Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–63), educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a close friend of E.
Fitzgerald. He left Cambridge without taking a degree, having lost some of his inheritance through gambling. He entered the Middle Temple, but he never practised as a barrister. He began his career in journalism as proprietor of a struggling weekly paper, the
National Standard, in 1833; it ceased publication a year later. He also studied art in London and in Paris. He married Isabella Shawe in 1836, the year in which his first publication in volume form,
Flore et Zephyr, appeared. The Thackerays returned to London, where their first child, Anne ( Anne Thackeray
Ritchie), was born in 1837. Thackeray began to contribute to
Fraser's Magazine, the
Morning Chronicle, the
New Monthly Magazine,
The Times, and many other periodicals. After the birth of their third child, Harriet Marian (later the first wife of Leslie
Stephen), in 1840 Isabella Thackeray suffered a mental breakdown which proved permanent.
Thackeray first came to the attention of the public with
The Yellowplush Papers, which appeared in
Fraser's Magazine in 1837–8, followed by
Catherine (1839) and
A Shabby Genteel Story (1840). His first full-length volume,
The Paris Sketch Book (1840), was followed by
The Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841) a mock-heroic tale about a diamond which brings bad luck to Samuel Titmarsh, an amiable young clerk who inherits the gem: this is narrated by Sam's cousin, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, who provided Thackeray with his most familiar pseudonym. Other pseudonyms included ‘George Savage FitzBoodle’, a bachelor clubman, ‘author’ of
The FitzBoodle Papers (1842–3), narrator of
Men's Wives (1843) and ‘editor’ of
The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844); Jeames de la Pluche; and ‘Our Fat Correspondent’.
The Irish Sketch Book of 1843 (a personal, impressionistic and prejudiced account of an 1842 tour of Ireland) has a preface signed, for the first, with Thackeray's own name.
Thackeray began his association with
Punch in 1842, and contributed to it caricatures as well as articles and humorous sketches.
The Snobs of England, by One of Themselves (1846–7, later published as
The Book of Snobs, 1848), was narrated by ‘Mr Snob’. This constitutes his great anatomy of the English vice of snobbery, a term he invented.
Mr Punch's Prize Novelists (1847) parodies the leading writers of the day.
His first major novel,
Vanity Fair (1847), began to appear in monthly numbers, with illustrations by the author.
Pendennis (1848–50 was followed by
The History of Henry Esmond (1852, 3 vols), and
The Newcomes, published in numbers in 1853–5. Thackeray continued to produce lighter work, including a series of ‘Christmas Books’ which he illustrated himself. In 1851 he gave a series of lectures,
The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, and in 1855–7, he lectured on
The Four Georges. He twice visited the USA to deliver his lectures, in 1851–3 and 1855–6.
The Virginians, set in America, appeared in numbers in 1857–9. In 1860 he became the first editor of the
Cornhill Magazine, for which he wrote his
Roundabout Papers and in which appeared
Lovel the Widower,
The Adventures of Philip, and the unfinished
Denis Duval.
