
they had set it, and making its way between the jasmine sprigs.... Our
garden was not tidy (though on one grand occasion a man came to mow the
grass), but it was full of sweet things.... Lady Duff Gordon came to stay
with us once (it was on that occasion that the grass was mowed), and she
afterwards sent us some doves, which used to hang high up in a wicker cage
from the windows of the schoolroom. The schoolroom was over my father's
bedroom, and his bedroom was over the study where he used to write, and
they all looked to the garden and the sunsets."
On his return from the American lecturing, in 1853, when he had already
made a beginning of _The Newcomes_, he gave up the Young Street house and
moved to 36 Onslow Square, South Kensington (or Brompton, as it was called
at that period); and during the seven years of his residence there he
finished _The Newcomes_, wrote _The Four Georges_, _The Virginians_, many
of the _Roundabout Papers_, began the writing of _Philip_, and founded and
entered upon his duties as editor of the _Cornhill Magazine_. The front
room on the second floor was his study.
[Illustration: LAMB BUILDING. TEMPLE. FROM THE CLOISTERS.]
It was whilst Thackeray was living here that the quarrel occurred between
him and Edmund Yates, who had contributed a smart personal article to
_Town Talk_, on the 12th June 1858, in the course of which he wrote: "Mr.
Thackeray is forty-six years old, though from the silvery whiteness of his
hair he appears somewhat older. He is very tall, standing upwards of six
feet two inches; and as he walks erect his height makes him conspicuous in
every assembly. His face is bloodless, and not particularly expressive,
but remarkable for the fracture of the bridge of the nose, the result of
an accident in youth. He wears a small grey whisker, but otherwise is
clean shaven. No one meeting him could fail to recognise in him a
gentleman; his bearing is cold and uninviting, his style of conversation
either openly cynical, or affectedly good-natured and benevolent; his
_bonhomie_ is forced, his wit biting, his pride easily touched--but his
appearance is invariably that of the cool, suave, well-bred gentleman who,
whatever may be rankling within, suffers no surface display of his
emotion." He went on to discuss Thackeray's work, and said unjustly of his
lectures that in this country he flattered the aristocracy and in America
he attacked it, the attacks being contained in _The Four Georges_, which
"have been dead failures in England, though as literary compositions they
are most excellent. Our own opinion is that his success is on the wane;
his writings never were understood or appreciated even by the middle
classes; the aristocracy have been alienated by his American onslaught on
their body, and the educated and refined are not sufficiently numerous to
constitute an audience; moreover, there is a want of heart in all he
writes which is not to be balanced by the most brilliant sarcasm."
The description of Thackeray's personal appearance here is perhaps rather
impertinently frank, but it is clever and pictorially good; for the
rest--we who know now what a generous, kindly, almost too sentimentally
tender heart throbbed within that husk of cynicism and sarcasm in which he
protectively enfolded it, know that Yates was writing of what he did not
understand. Unfortunately, however, Thackeray took him seriously, and
wrote a letter of dignified but angry protest to him, especially against
the imputation of insincerity when he spoke good-naturedly in private.
"Had your remarks been written by a person unknown to me, I should have
noticed them no more than other calumnies; but as we have shaken hands
more than once and met hitherto on friendly terms, I am obliged to take
notice of articles which I consider to be not offensive and unfriendly
merely, but slanderous and untrue. We meet at a club where, before you
were born, I believe, I and other gentlemen have been in the habit of
talking without any idea that our conversation would supply paragraphs for
professional vendors of 'Literary Talk'; and I don't remember that out of
the club I have ever exchanged six words with you."
Yates replied, and "rather than have further correspondence with a writer
of that character," Thackeray put the letters before the committee of the
Garrick Club, asking them to decide whether the publication of such an
article as Yates had written was not intolerable in a society of gentlemen
and fatal to the comfort of the club. The committee resolved that Yates
must either apologise or resign his membership. Then Dickens, thinking the
committee were exceeding their powers, intervened on Yates's behalf; wrote
to Thackeray in a conciliatory strain, and asked if any conference could
be held between himself, as representing Yates, and some friend who should
represent Thackeray, with a view to arriving at a friendly settlement of
the unpleasantness. This apparently well-intentioned interference annoyed
Thackeray; he curtly replied that he preferred to leave his interests in
the hands of the club committee, and as a result he and Dickens were
bitterly estranged. That the friendship between two such men should have
been broken by such a petty incident was deplorable enough, but happily,
only a few days before Thackeray's death, they chanced to meet in the
lobby of the Athenæum, and by a mutual impulse each offered his hand to
the other, and the breach was healed.
In 1862 Thackeray made his last change of address, and went to No. 2
Palace Green, Kensington, a large and handsome house that he had built for
himself. Some of his friends thought that in building it he had spent his
money recklessly, but he did it in pursuance of the desire, that crops up
so frequently in his correspondence, to make some provision for the future
of his children; and when, after his death, it was sold for £2000 more
than it had cost him, he was sufficiently justified. It was in this house
that he finished _Philip_, and, having retired from the editing of the
_Cornhill_, began to write _Denis Duval_, but died on Christmas Eve 1863,
leaving it little more than well begun. When he was writing _Pendennis_ he
had been near death's door, and ever since he had suffered from attacks of
sickness almost every month. He was not well when his valet left him at
eleven on the night of the 23rd December; about midnight his mother, whose
bedroom was immediately over his, heard him walking about his room; at
nine next morning, when his valet went in with his coffee, he saw him
"lying on his back quite still, with his arms spread over the coverlet,
but he took no notice, as he was accustomed to see his master thus after
one of his attacks." Returning later, and finding the coffee untouched on
the table beside the bed, he felt a sudden apprehension, and was horrified
to discover that Thackeray was dead.
Yates has told how the rumour of his death ran through the clubs and was
soon all about the town, and of how, wherever it went, it left a cloud
over everything that Christmas Eve; and I have just turned up one of my
old _Cornhill_ volumes to read again what Dickens and Trollope wrote of
him in the number for February 1864. "I saw him first," says Dickens,
"nearly twenty-eight years ago, when he proposed to be the illustrator of
my earliest book. I saw him last, shortly before Christmas, at the
Athenæum Club, when he told me that he had been in bed three days--that
after these attacks he was troubled with cold shiverings, 'which quite
took the power of work out of him'--and that he had it in his mind to try
a new remedy, which he laughingly described. He was very cheerful, and
looked very bright. In the night of that day week, he died." Dickens goes
on to give little instances of his kindness, of his great and good nature;
and then describes how he was found lying dead. "He was only in his
fifty-third year; so young a man that the mother who blessed him in his
first sleep blessed him in his last." And says Trollope, no one is
thinking just then of the greatness of his work--"The fine grey head, the
dear face with its gentle smile, the sweet, manly voice which we knew so
well, with its few words of kindest greeting; the gait and manner, the
personal presence of him whom it so delighted us to encounter in our
casual comings and goings about the town--it is of these things, and of
these things lost for ever, that we are now thinking. We think of them as
treasures which are not only lost, but which can never be replaced. He who
knew Thackeray will have a vacancy in his heart's inmost casket which must
remain vacant till he dies. One loved him almost as one loves a woman,
tenderly and with thoughtfulness--thinking of him when away from him as a
source of joy which cannot be analysed, but is full of comfort. One who
loved him, loved him thus because his heart was tender, as is the heart of
a woman."