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284 The nineteenth century
in some ways foreshadows Wilde for its irony and wit. Lothair searches
for Christian truth, while all sorts of struggling patriots (mainly Italian)
try to control and influence him, in order to have access to his wealth.
In its treatment of such themes as money, religion, aristocracy, and
patriotism, Lothair brings together the verve and wit of Byron and the
end-of-the-century cynical realism of Oscar Wilde.
William Makepeace Thackeray can be seen to follow Dickens’s
example in beginning his career in light, sketch-type journalism, and,
like Dickens’s pen-name Boz, Thackeray’s ‘Michael Angelo Titmarsh’
became a well-known voice. But the lightness of the humour of his
early works begins to darken in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Vanity
Fair (1847–48) gives an unusual perspective on the Napoleonic wars,
focusing a satirical eye on high society. The heroine, Becky Sharp, is
a penniless orphan, and is contrasted throughout the novel with rich,
spoiled Amelia Sedley. The background of the war, with Waterloo a
climax of death in the private world of the heroines at the moment of
greatest national triumph, underscores the hollowness behind the
achievement. Thackeray anticipates Dickens’s later concern with money
and society: Becky can impress society on ‘nothing a year’ with the
facade of respectability which is soon revealed to have no substance.
Pendennis (1848–50) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852) – the
first, like David Copperfield, a story of the growth of the hero from
childhood to adulthood, the second a historical novel – confirm the
darker side of Thackeray’s outlook in the creation of characters whose
lives are ‘a series of defeats’ to be overcome rather than a simple
progress to prosperity. Thackeray, who was born in Calcutta (the first
major novelist to be born in the colonies), continued the Henry Esmond
story in The Virginians (1857–59), one of many English novels of the
age to be set in America, which is viewed with a critical eye. Dickens’s
own reactions to America in American Notes (1842), and then in the
novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), had offended his American
readership considerably. Thackeray’s melancholy tone, and the
characters’ fixations with money, inheritance and social status, confirm
that, since Scott, the historical novel had made considerable progress
as a vehicle for social observation and comment. Dickens’s portraits
of Victorian society are broader than Thackeray’s, and George Eliot