A History of English Literature

WILLIAM M. THACKERAY. Dickens' chief rival for fame during his later
lifetime and afterward was Thackeray, who presents a strong contrast with
him, both as man and as writer.
Thackeray, the son of an East India Company official, was born at Calcutta
in 1811. His father died while he was a child and he was taken to England
for his education; he was a student in the Charterhouse School and then for
a year at Cambridge. Next, on the Continent, he studied drawing, and though
his unmethodical and somewhat idle habits prevented him from ever really
mastering the technique of the art, his real knack for it enabled him later
on to illustrate his own books in a semi-grotesque but effective fashion.
Desultory study of the law was interrupted when he came of age by the
inheritance of a comfortable fortune, which he managed to lose within a
year or two by gambling, speculations, and an unsuccessful effort at
carrying on a newspaper. Real application to newspaper and magazine writing
secured him after four years a place on 'Eraser's Magazine,' and he was
married. Not long after, his wife became insane, but his warm affection for
his daughters gave him throughout his life genuine domestic happiness.
For ten years Thackeray's production was mainly in the line of satirical
humorous and picaresque fiction, none of it of the first rank. During this
period he chiefly attacked current vices, snobbishness, and sentimentality,
which latter quality, Thackeray's special aversion, he found rampant in
contemporary life and literature, including the novels of Dickens. The
appearance of his masterpiece, 'Vanity Fair' (the allegorical title taken
from a famous incident in 'Pilgrim's Progress'), in 'Fraser's Magazine' in
1847-8 (the year before Dickens' 'David Copperfield') brought him sudden
fame and made him a social lion. Within the next ten years he produced his
other important novels, of which the best are 'Pendennis,' 'Henry Esmond,'
and 'The Newcomes,' and also his charming essays (first delivered as
lectures) on the eighteenth century in England, namely 'English Humorists,'
and 'The Four Georges.' All his novels except 'Henry Esmond' were published
serially, and he generally delayed composing each instalment until the
latest possible moment, working reluctantly except under the stress of
immediate compulsion. He was for three years, at its commencement, editor
of 'The Cornhill Magazine.' He died in 1863 at the age of fifty-two, of
heart failure.
The great contrast between Dickens and Thackeray results chiefly from the
predominance in Thackeray of the critical intellectual quality and of the
somewhat fastidious instinct of the man of society and of the world which
Dickens so conspicuously lacked. As a man Thackeray was at home and at ease
only among people of formal good breeding; he shrank from direct contact
with the common people; in spite of his assaults on the frivolity and vice
of fashionable society, he was fond of it; his spirit was very keenly
analytical; and he would have been chagrined by nothing more than by
seeming to allow his emotion to get the better of his judgment. His novels
seem to many readers cynical, because he scrutinizes almost every character
and every group with impartial vigor, dragging forth every fault and every
weakness into the light. On the title page of 'Vanity Fair' he proclaims
that it is a novel without a hero; and here, as in some of his lesser
works, most of the characters are either altogether bad or worthless and
the others very largely weak or absurd, so that the impression of human
life which the reader apparently ought to carry away is that of a hopeless
chaos of selfishness, hypocrisy, and futility. One word, which has often
been applied to Thackeray, best expresses his attitude--disillusionment.
The last sentences of 'Vanity Fair' are characteristic: 'Oh! Vanitas
Vanitatum! which, of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire?
or, having it, is satisfied?--Come, children, let us shut the box and the