On this date in 1811, William Makepeace Thackeray was born in India. He was educated at Cambridge, Trinity College, met the aged Goethe in Germany, lost most of his inheritance through gambling or bad investments and then studied law. Thackeray decided to go into writing, lived in Paris for several years and then moved back to London for a journalism career.
Employing highly unlikely noms de plume such as “C.J. Yellowplush” and “George Savage Fitz-Boodle,” Thackeray eventually wrote for the periodical Punch. The Book of Snobs (1848) compiled sketches published weekly in Punch. Example: “Snobs are to be studied like other objects of Natural Science, and are a part of the Beautiful (with a large B).”
The satirist had success with The Paris Sketchbook (1840), Barry Lyndon (1844) and Vanity Fair, which was serialized in 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.”) For a time his popularity rivaled Dickens’ and, like Dickens, Thackeray lectured in the U.S. to great acclaim. His novel The Virginians, set in America, was published in 1858-59 after being serialized in 24 monthly parts.
Thackeray “seems to have formed no very definite creed.” (Life of W.M. Thackeray, by Herman Merivale, 1891.) “About my future state I don’t know. I leave it in the disposal of the awful Father.” (Life of W.M. Thackeray by Louis Melville, Vol. 2, 1899.)
After his wife had three daughters in three years, she suffered a permanent nervous breakdown. Thackeray and his mother took care of the girls. His daughter Harriet married Sir Leslie Stephen, a clergyman who became an agnostic. He died at age 52 of a brain aneurysm in 1863.
