William Thackeray
From Philosopedia
Thackeray, William Makepeace (18 July 1811 - 24 December 1863)
Thackeray, the Calcutta-born English novelist, was a brilliant satirist. He left Trinity College, Cambridge, without taking a degree, because he lost some of his inheritance through gambling. During the winter of 1830–1831 he visited Weimar, where he met Goethe. By 1833 virtually all his inherited money had been lost, probably in the collapse of the Indian agency-houses. Thackeray lived in Paris from 1834 until 1837, making a meager living from journalism. As a contributor to Punch, he often parodied the false romantic sentiment pervading the fiction of his day.
In 1836, he married Isabella Shawe, who three years later became hopelessly insane after having had three children in three years. She was cared for by a family in Essex and survived her husband by thirty years. Thackeray sent his two young daughters to be raised by his parents in Paris, then lived the life of a clubman in London and worked to support his family. His eldest daughter, Lady Anne Ritchie, was also an author. His younger daughter Harriet married Sir Leslie Stephen, an ordained minister who became an agnostic.
Thackeray frequently wrote against the use of tobacco, including in his fiction such lines as,
- Cigars introduced with the coffee, do, if anything can, make us forget the absence of the other sex.
He employed highly unlikely noms de plume, such as "C.J. Yellowplush" and "George Savage Fitz-Boodle."
In 1841, Thackeray wrote Comic Tales and Sketches, followed in 1848 by The Book of Snobs (Sample: "He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob."). The satirist had success with The Paris Sketchbook (1840) and Barry Lyndon (1844).
The public liked Vanity Fair, which was serialized between 1847-48 and introduced the amoral and memorable character of Becky Sharp ("I think I could be a good woman if I have five thousand a year"). (That work, inspired by a phrase from John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress, he had originally been titled The Novel Without a Hero: Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society).
For a time his popularity rivaled Dickens, and, like Dickens, Thackeray lectured in the United States to great acclaim.
According to Joseph McCabe, Tennyson was a theist but was skeptical about a future life. “About my future state I don’t know,” he was quoted as saying in Lewis Melville’s Life of Thackeray. In The Letters of Dr. J. Brown, there is a letter in which Thackeray says that he has listened to a preacher “on the evangelical dodge” and he adds, “Ah, what rubbish.” Melville states that Thackeray “formed no very definite creed.”
(See entry for Joseph Warren Beach.)
