Thackeray by D J Taylor

Thackeray by D J Taylor
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Category: Biography
Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
Summary: A full biography of the early Victorian writer and journalist best remembered for 'Vanity Fair', first published in 1999 and reissued in paperback to mark the bicentenary of his birth.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 512	Date: April 2011
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 978-0099563259
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Today, William Makepeace Thackeray is remembered almost exclusively as the writer of 'Vanity Fair', considered as among the greatest novels of its time. Yet he was a prolific writer, also responsible for 'Pendennis' and 'The Newcomes', as well as several sketches, essays and much poetry. However most of his work is largely forgotten today, while as a person he remains little known, and he has been somewhat overshadowed by his better-known contemporary, old friend and rival Charles Dickens, born one year later. This biography does an excellent job in rescuing him from such semi-obscurity.

Born in India in 1811, Thackeray and his mother moved back to England in early childhood after the death of his father. He could have lived comfortably on his inheritance, but as a young man he gambled most of it away. To compound this misfortune came a second, when the young woman whom he married suffered from severe depression after the death in infancy of their third child. Diagnosed as insane after an unsuccessful attempt to drown herself and one of their daughters, she spent the rest of her life confined in a home near Paris, outliving him by nearly thirty years.

Forced to work for a living, he initially wanted to be an artist. As the drawings, mostly comic in nature, reproduced in this book show, he was quite talented in this direction, but eventually he found his main strength in the written word. From writing short sketches and essays, her went on to novels, finding initial success in 1844 with The Luck of Barry Lyndon, immortalized more recently in a film by Stanley Kubrick. It was however Vanity Fair, four years later, which proved to be his crowning success, and one which he spent the rest of his days trying to live up to.

As a popular and prolific author (his collected works, we are told, extend to 26 hardback volumes in all), he enjoyed moderate success throughout his life, but this biography suggests that after the sadness of his married life he was never quite at ease with himself or the world. An unrequited affair with Jane Brookfield, the wife of his best friend, seems to have embittered him. Years of ill-health, probably caused in part by an early venereal infection which was never completely cured, took their toll. Nevertheless this did not stop him from travelling widely throughout Europe and the United States or standing for parliament in 1857 as an Independent candidate for Oxford, losing quite narrowly.

He also became the founding editor of the 'Cornhill Magazine', although was never comfortable in the editorial chair which he resigned after a couple of years and much preferred the role of contributor, something he undertook regularly for the little time still left to him. On the night before Christmas Eve, 1863, his daughter dreamt that they were climbing a high hill, and as he was pointing something out to her he disappeared, leaving her to go down alone. In the morning she awoke to the news that he had been found dead in bed, apparently after a stroke.

As a person, he seems to have been engaging, witty company at times, and an excellent father to his daughters, yet pompous, sensitive to criticism, ill-tempered and quarrelsome on occasion – though this could have been blamed on his poor health. The last years were made difficult by what became known as the Garrick Club affair, when he took offence at some remarks made by him in the press, and led to a breach between him and Dickens. The fundamental difference between both men, by the way, is also emphasised. Thackeray was on the whole a mild yet uncritical satirist, yet largely prepared to accept the world and its faults as he found them, while Dickens was indignant at the social abuses and inequality he saw around him, his writings often seething with rage at the inhumanity he longed to see put right. The latter, being the man with the message, is more widely celebrated to this day, while most of the former's writings with one or two exceptions are now little read.

The final impression we are left by this very full biography is of a man who lived an often sad and unfulfilled life. Yet at least he ended his days reasonably well off after some years of financial struggle, having been able to set aside enough to build himself a grand house in Kensington. Taylor presents a very rounded portrait of an often contradictory man who evidently lived life to the full, and whose reputation survives to this day, even if not quite in the first rank of 19th century writers, certainly not far below.

Our thanks to Vintage for sending a review copy to Bookbag. We also have a review of The Prose Factory by D J Taylor.

For another 19th century literary life, may we also recommend Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life by Lyndall Gordon.

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