William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray was born on July 18, 1811, in Kolkata (then Calcutta), the administrative centre of British India, where his father, Richmond Thackeray, held a senior post as a collector in the East India Company's revenue service ^[1]. The family belonged to a network of Anglo-Indian administrators; several Thackerays before him had served the Company, and the India of his infancy left traces in his later fiction, particularly in the character of Jos Sedley, the Collector of Boggley Wollah in Vanity Fair ^[2].

Richmond Thackeray died in 1815, when his son was four. The following year the boy was sent to England for schooling, a common and often painful custom among Anglo-Indian families, while his mother, Anne Becher, remained in India and later remarried ^[1]. Young William attended schools in Southampton and Chiswick before entering Charterhouse School in London in 1822. He was unhappy there, later mocking it in his fiction as "Slaughterhouse," though he softened toward the school in later life and rechristened it "Greyfriars" in The Newcomes ^[3].

In 1829 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. He contributed light verse to undergraduate papers, including a parody of the prize-winning poem "Timbuctoo" (the serious version that year was Alfred Tennyson's), but he gambled, lost money to professional card players, and left in 1830 without taking a degree ^[1]. A period of drift followed: travel on the Continent, a stay in Weimar where he met the elderly Goethe, desultory legal study at the Middle Temple, and experiments in art ^[2].

At twenty-one Thackeray came into an inheritance of roughly twenty thousand pounds, and within a few years most of it was gone, lost through gambling, unwise investments in two failing newspapers, and the collapse of Indian banks in which family money was held ^[1]. The loss forced a decision that shaped English literature: needing an income, he turned to the two skills he possessed, drawing and writing. He studied art in Paris in the mid 1830s and for the rest of his life illustrated much of his own work ^[4].

Anyone asking who was William Makepeace Thackeray before Vanity Fair would have received a confusing answer, because he barely existed under his own name. Through the late 1830s and 1840s he wrote prolifically for Fraser's Magazine, The Times, and from 1842 the comic weekly Punch, hiding behind a crowd of pseudonyms: Michael Angelo Titmarsh, George Savage Fitz-Boodle, Charles James Yellowplush, and others ^[2]. The work included art criticism, travel sketches, parodies, and fiction. Catherine (1839-40) mocked the fashion for glamorised criminal heroes; The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), the memoir of an unrepentant Irish rogue, is now regarded as the finest of these early narratives ^[3].

For Punch he produced The Snobs of England (1846-47), a series anatomising social climbing and pretension in every corner of British life. The series was hugely popular, was collected as The Book of Snobs, and did much to fix the modern meaning of the word snob ^[4].

Among William Makepeace Thackeray achievements, nothing else approaches Vanity Fair, published in monthly parts from January 1847 to July 1848 and the first major work to carry his own name ^[1]. Subtitled "A Novel without a Hero," it follows two young women from school into Regency society: the passive, gentle Amelia Sedley and the brilliant, amoral Becky Sharp, an orphan who claws her way upward through charm, calculation, and cold nerve. Set against the backdrop of the Waterloo campaign of 1815, the novel treats worldly ambition with an irony that spares no one, including the narrator himself ^[2].

Vanity Fair transformed Thackeray from an overworked journalist into a celebrity, and reviewers began pairing his name with that of Dickens, a comparison that persisted for the rest of the century ^[3]. He consolidated the success with The History of Pendennis (1848-50), a semi-autobiographical account of a young man's education in literature and love, and then with The History of Henry Esmond (1852), a historical novel set in the reign of Queen Anne. Esmond was published complete in three volumes rather than in parts, written in a deliberately eighteenth-century idiom, and many critics have judged it his most carefully constructed book ^[1].

The Newcomes (1853-55) offered a vast, melancholy panorama of an English family across generations, while The Virginians (1857-59) followed Esmond's American descendants through the era of the American Revolution ^[3]. Thackeray also flourished on the lecture platform. His series The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century and The Four Georges drew large audiences in Britain and on two American tours, in 1852-53 and 1855-56, and the American journeys were lucrative enough to restore the fortune he had lost as a young man ^[4].

In 1836, while working as Paris correspondent for a short-lived radical paper called The Constitutional, Thackeray married Isabella Gethin Shawe, the daughter of an Irish colonel's widow ^[1]. The couple settled in London and had three daughters: Anne Isabella in 1837, Jane in 1838 (she died in infancy), and Harriet Marian, known as Minny, in 1840 ^[2].

After Minny's birth Isabella sank into a severe mental illness from which she never recovered. In September 1840, during a sea voyage to Ireland, she attempted to drown herself, and after years of treatment in England and abroad she was placed in private care, outliving her husband by three decades ^[1]. Thackeray never divorced and never remarried. He raised his daughters with the help of his mother and grandmother, and the strain of supporting two households by his pen partly explains his enormous journalistic output ^[3].

His emotional life found an outlet in a long, intense attachment to Jane Brookfield, the wife of his old Cambridge friend the Reverend William Brookfield; the friendship ended painfully in 1851 when her husband demanded a break ^[2]. Thackeray's elder daughter, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, became a respected novelist and memoirist in her own right, and Minny married the critic Leslie Stephen, later the father (by his second marriage) of Virginia Woolf ^[4].

The 1850s brought Thackeray wealth, fame, and steadily worsening health. He suffered from a urethral stricture dating from a youthful illness, along with recurrent fevers and the effects of a large appetite for food and drink, and from mid-decade his writing shows a slackening of energy that he himself acknowledged ^[1].

In 1857 he stood for Parliament as an independent candidate in Oxford, campaigning on a platform that included the ballot and wider suffrage, and lost by a narrow margin ^[2]. The following year he was drawn into the so-called Garrick Club affair, a bitter public quarrel with the young journalist Edmund Yates that hardened a long rivalry with Dickens, who took Yates's side; the two great novelists were only reconciled shortly before Thackeray's death ^[3].

In 1860 he became the founding editor of the Cornhill Magazine, a new shilling monthly that quickly reached sales unheard of for a literary journal and carried work by Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot's circle of contemporaries. Thackeray contributed his genial Roundabout Papers essays and the novels Lovel the Widower and The Adventures of Philip, but editing wearied him and he resigned the post in 1862 ^[1]. He built himself a red-brick house at 2 Palace Green, Kensington, and there, on December 24, 1863, he was found dead in bed of a stroke, aged fifty-two. His final novel, Denis Duval, was left unfinished. An estimated crowd of many hundreds attended his burial at Kensal Green Cemetery, and a memorial bust by Carlo Marochetti was placed in Westminster Abbey ^[4].

For decades after his death Thackeray was routinely named alongside Dickens as one of the two masters of the Victorian novel, and any William Makepeace Thackeray biography must reckon with that comparison: where Dickens dealt in energy and sentiment, Thackeray offered irony, worldly knowledge, and a narrator who talks to the reader like a clever, disenchanted friend ^[1]. His reputation narrowed in the twentieth century, and today his standing rests chiefly on Vanity Fair, which remains in print in every major classics series and is regularly assigned in university courses on the novel ^[3].

Becky Sharp has proved his most durable creation. The novel has been adapted many times for stage and screen, including a 1935 Hollywood film (the first feature shot in three-strip Technicolor), Mira Nair's 2004 film with Reese Witherspoon, and a 2018 ITV and Amazon television serial ^[4]. Barry Lyndon reached a new audience through Stanley Kubrick's meticulous 1975 film adaptation ^[2].

A few William Makepeace Thackeray facts show how far his influence spread beyond fiction. His Book of Snobs fixed the modern sense of the word snob in the language, and the Oxford English Dictionary credits Vanity Fair with early printed uses of several now-common expressions ^[2]. His manuscripts and drawings are held by institutions including the Morgan Library in New York and Charterhouse, and scholars continue to mine his letters, edited in four volumes by Gordon N. Ray, whose two-volume life remains the standard biography ^[3].