THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

profession seems to me to be as serious as the Parson’s own.’
Thackeray’s later, far more parsonic, novels have generally been denied the critical esteem which the twentieth
century has accorded too exclusively to Vanity Fair. None of them has quite the same experimental ebullience and
sharpness, and none expresses the same guarded fascination with the laxer morals of Regency England, but each in its
way responds to particular aspects of mid-Victorian culture, to its earnestness as much as to the fascination with
history, its sexual guardedness, and its prodigality. The History of Pendennis (1848-50) traces the development of a
young gentleman by looking (as the subtitle suggests) at ‘his fortunes and misfortunes, his friends and his greatest
enemy’. The original paper covers to the monthly parts showed its protagonist torn between domestic virtue and the
pleasures of the world, between a maternal brunette and a seductive blonde. Pen’s ‘greatest enemy’ is himself,
tempted by the ills to which adolescence and young manhood are heir — sexual awakening and exploration, laziness,
indulgence, debt and immaturity. That he finally achieves success both in love and in the literary life is testimony both
to a new geniality on Thackeray’s part and to a Victorian seriousness (which is only partly tongue-in-cheek). Its
successor, The History of Henry Esmond (1852), is a radically different work. Set largely in the reign of Queen Anne,
and narrated by a melancholic, self doubting, fitfully romantic aristocrat, it both pays tribute to the fiction of the
previous century and offers distinctly
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nineteenth-century insights into the historical process. Like Scott before him, Thackeray intermixes the private and
the public, but through his moody confessional, first-person narrator he allows for myopic perspectives and the
expression of confused motives. The moral oppositions suggested by social pretences and a Jacobite Pretender to the
throne, by honour and deception, by European war and London journalism, by shabby heroes and elusive lovers, by
unsettling and divided England and an American Indian summer, make for a deeply disconcerting but profoundly
fertile novel. In its final gestures of placid and passive withdrawal it not only qualifies the Whiggish confidence of
Macaulay but also disturbs conventional Victorian notions of what might constitute a ‘happy’ ending.
The Newcomes of 1853-5, Thackeray’s most obviously ‘Victorian’ novel follows the vagaries of an extended
genteel family (though there is a punning irony in his description of them in his subtitle as ‘most respectable’). Only
the upright Colonel Newcome, an Indian Army officer, bewildered by the ways of the world, maintains the virtues of
true ‘gentlemanliness’ by which Thackeray and his class set such store (and which his many déclassé nineteenthcentury
contemporaries attempted both to refine and to redefine). In The Virginians (1857-9) the novelist returns to
the destinies of the gentlemanly Esmond family in their Virginian retreat. The novel, which was partly inspired by
Thackeray’s visits to the United States in 1852-3 and 1855-6, re-examines the dilemmas posed by political division
within a family in the period of the American Revolution. Despite its glancing, historically based, reflections on a
nation approaching Civil War, and its evocation of the literary and fashionable worlds of eighteenth-century London,
it is a broken-backed and often sentimental work, disappointing when set beside the intellectual stringency and
narrative subtlety of Henry Esmond. The Adventures of Philip (which like The Newcomes purports to be told by
Arthur Pendennis) loosely interconnects with its predecessors as if part of an expanding, loose family chronicle. It was
first published serially in the Cornhill Magazine in 1861-2 during the brief period of Thackeray’s editorship of one of
the most innovative periodicals of its day. It must have been obvious, even to his most devoted admirers, that the
scintillation of Vanity Fair was now elusive.
Anthony Trollope (1815-82) was Thackeray’s most determined and consistent admirer amongst his fellownovelists.
From the evidence of his brief but antipathetic characterization of Dickens as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’ in
The Warden it is evident that Trollope distrusted that writer’s campaigns, prejudices, and tear-jerkings; the fact that
‘Mr Popular Sentiment’ is in league with ‘Dr Pessimist Anticant’ (a side-swipe at Carlyle) suggests that he also
disliked a noisily committed literature. Trollope is the most informed and observant political novelist in English, but
his politics are those of parliamentary and ecclesiastical manoeuvres and scandals, of country-house shuffles and
reshuffles, and of personalities in conflict and in mutual complement. When he describes himself in his often
irritatingly misleading Autobiography
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(1875-6) as an advanced Conservative-Liberal he is not only using the new party terminology of the day, but
attempting to point to his own aspiration to neutrality as a writer. Party politics fascinate him as an observer of human
tribalism and ambition but particular policies and the high-minded pursuance of issues are of little consequence in
novels which frequently touch on power and the delight in wielding power. When Trollope himself tried to enter
Parliament, his campaign proved a disaster. When he developed the political career of his idealized gentlemanly
power broker, Plantagenet Palliser, in The Prime Minister (1875-6) he revealed a thin-skinned but upright man whose
ambition is merely to introduce a decimal currency. Power proves both elusive and hollow. What Trollope seems to