Thackeray constantly mixes up real with fictitious names in his
descriptions. Some disguise was often necessary, and sometimes even
compulsory. He could not be as explicit or as literal as Dickens,
because most of his characters represented a very different class. The
latter could draw in detail the house he selected as most appropriate for
the occupation of Sairey Gamp, because the actual tenants were not likely
to find him out, or, if they ever read his description, to quarrel with
it. But many of the clients whom Thackeray had to provide with dwellings
were great people, and could only be placed in great neighbourhoods,
where the houses are large, conspicuous, and easily distinguished. He
either had to omit any descriptive detail, or to mask the actual place he
had in mind by locating it in some street or square with a fanciful name.
Any student of his works will have no difficulty, however, in finding
Gaunt House, Gaunt Square, and Great Gaunt street, if he makes a personal
search for them in Mayfair, though they are not indicated in any map or
directory.
Mayfair (let me say for the benefit of my readers who are so unfortunate
as not to knew London) is one of the three most fashionable
neighbourhoods of the great metropolis, and of the three it is the most
aristocratic and most ancient. It is, as nearly as possible, a square,
about half a mile wide and three-quarters of a mile long, bounded at one
end by Oxford street, with its shops and plebeian traffic, at the other
end by the most delightful of London streets, Piccadilly; at one side by
Bond street, and at the other by Park Lane, the houses in which overlook
the beautiful expanse of Hyde Park. The names of some of its streets
have become synonymous with patrician pomp and the affluence of
inheritance. It is the highest heaven of social aspiration, the most
exalted object of worldly veneration. This is the house of the Duke of
Hawksbury; this of the Earl of Tue-brook; that of Viscount Wallasey, and
that of Lord Arthur Bebbington. It is preëminently the region of the
“quality.” But let not the reader suppose that it is a region of
exterior splendor, of spacious architecture, of brilliant appearance.
Belgravia is far grander to look at, and seems to possess greater riches,
and to use them more lavishly. Even Tyburnia, the neighborhood to the
north of Hyde Park, is more suggestive of social eminence. Mayfair
displays none of the signs of the rude enjoyment and proud assertiveness
which spring from recent prosperity. It is old-fashioned, un-changing,
and dull. It is little different from what it was at the beginning of
the century, except that it is nearer decay, and that febrile irruptions
of modern Queen Anne architecture occasionally vary the sombreness of its
original style. The physiognomy of its houses expresses a sort of
torpor, as if familiarity with honours were as wearisome as continuous
association with misfortune. They have an air of funereal resignation.
Many of the streets are short and narrow: many of the houses are dingy.
The ornaments are of a sepulchral kind, such as urns over the door-ways,
and funeral wreaths about the porticoes. The blazoned heraldry of the
hatchments has been nearly extinguished by the smoke. At some doors
there are two incongruous obelisks, joined to the iron railing which
screens the basement, and the portico is extended to the curb. But
ornaments even as unsatisfactory as these are not common, and most of the
houses, with high fronts of blackened brick and oblong windows, are
unadorned, except by a few boxes of flowers on the sills. The lackeys,
with crimson knee-breeches, white stockings, laced coats, buckled shoes,
and powdered hair, blaze in this gloom with a pyrotechnic splendour.
Occasionally, the uniform rows of smoky brick and pointed stucco houses
are overshadowed by a larger mansion, shut within its own walls, and some
of the streets enter spacious squares, where there are sooty trees and
grass and chirping sparrows.
It is possible that Thackeray had no exact place in mind when he wrote of
Gaunt House and Gaunt Square, but it is not likely. The creatures of his
imagination were flesh and blood to him, too vital to be left without
habitations. “All the world knows,” he says in _Vanity Fair_, “that
Gaunt House stands in Gaunt Square, out of which Great Gaunt street leads
. . . Gaunt House occupies nearly a side of the square. The remaining
three sides consist of mansions which have passed away into dowagerism.
. . . It has a dreary look, nor is Lord Steyne’s palace less dreary. All
to be seen of it is a vast wall in front, with rustic columns at the
great gate.” Berkeley Square almost exactly corresponds with this
description. Here are the gloomy mansions, looking out on grass and
trees which seem to belong to a cemetery, and here, immediately
recognizable, is the palace, filling nearly a side of the square, and
shut within high walls to hide what they inclose from the prying eyes of
the passers, though the upper stories can be seen from the opposite side
of the way. Here is the very gate, with heavy knockers, though the
rustic columns of Thackeray’s text have been replaced by new ones of a
different shape. We do not find in the middle of the square the statue
of Lord Gaunt, “in a three-tailed wig, and otherwise habited like a Roman
emperor,” but we can identify almost every other detail of the picture.
Now, as this palace has long been occupied by a noble family, it would
not be just for us to mention the name of the house, lest some undeserved
reproach should thereby fall on the tenants; for, while Thackeray
described the locality with such faithful elaboration it is not to be
inferred that he drew the character of Lord Steyne from an actual person
living in the neighbourhood; nothing indeed, could be less probable.
He also speaks of the square as Shiverley Square, and briefly mentions it
in describing Becky’s drive to the house of Sir Pitt Crawley: “Having
passed through Shiverley Square into Great Gaunt street, the carriage at
length stopped at a tall, gloomy house, between two other tall, gloomy
houses, each with a hatchment over the middle drawing-room window, as is
the custom in Great Gaunt street, in which gloomy locality death seems to
reign perpetual.”
Great Gaunt street is undoubtedly Hill street, which he mentions
specifically in another place as the home of Lady Gaunt’s mother.
Sometimes it was necessary for him to invent a name, and when he did so
he was peculiarly apt. Gaunt Square seems a more fitting and descriptive
name than Berkeley Square, but he frequently varied the real with the
fictitious name with playful caprice.
It was in another of these queer old streets in Mayfair that that wicked
old fairy godmother, the Countess of Kew, lived, and there (in Queen
street) Ethel Newcome visited her, and was instructed in the rigourous
social code which unites fortune with fortune, or fortune with rank, and
which is by no means limited to Mayfair or Belgravia, but finds
expositors and adherents under the bluer skies of America. Ethel herself
lived with her mother in Park Lane, the western boundary of Mayfair, and
assuredly the most attractive part of the region. Park Lane has all of
Hyde Park before its windows,—all the variegated and plentifully stocked
flower-beds of the Ring Road, the wide sweep of grassy playground, and
the knots of patriarchal trees which give the Park one of its greatest
charms. Unlike most of the region behind it is cheerful; or, if not
exactly cheerful, it has not the mopish signs of withdrawal from all
natural human interests which are seen in many of the houses in Gaunt
Square and the tributary streets. Some of the houses are small, with
oriel windows, and little balconies filled with flower-pots; some of them
are palatial in size and decoration; but all of them are fashionable, and
elderly bachelors are known to give incredibly large prices for the
smallest possible quarters under the roof of the meanest of them. The
exteriors are not of the sooty brick which characterizes Hill street, but
of plaster, which is annually repainted in drab or cream colour at the
beginning of each season. What with the flowers of the Park and the
gardens which lie before some of the houses, Park Lane seems a fitting
abode for those who are fortunate both in birth and in wealth; it is as
patrician as any other part of Mayfair, and it relieves itself of the
gloom which seems to be considered an inevitable accessory of
respectability elsewhere.
In one of these houses—which one it is not easy to say, as Thackeray has
given us no clue—Lady Ann Newcome lived, and at it Mrs. Hobson Newcome
looked from afar with an envy which betrayed itself in her constant
reiterations of her contentment with her own circumstances. Mrs. Hobson
lived in Bryanston Square, a dingily verdant quadrangle north of Oxford
street, near which Clive had a studio; and J. J. Ridley, Fred Bayham,
Miss Cann, and the Rev. Charles Honeyman, lodged together in Walpole
street, Mayfair. The Rev. Charles Honeyman’s chapel was close by, and
before the story of _Vanity Fair_ reached its end there was a charitable
lady in the congregation who wrote hymns and called herself Lady Crawley,
and from whom William Dobbin and Amelia Sedley, now united, shrunk as
they passed her at the fancy fair, recognizing in that altered person the
dreadful Becky.
In the eyes of the lover of Thackeray, no character of history or fiction
has lent more interest to Mayfair than Becky, to which neighbourhood she
came with her husband some two or three years after their return from
Paris, establishing herself in “a very small, comfortable house in Curzon
street,” and demonstrating to the world the useful and interesting art of
living on nothing a year. There is more than one small house in Curzon
street, but among them all Becky’s is unmistakable. It is on the south
side of the street, near the western end, and only a few doors farther
east than the house in which Lord Beaconsfield died. It is four stories
and a half high, and is built of blackish brick like its neighbours, with
painted sills and portico. Its extreme narrowness, compared with its
height, especially distinguishes it: the front door, with drab pilasters
and a moulded architrave, is just half its width, and only leaves room
for one parlour window on the first floor. One can see over the railings
into the basement and through the kitchen windows. Phantoms appear to us
in all the windows—the ghost of Becky herself, dressed in a pink dress,
her shapely arms and shoulders wrapped in gauze; her ringlets hanging
about her neck; her feet peeping out of the crisp folds of silk—“the
prettiest little feet in the prettiest little sandals in the finest silk
stockings in the world.” It was in this cozy little domicile that the
arch little hypocrite entertained Lord Steyne, whose house in Gaunt
Square is only a few hundred yards distant, and Rawdon fleeced young
Southdown at cards. No one can help smiling at the remembrances that
come upon him in looking at those basement windows. No one who has read
_Vanity Fair_ is likely to forget the picture of the sensual marquis
gazing into the kitchen and seeing no one there just before he knocks at
the door, where he is met by Becky, who is as fresh as a rose from her
dressing-table, and who excuses her pretended dishabille by saying that
she has just come out of the kitchen, where she has been making pie, to
which palpable lie the marquis gives an audacious affirmation by adding
that he saw her there as he came in!
This little house was chosen for that scene in which Thackeray’s genius
rises to its highest point of dramatic intensity; and so many literary
pilgrims come to peep at it that the tenants must be annoyed, though the
policeman on the beat has become so accustomed to them that he no longer
eyes them cornerwise or suspects them of burglarious intentions.