At the time, it caused a sensation thanks to its controversial ending, wherein the hero marries a woman who early in the novel seemed a "mother" to him. During these years of success, Thackeray lived virtually a bachelor life in London, even though now he had his daughters and grandmother with him.
He spent much time with friends, enlivening the weekly staff dinners for Punch , attending the social functions of a fashionable society hitherto closed to him, and becoming the constant attendant on Jane Brookfield, the wife of an old friend from Cambridge.
Thackeray and the Brookfields were involved in an increasingly tense emotional triangle, until his first trip to America in provided the time and distance for Thackeray to extricate himself emotionally.
William Brookfield's coldness and peremptory desire to dominate his wife, her resistance and the accompanying need for someone to turn to, and Thackeray's loneliness and characteristic susceptibility to a fascinating woman combined to create a complicated affair.
A curate who was disappointed in his wish for advancement in the Church, Brookfield alternately ignored or forbade his wife's warm communications with the successful novelist. Jane returned Thackeray's ardent expressions of friendship, lamented her husband's inability to understand her, and then surprised her platonic lover by getting pregnant by the husband she supposedly had no sympathy for.
Thackeray, for his part, professed for the wife a devotion that was pure and remained a companion of the husband, but nonetheless felt betrayed by Jane's tendency to cool down the correspondence when Brookfield complained. Thackeray eventually caused a dramatic break in these arrangements by berating Brookfield for his neglectful treatment of his wife.
The curate packed up his household for a vacation in Madeira, and, by the time Thackeray heard of Jane's second pregnancy, during his own trip to America, he had decided never to return to the vassalage he had endured for seven years. Thackeray followed in Dickens's footsteps with a lecturing tour of America. A reprise of his tour of the British Isles speaking on The English Humourists , these lectures were profitable for Thackeray and also provided influential--if now exploded--views of both Swift and Sterne.
Thackeray saw America through the eyes of friendly hosts, and he was more careful not to offend than Dickens had been, choosing, for instance, not to write a profitable account of his journey. Thackeray was also more tolerant of slavery--he wrote home to his mother that he did not recognize blacks as equals, though he did condemn the institution on moral grounds.
Susceptible to criticism from his hosts that the living conditions for English workers were worse than those for slaves, he chose to believe at least on this first tour that the whipping of slaves was rare and that families were not normally separated on the auction block.
Thackeray made enduring friendships during his trip, most significantly with the Baxter family of New York. The eldest daughter, Sally, enchanted the novelist--as a number of vibrant, intelligent, beautiful young women had done before her--and she became the model for Ethel Newcome.
He visited her on his second tour of the States when she was married to a South Carolina gentleman, and he lamented her sad life when she sat alone in Charleston, dying of tuberculosis, after the outbreak of the Civil War.
The panoramic novel The Newcomes --one of the books Henry James called "loose, baggy monsters"--brought Thackeray back to both novel-writing after more than a year off and his own century, as well as to the social satire of Vanity Fair. The main targets of this novel are snobbery and mercenary marriages. He also brought out in his most enduring Christmas book, the fairy tale The Rose and the Ring , which he called a "Fireside Pantomime. After a second profitable lecturing tour on The Four Georges that is, the Hanoverian kings of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries , Thackeray stood for Parliament as an independent and was defeated when a well-known politician was substituted for the man he thought he was to run against.
Thackeray believed his advocacy of entertainment on the Sabbath was also crucial in his defeat. In , he published The Virginians , a novel set before and during the American Revolution, which is a sequel to Henry Esmond , and which Thackeray intended as a fond tribute to the country where he made a number of friends--though he inadvertently angered some particularly patriotic Americans with his mild but not-especially-heroic portrait of George Washington.
The novel is noteworthy for the problems Thackeray had with the plot, its action being repeatedly forstalled by narrative intrusions, and the Revolutionary War being postponed till the book is almost over. Its ostensible theme, Pen's struggle to choose between a practical, worldly life and domestic virtue, presents only a superficial analysis of character and a doubtful moral accommodation. The History of Henry Esmond , Thackeray's most carefully planned and executed work, is a historical novel set in the 18th century.
He felt a temperamental sympathy with this age of satire and urbane wit, and he had made a significant contribution to a revival of interest in it the year before in a popular series of lectures, The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. Esmond presents a vivid and convincing realization of the manners and historical background of the period and contains some of his most complex and firmly controlled characters.
The Newcomes returns to the method of serial improvisation used for Vanity Fair. Supposedly written by the hero of Pendennis, it chronicles the moral history of four generations of an English family. The most massive and complex of Thackeray's social panoramas, it is also the darkest in its relentless portrayal of the defeat of humane feeling by false standards of respectability. Feeling that he had written himself out, Thackeray returned to earlier works for subjects for his later novels, and his narrators became increasingly garrulous in their familiar moralism.
Thackeray's later career was varied by an unsuccessful campaign for Parliament as a reform candidate in and by two lecture trips to the United States in and A founding editor of the Cornhill Magazine, he served it from to A massive person, 6 feet 3 inches tall, Thackeray was a genial and modest man, fond of good food and wine. In the years of his success he candidly took great pleasure in the amenities of the society that he portrayed so critically in his novels. He died on Dec. Gordon N.
Thackeray's mind was affected and she had to be placed with a family who took care of her. The little girls were sent to Thackeray's mother in Paris.
Although Mrs. Thackeray outlived her husband by thirty years, she did not recover. In , Thackeray came to London and became a regular contributor to Fraser's Magazine. From to , he was on the staff of Punch , a position that brought in a good income. During his stay at Punch , he wrote Vanity Fair , the work which placed him in the first rank of novelists. He completed it when he was thirty-seven. In , Thackeray stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for Oxford. In he took on the editorship of the Cornhill Magazine.
Titmarsh, were in a lighter vein. In the fall of Thackeray's wife suffered a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. This experience profoundly affected his character and work.
He became more sympathetic and less harsh in his judgments, and came to value domestic affection as the greatest good thing in life. These new attitudes emerged clearly in the best of his early stories, "The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond" In this tale an obscure not distinct clerk rises to sudden success and wealth but finds true happiness only after ruin has brought him back to hearth and home.
Adopting the mask of an aristocratic upper-class London bachelor and clubman named George Savage Fitz-Boodle, Thackeray next wrote a number of papers satirizing pointing out and devaluing sin or silliness his way of life. The series called "Men's Wives," which was written at the same time, shows a maturing sense of comedy and tragedy.
With The Luck of Barry Lyndon Thackeray returned to an earlier subject, the gentleman scoundrel. His central theme is the ruin of a young man's character by false ideals of conduct and worldly success. As a regular contributor to the satiric magazine Punch between and , Thackeray finally achieved widespread recognition. It was a critical survey of the manners of a period in which the redistribution of wealth and power caused by industrialism the rise of industry had shaken old standards of behavior and social relationships.
Vanity Fair — established Thackeray's fame permanently. Set in the time just before and after the Battle of Waterloo ; a battle that ended French domination of Europe , this novel is a portrait of society and centers on three families interrelated by acquaintance and marriage. In the unrestrained and resourceful Becky Sharp, Thackeray created one of fiction's most engaging characters.
In Pendennis — Thackeray concentrated on one character. The story of the development of a young writer, the first part draws on Thackeray's own life at school, at college, and as a journalist. The second half, which he wrote after a severe illness, lost the novel's focus. It presents only a superficial having insincere and shallow qualities analysis of character in Pen's struggle to choose between a practical, worldly life and one of domestic virtue.
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