The Victorian age was characterized by sharp contradictions

1.2 Literary career of Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811.Both his parents were of Anglo-Indian descent, and his father, Richmond Thackeray was born at South Mimms and went to India in 1798 at age sixteen as a writer with the East India Company. Richmond fathered a daughter, Sarah Redfield, in 1804 with Charlotte Sophia Rudd⁴, his possibly Eurasian mistress, and both mother and daughter were named in his will. Such liaisons were common among gentlemen of the East India Company, and it formed no bar to his later courting and marrying William’s mother. Thackeray’s mother Anne Becher was “one of the reigning beauties of the day” and a daughter of John Harmon Becher, Collector of the South 24 Parganas district, of an old Bengal civilian family” noted for the tenderness of its women”.
Anne Becher and Richmond Thackeray were married in Calcutta on 13 October 1810. Their only child was William. There is a fine miniature portrait of Anne Becher Thackeray and William Makepeace Thackeray, aged about two, done in Madras by George Chinnery 1813. Anne’s family’s deception was unexpectedly revealed in 1812, when Richmond Thackeray unwittingly invited the supposedly dead Carmichael-Smyth to dinner. Five years later, after Richmond had died of a fever on 13 September 1815, Anne married Henry Carmichael-Smyth, on 13 March 1817.The couple moved to England in 1820 and his son was sent to home to England at five years old to be educated, stopping at St. Helena on the way and having a servant point out to him the prisoner Napoleon, who “eats three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands on” The separation from his mother had a traumatic effect on the young Thackeray, which he discussed in his essay” On Letts’s Diary” in The Roundabout Papers.
In England he was educated at schools in Southampton and Chiswick. After attending several grammar schools Thackeray went in 1822 to Charterhouse, the London public school, where he led a rather lonely and miserable existence and he became a close friend of John Leech. Thackeray disliked Charterhouse, and parodied it in his fiction as “Slaughterhouse”. Nevertheless, Thackeray was honoured in the Charterhouse Chapel with a monument after his death. Illness in his last year there, during which he reportedly grew to his full height of six foot three, postponed his matriculation at Trinity College Cambridge, until February 1829. He was happier while studying at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1828-1830. In 1830 he left Cambridge without taking a degree and during 1831-33 he studied law at the Middle Temple, London. He then considered painting as a profession: his artistic gifts are seen in his letters and many of his early writings, which are amusingly and energetically illustrated. Thackeray then travelled for some time on the continent, visiting Paris and Weimar, where he met Goethe. He returned to England at the age of 21.All his efforts at this time have a dilettante air, understandable in a young man who, on coming of age in 1832, had inherited $20.000 from his father. He soon lost his fortune, however, through gambling and unlucky speculations and investments and he squandered much of it on gambling and on funding two successful newspapers, The National Standard and The Constitutional, for which he had hoped to write. He also lost a good part of his fortune in the collapse of two Indian banks. Forced to consider a profession to support himself, he turned first to art, which he studied in Paris, but did not pursue it, except in later years as the illustrator of some of his own novels and other writingsю In 1836, while studying art in Paris, he married a penniless Irish girl, on 20 August 1836, Isabella Gethin Shaw (1816–1893), second daughter of Isabella Creagh Shaw and Matthew Shaw, a colonel who had died after distinguished service, primarily in India. The Thackeray’s had three children, all girls: Anne Isabella⁵ (1837–1919), Jane (who died at eight months old) and Harriet Marian (1840–1875). Of Thackeray’s three daughters, one died in infancy (1839); and in 1840, after her last confinement, Mrs. Thackeray became insane. She never recovered and long survived her husband, living with friends in the country. Thackeray was, in effect, a widower, relying much on club life and gradually giving more and more attention to his daughters, for whom he established a home in London in 1846. The serial publication in 1847–48 of his novel Vanity Fair brought Thackeray both fame and prosperity, and from then on he was an established author on the English scene.

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Thackeray’s one serious romantic attachment in his later life, to Jane Brookfield, can be traced in his letters. She was the wife of a friend of his Cambridge days, and during Thackeray’s “widowerhood,” when his life lacked an emotional centre, he found one in the Brookfield home. Henry Brookfield’s insistence in 1851 that his wife’s passionate but platonic friendship with Thackeray should end was a grief greater than any the author had known since his wife’s descent into insanity. Thackeray now began "writing for his life", as he put it, turning to journalism in an effort to support his young family. He primarily worked for Fraser’s Magazine, a sharp-witted and sharp-tongued conservative publication for which he produced art criticism, short fictional sketches, and two longer fictional works, Catherine and The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Between 1837 and 1840 he also reviewed books for The Times. He was also a regular contributor to The Morning Chronicle and The Foreign Quarterly Review. Later, through his connection to the illustrator John Leech, he began writing for the newly created magazine Punch, in which he published The Snob Papers, later collected as The Book of Snobs. This work popularised the modern meaning of the word "snob". Thackeray’s literary significance lies in his contribution to the development of the novel. His reflections upon Victorian England through the use of an intrusive narrator became a new form of fiction, and his sprawling panoramas of eighteenth century England give the reader a psychological treatise of the times. The slow, satiric revelation of his characters and the realistic analysis of topics that other Victorian writers avoided, told in the form of a memoir by a witty, caustic observer, laid the groundwork for the psychological realism of Henry James; Thackeray’s experiments with the generational form presaged the works of John Galsworthy.
Thackeray’s writing can be divided into four distinct periods. The first, from 1837 to 1843, was a period in which he exercised an almost passionate vigor to point out where society had gone wrong. He places himself outside his writing through his superior attitude toward his characters, lower-class subjects whom he treats in the most disparaging manner conceivable. There is a glimmer of the Thackeray yet to come when he shifts his focus to the middle class, and when, in The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841; later published as The Great Hoggarty Diamond, 1848), he presents the likable Sam Tit marsh. Thackeray cast himself as Tit marsh, thereby indicating his concern about class. This concern was to dominate his writing.

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Thackeray was unsure about his own place in the rigid English social system. He thus adopted a jauntily unpretentious persona in his social fictions. He developed a talent for the burlesque and began to attack other writers, ridiculing military adventure novels, satirically attacking the New gate School, and portraying his fascination with the Europe of that time. The years 1843 to 1848 marked a significant change in Thackeray’s development as a writer. His personal involvement in his works became more apparent, and his association with Punch heightened his understanding of society’s injustices. During this period, Thackeray wrote a series of short stories, Men’s Wives (1843), that illustrate his misgivings about women and marriage. Along these same lines, he wrote several other pieces. One of particular note, “Bluebeard’s Ghost,” is the tale of a young widow’s devotion to her dead partner; in it, Thackeray’s love for Jane Brookfield and his jealousy of her fidelity to her husband are clear. The opulence of the eighteenth century, the lives of rogues, the education of gentlemen, and the presence of doting mothers blend in his best work of these middle years, The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Although the theme of the novel is social pretension, it is also a deliberate spoof of popular historical, crime, and romantic novels. The Snobs of England, by One of Themselves (1846-1874; later published as The Book of Snobs,1848, 1852) is Thackeray’s classic assault on pretentiousness. His message is that the remedy for social ills is social equality Thackeray was a regular contributor to Punch between 1843 and 1854.
Tragedy struck in Thackeray’s personal life as his wife, Isabella, succumbed to depression after the birth of their third child, in 1840. Finding that he could get no work done at home, he spent more and more time away until September 1840, when he realised how grave his wife’s condition was. Struck by guilt, he set out with his wife to Ireland. During the crossing she threw herself from a water-closet into the sea, but she was pulled from the waters. They fled back home after a four-week battle with her mother. From November 1840 to February 1842 Isabella was in and out of professional care, as her condition waxed and waned.
She eventually deteriorated into a permanent state of detachment from reality. Thackeray desperately sought cures for her, but nothing worked, and she ended up in two different asylums in or near Paris until 1845, after which Thackeray took her back to England, where he installed her with a Mrs Bakewell at Camberwell. Isabella outlived her husband by 30 years, in the end being cared for by a family named Thompson in Leigh-on-Sea at South end until her death in 1894 After his wife’s illness Thackeray became a de facto widower, never establishing another permanent relationship. He did pursue other women, however, in particular Mrs Jane Brookfield⁶ and Sally Baxter. In 1851 Mr Brookfield barred Thackeray from further visits to or correspondence with Jane. Baxter, an American twenty years Thackeray’s junior whom he met during a lecture tour in New York City in 1852, married another man яччччччччччччяяяяяяяяяяяяяяяяяяяяin 1854
In the early 1840s Thackeray had some success with two travel books, The Paris Sketch Book and The Irish Sketch Book, the latter marked by hostility to Irish Catholics. However, as the book appealed to British prejudices, Thackeray was given the job of being Punch’s Irish expert, often under the pseudonym Hibernis Hibernior⁷ It was Thackeray, in other words, who was chiefly responsible for Punch‘s notoriously hostile and condescending depictions of the Irish during An Gorta Mór (1845–51)
Thackeray achieved more recognition with his Snob Papers (serialised 1846/47, published in book form in 1848), but the work that really established his fame was the novel Vanity Fair, which first appeared in serialised instalments beginning in January 1847. Even before Vanity Fair completed its serial run esses, including a near-fatal one that Thackeray had become a celebrity, sought after by the very lords and ladies whom he satirised. They hailed him as the equal of Dickens⁸.
He remained "at the top of the tree," as he put it, for the rest of his life, during which he produced several large novels, notably Pendennis, The Newcomes and The History of Henry Esmond, despite various illnesses, including a near- fatal one that struck him in 1849 in the middle of writing Pendennis. He twice visited the United States on lecture tours during this period. Thackeray also gave lectures in London on the English humorists of the eighteenth century, and on the first four Hanoverian monarchs. The latter series was published in book form as The Four Georges.
In Oxford he stood unsuccessfully as an independent for Parliament. He was narrowly beaten by Cardwell, who received 1,070 votes, as against 1,005 for Thackeray.
In 1860 Thackeray became editor of the newly established Cornhill Magazine, but he was never comfortable in the role, preferring to contribute to the magazine as the writer of a column called Roundabout Papers. Thackeray’s grave at Kensal Green Cemetery, London, photographed in 2014 Thackeray’s health worsened during the 1850s and he was plagued by a recurring stricture of the urethra that laid him up for days at a time. He also felt that he had lost much of his creative impetus. He worsened matters by excessive eating and drinking, and avoiding exercise, though he enjoyed horseback-riding (he kept a horse). He has been described as "the greatest literary glutton who ever lived". His main activity apart from writing was "guttling and gorging". He could not break his addiction to spicy peppers, further ruining his digestion. On 23 December 1863, after returning from dining out and before dressing for bed, he suffered a stroke. He was found dead in his bed the following morning. His death at the age of fifty-two was entirely unexpected, and shocked his family, his friends and the reading public. An estimated 7,000 people attended his funeral at Kensington Gardens. He was buried on 29 December at Kensal Green Cemetery, and a memorial bust sculpted by Marochetti can be found in Westminster Abbey.

Chapter II. Vanity Fair- a novel without a hero