In the nineteenth century, hundreds of three-volume novels were produced every year to feed Victorian circulating libraries—to sail “tired people to the Islands of the Blest,” as Rudyard Kipling would put it after the form died out. Anthony Trollope could only write two or three of these a year. And so countless minor authors were pressed into service, producing the kind of books so much forgotten now that they must be read from Archive.org scans rather than Project Gutenberg e-texts.
Some are still seaworthy today, if you’ve already gotten your legs under you. After you have read through the best of Wilkie Collins, for instance, you will eventually get to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd or Lady Audley’s Secret, best-selling pioneers of the “Is this woman already married?” genre of Victorian thriller.
I’m fond of Arthur Pendennis, too. Pendennis is a creation of William Makepeace Thackeray. He first appears as the title character in a novel where he himself is a novelist, the author of Walter Lorraine. He ends his career twenty years later as the fictional compiler of The Adventures of Philip, Thackeray’s very real and forgettable mid-Victorian serial.
It was not uncommon for writers circling the endless periodicals of Victorian Britain to experiment with pseudonyms, but for Thackeray the experiment was his brief stint publishing as himself. Beginning in 1837, writing as a haughty and semiliterate footman called Charles Yellowplush, Esq., he spent ten years providing for his young family and increasingly ill wife under a host of fictional bylines, including a swaggering Anglo-Indian, a dim club man, and an aging Punch staffer known only as “Our Fat Contributor.”
Thackeray’s most important early pseudonym, appearing on nearly everything he wrote “as himself” in those years, had no special position or stylistic tics. Michael Angelo Titmarsh was, as D. J. Taylor says of these ghostly writers, “not quite Thackeray, and at the same time not quite independent of Thackeray.” Titmarsh could possess any characteristic Thackeray needed him to have. He could write outrageous fiction or straightforward travelogues following Thackeray through Paris and Ireland. He could sprout a cousin named Samuel, who in The Great Hoggarty Diamond is assigned the pleasant penniless early days of Thackeray’s marriage and the death of his infant daughter. (When Samuel Titmarsh’s little daughter dies, his wife finds a position as a wet nurse for a kind young aristocrat who has just had a girl of her own; when one of Thackeray’s daughters died and his wife had another, after which she had a mental breakdown, his mother and stepfather spent years caring for his living daughters as their own.)
Vanity Fair was published under Thackeray’s own name in 1847, four years after the Irish Sketch Book had been attributed to M. A. Titmarsh, but with a dedication by W. M. Thackeray. Contemporary readers often find it impossible to believe that Thackeray’s sentimental later books were written by the man who wrote Vanity Fair. Thackeray may have agreed; as soon as he had finished creating a writer called Arthur Pendennis, who was not quite himself, he put him to work writing novels.
As authors, Pendennis and the Thackeray of Vanity Fair have little in common. Charlotte Brontë, not realizing she was rededicating Jane Eyre to a man who had to commit his wife to a string of private asylums after she tried to drown herself and her daughter, lauded the author of Vanity Fair as one who “comes before the great ones of society, much as the sons of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel.” Catherine Peters calls the signature narrative technique of Vanity Fair “double irony”—a doubling and tripling back so that the reader can’t identify where his feelings are supposed to come to rest. Thackeray introduces Amelia Sedley along conventional lines as a highly accomplished young lady before adding a wink by comparing drawing and piano-playing to “qualities of love and gentleness,” Peters says, that “he expects us to value more.” Then he casts doubt on that as well, suggesting that Amelia is indiscriminately loving and gentle. (Pendennis would stop here, or one step earlier.) Finally Thackeray looks back out at the reader, inventing a specially annoying figure (“JONES, who reads this book at his club”) who has (and therefore destroys) the exact cynical thought Thackeray has planted in his reader’s mind.
The History of Pendennis, ostensibly written by Thackeray, followed Vanity Fair almost immediately, running from 1848 through 1850. It stars (and sounds suspiciously like it was written by) Pendennis. Unlike its predecessor, Pendennis lays no traps for the comfortable reader. A young man gambles his way out of university (as Thackeray had) and makes a headlong dive into writing to make up what he has lost (ditto). He has a skeptical turn of mind, but (as admirers such as Brontë would later say of Thackeray) his love of middle-class proprieties and dinners with titled bores prevents him from roaring before the throned kings of Israel or Judah. His novel Walter Lorraine is celebrated as fashionable rather than important, and Pendennis ends with its hero narrowly avoiding disaster, changing his ways, and marrying his angelic foster sister, Laura (as Thackeray had not).
Thackeray tells us repeatedly, beginning in the preface, that Pendennis is no hero. It’s easy to believe this about Pendennis the author, but one hundred seventy-five years later it is harder to accept that he means it about Pendennis the character, who has after all married someone at the end of a Victorian novel. Trollope’s measured defense of this Pendennis, after Thackeray’s death, shows the extent of our unfamiliarity with the world for which Pendennis the author wrote. This is how Trollope feels he must excuse Pendennis to his fellow Victorians:
In our individual lives we are contented to endure an admixture of evil, which we should resent if imputed to us in the general. We presume ourselves to be truth-speaking, noble in our sentiments, generous in our actions, modest and unselfish, chivalrous and devoted. But we forgive and pass over in silence a few delinquencies among ourselves. . . . We take it for granted, as though they were fixed rules in life, that our boys from our public schools look us in the face and are manly; that our gentlemen tell the truth as a matter of course; and that our young ladies are refined and unselfish. Thackeray is always protesting that it is not so, and that no good is done by blinking the truth. He knows that we have our little home experiences. Let us have the facts out, and mend what is bad if we can.
This is a speech nobody has ever had to deliver to the readers of true crime books or the drama subreddit: “I know we all believe that the happiest families are secretly very happy, and that behind every golden exterior lurks a heart of gold, but sometimes that’s just not true!”
So it is critical to Pendennis, as well as the two novels its hero is supposed to have written later, to take Thackeray at his word: Pendennis comes through his time as the star of a Victorian novel with the requisite virtuous wife, but he does not become a great man, and he is not a great author. But The Newcomes, his masterpiece, is a great book.
The Newcomes was Thackeray’s next novel about contemporary life after Pendennis; he told a friend that “Mr. Pendennis is the author of the book, and he has taken a great weight off my mind, for under that mask and acting, as it were, I can afford to say and think many things that I couldn’t venture on in my own person.”
By the time of its publication in 1854, Thackeray was enormously famous, Dickens’s only peer—the kind of gentleman, Trollope tells us, people assumed told the truth as a matter of course. He was also physically enormous, impossible to hide; a sick little girl he befriended late in life wrote more than fifty years later that “the steadfast eyes and his gold spectacles in my child mind [were] the only thing that showed he was not a real giant.”
But The Newcomes is not written by Thackeray the cultural titan; it is written by the minor novelist Pendennis, about some people he and his wife Laura know. No longer constrained by the stations of the coming-of-age story, we’re granted little visions of Pendennis as his peers (and readers) might have seen him. He and Laura joke with each other, disagree about their friends the main characters, and enjoy a relaxed life as reasonably successful and reasonably decent mortals.
It begins in flashback: Pendennis, still an unattached young buck, has a chance meeting with Clive Newcome, a younger boy he had known at school. Clive and his father, Colonel Newcome—“a gentleman with a lean brown face and long black mustachios, dressed in very loose clothes”—have come to a dive called the Cave of Harmony for “supper and a song.”
The Newcomes is the Colonel’s book, and in Thackeray’s lifetime the Colonel was his most beloved character. It is sometime in the 1840s, and the Colonel, a widower, has been in India for thirty-five years. Having made his fortune, he has returned to England to see Clive, and he is visiting the Cave, Clive says, because “all the wits used to come here,—Mr. Sheridan, Captain Morris, Colonel Hanger, Professor Porson.” But all he finds, to Pendennis’s own horror, are tables full of dissipated young men.
Pendennis and his friends have already quietly agreed to pull their punches on account of Clive’s youth, and the night is a success at first. Colonel Newsome, the narrator says,
laughed at the Derby Ram so that it did you good to hear him; and when Hoskins sang (as he did admirably) the Old English Gentleman, and described, in measured cadence, the death of that venerable aristocrat, tears trickled down the honest warrior’s cheek, while he held out his hand to Hoskins and said, “Thank you, sir, for that song; it is an honour to human nature.” On which Hoskins began to cry too.
To Clive’s silent horror, and as Pendennis holds his breath, the Colonel asks to sing as well, explaining that he loves music but was rarely allowed to hear it before he was sent to India. When he delivers the first verse of his ancient ballad in “an exceedingly pleasant voice, with flourishes and roulades in the old Incledon manner, which has nearly passed away,” Clive recovers, and the university men are riveted.
With this set piece, Pendennis makes it clear that the Colonel possesses a straightforwardness and simplicity granted to no one in Pendennis. In the company of the oldest boy of all, all the ostensibly disillusioned young men shed their self-protective wisdom and become boys themselves. It is a moment that Thackeray the titan could not have precipitated or learned from, but it sticks with Pendennis, the journeyman writer and reasonably decent Victorian who remembers that at twenty-two he had felt himself to be “as old as, ay, older than the Colonel.”
But after the song, Pendennis notices an old acquaintance, the bedraggled and permanently drunk Captain Costigan. It becomes apparent that egging Costigan into performing “what he called one of his prime songs” is now a common pastime at the Cave of Harmony, even if it wasn’t so in Mr. Sheridan’s time, and he delivers a vulgar performance that drives the Colonel out the door in loud, honorable protest.
If Pendennis shows how an unheroic figure might scrape through Thackeray’s age and make a creditable showing for himself, The Newcomes shows how difficult life can be for someone as virtuous as we might wish to be ourselves. The Colonel’s life in England is a series of repetitions and echoes of his night at the Cave of Harmony. A corner of English life is brightened by its proximity to him, then it’s embarrassed by his presence, and finally it forces him out.
Eventually English life is too much even for him: His desire to see Clive and his spoiled half-brother’s daughter make a match of it and his inability to examine the motivated kindness of his English neighbors overwhelms his simple goodness. The Colonel must watch his mistakes destroy his fortune and encumber Clive before the anachronistic and absurd nobility that had shamed Pendennis in the Cave of Harmony returns to console him in old age.
Pendennis and Thackeray share a fondness for discursive moralizing—one that ultimately ruins the final Pendennis novel, The Adventures of Philip—but Pendennis’s lectures are undercut by his insistence, sometimes endorsed by Mrs. Pen, on his own mediocrity. It’s important, too, that he is not so successful that he can’t observe a story without altering it. Thackeray and Trollope, chatting in the street, once agreed to loan one thousand pounds each to an acquaintance on the verge of ruin; Pendennis is capable, with Laura’s prodding, of making small gifts when his friends are in a scrape. By the time The Newcomes was published, Thackeray’s presence could solve problems that, for the purposes of a novel, must remain problems.
But what most separates Thackeray from Pendennis is the former’s skill and his ambition. The Thackeray of Vanity Fair could write a revered novel—perhaps the nineteenth-century novel most easily explained to the twenty-first—but he could not write one that married his utter distaste for the hypocrisies of the world around him to his easygoing fondness for it. Pendennis is a little complacent, even when he’s angry. He is constitutionally incapable of the destabilizing double irony of Vanity Fair, and is therefore the only man who could write about Colonel Newcome.
The original of Pendennis’s Colonel is Thackeray’s stepfather, Major Henry Carmichael-Smyth. Thackeray’s mother, Anne, fifteen and living with her grandmother, fell in love with the Major (then the Ensign). Her grandmother forbade the match, telling the Major that Anne had returned his letters and telling Anne that her suitor had died of a sudden fever. Anne was sent to India to find a husband, and did; her son with Richmond Thackeray, William, was born a year later. Soon after that, Richmond invited a military man to dinner and introduced him to his wife. Anne, after an incredibly uncomfortable evening, told Richmond who the man was and what had happened.
Richmond died of a sudden fever two years later, and Thackeray (like most Anglo-Indian children) was sent alone to England. His mother became Anne Carmichael-Smyth as soon as she was out of mourning. Thackeray pined while they were apart, but the Major seems to have been too simple and kind for anyone but Richmond Thackeray to have truly disliked him.
Having come back to life in front of the girl he loved, for a start, the Major succeeded at little else. But he failed in ways that endeared him to more capable people. Much of the family’s money, like the Colonel’s, evaporated in the predictable implosion of an Indian bank; he used some of what was left to help launch Thackeray by buying a small newspaper. The paper imploded, too, but he had tried it.
The picture of the Major that develops is of a man who, when he frustrates you, causes you to become frustrated by your own frustration. Taking his good qualities into account, you think, the world would be better if you could just accept this kind, ineffectual man for who he is. And that’s a Pendennis thought. Thackeray might ask you why it should be less frustrating for a nice man to squander your inheritance than a mean one, and then ask whether you’re asking that question to excuse some inborn defect of temper, and on and on.
Thackeray’s earliest surviving letter, written when he was six and attributed to “your affectionate son, William Thackeray,” ends, “I hope Captain Smyth is well; give my love to him, and tell him he must bring you home.” He drew Smyth on horseback beneath it, over his great-grandmother’s chatty postscript. Thackeray sent the letter three years before his parents returned to England, and he never wrote about their reunion, or about meeting the man he always called “father,” in a novel. It was not the kind of story you could trust to the author of Vanity Fair.
In the nineteenth century, hundreds of three-volume novels were produced every year to feed Victorian circulating libraries—to sail “tired people to the Islands of the Blest,” as Rudyard Kipling would put it after the form died out. Anthony Trollope could only write two or three of these a year. And so countless minor authors were pressed into service, producing the kind of books so much forgotten now that they must be read from Archive.org scans rather than Project Gutenberg e-texts.
Some are still seaworthy today, if you’ve already gotten your legs under you. After you have read through the best of Wilkie Collins, for instance, you will eventually get to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd or Lady Audley’s Secret, best-selling pioneers of the “Is this woman already married?” genre of Victorian thriller.
I’m fond of Arthur Pendennis, too. Pendennis is a creation of William Makepeace Thackeray. He first appears as the title character in a novel where he himself is a novelist, the author of Walter Lorraine. He ends his career twenty years later as the fictional compiler of The Adventures of Philip, Thackeray’s very real and forgettable mid-Victorian serial.
It was not uncommon for writers circling the endless periodicals of Victorian Britain to experiment with pseudonyms, but for Thackeray the experiment was his brief stint publishing as himself. Beginning in 1837, writing as a haughty and semiliterate footman called Charles Yellowplush, Esq., he spent ten years providing for his young family and increasingly ill wife under a host of fictional bylines, including a swaggering Anglo-Indian, a dim club man, and an aging Punch staffer known only as “Our Fat Contributor.”
Thackeray’s most important early pseudonym, appearing on nearly everything he wrote “as himself” in those years, had no special position or stylistic tics. Michael Angelo Titmarsh was, as D. J. Taylor says of these ghostly writers, “not quite Thackeray, and at the same time not quite independent of Thackeray.” Titmarsh could possess any characteristic Thackeray needed him to have. He could write outrageous fiction or straightforward travelogues following Thackeray through Paris and Ireland. He could sprout a cousin named Samuel, who in The Great Hoggarty Diamond is assigned the pleasant penniless early days of Thackeray’s marriage and the death of his infant daughter. (When Samuel Titmarsh’s little daughter dies, his wife finds a position as a wet nurse for a kind young aristocrat who has just had a girl of her own; when one of Thackeray’s daughters died and his wife had another, after which she had a mental breakdown, his mother and stepfather spent years caring for his living daughters as their own.)
Vanity Fair was published under Thackeray’s own name in 1847, four years after the Irish Sketch Book had been attributed to M. A. Titmarsh, but with a dedication by W. M. Thackeray. Contemporary readers often find it impossible to believe that Thackeray’s sentimental later books were written by the man who wrote Vanity Fair. Thackeray may have agreed; as soon as he had finished creating a writer called Arthur Pendennis, who was not quite himself, he put him to work writing novels.
As authors, Pendennis and the Thackeray of Vanity Fair have little in common. Charlotte Brontë, not realizing she was rededicating Jane Eyre to a man who had to commit his wife to a string of private asylums after she tried to drown herself and her daughter, lauded the author of Vanity Fair as one who “comes before the great ones of society, much as the sons of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel.” Catherine Peters calls the signature narrative technique of Vanity Fair “double irony”—a doubling and tripling back so that the reader can’t identify where his feelings are supposed to come to rest. Thackeray introduces Amelia Sedley along conventional lines as a highly accomplished young lady before adding a wink by comparing drawing and piano-playing to “qualities of love and gentleness,” Peters says, that “he expects us to value more.” Then he casts doubt on that as well, suggesting that Amelia is indiscriminately loving and gentle. (Pendennis would stop here, or one step earlier.) Finally Thackeray looks back out at the reader, inventing a specially annoying figure (“JONES, who reads this book at his club”) who has (and therefore destroys) the exact cynical thought Thackeray has planted in his reader’s mind.
The History of Pendennis, ostensibly written by Thackeray, followed Vanity Fair almost immediately, running from 1848 through 1850. It stars (and sounds suspiciously like it was written by) Pendennis. Unlike its predecessor, Pendennis lays no traps for the comfortable reader. A young man gambles his way out of university (as Thackeray had) and makes a headlong dive into writing to make up what he has lost (ditto). He has a skeptical turn of mind, but (as admirers such as Brontë would later say of Thackeray) his love of middle-class proprieties and dinners with titled bores prevents him from roaring before the throned kings of Israel or Judah. His novel Walter Lorraine is celebrated as fashionable rather than important, and Pendennis ends with its hero narrowly avoiding disaster, changing his ways, and marrying his angelic foster sister, Laura (as Thackeray had not).
Thackeray tells us repeatedly, beginning in the preface, that Pendennis is no hero. It’s easy to believe this about Pendennis the author, but one hundred seventy-five years later it is harder to accept that he means it about Pendennis the character, who has after all married someone at the end of a Victorian novel. Trollope’s measured defense of this Pendennis, after Thackeray’s death, shows the extent of our unfamiliarity with the world for which Pendennis the author wrote. This is how Trollope feels he must excuse Pendennis to his fellow Victorians:
In our individual lives we are contented to endure an admixture of evil, which we should resent if imputed to us in the general. We presume ourselves to be truth-speaking, noble in our sentiments, generous in our actions, modest and unselfish, chivalrous and devoted. But we forgive and pass over in silence a few delinquencies among ourselves. . . . We take it for granted, as though they were fixed rules in life, that our boys from our public schools look us in the face and are manly; that our gentlemen tell the truth as a matter of course; and that our young ladies are refined and unselfish. Thackeray is always protesting that it is not so, and that no good is done by blinking the truth. He knows that we have our little home experiences. Let us have the facts out, and mend what is bad if we can.
This is a speech nobody has ever had to deliver to the readers of true crime books or the drama subreddit: “I know we all believe that the happiest families are secretly very happy, and that behind every golden exterior lurks a heart of gold, but sometimes that’s just not true!”
So it is critical to Pendennis, as well as the two novels its hero is supposed to have written later, to take Thackeray at his word: Pendennis comes through his time as the star of a Victorian novel with the requisite virtuous wife, but he does not become a great man, and he is not a great author. But The Newcomes, his masterpiece, is a great book.
The Newcomes was Thackeray’s next novel about contemporary life after Pendennis; he told a friend that “Mr. Pendennis is the author of the book, and he has taken a great weight off my mind, for under that mask and acting, as it were, I can afford to say and think many things that I couldn’t venture on in my own person.”
By the time of its publication in 1854, Thackeray was enormously famous, Dickens’s only peer—the kind of gentleman, Trollope tells us, people assumed told the truth as a matter of course. He was also physically enormous, impossible to hide; a sick little girl he befriended late in life wrote more than fifty years later that “the steadfast eyes and his gold spectacles in my child mind [were] the only thing that showed he was not a real giant.”
But The Newcomes is not written by Thackeray the cultural titan; it is written by the minor novelist Pendennis, about some people he and his wife Laura know. No longer constrained by the stations of the coming-of-age story, we’re granted little visions of Pendennis as his peers (and readers) might have seen him. He and Laura joke with each other, disagree about their friends the main characters, and enjoy a relaxed life as reasonably successful and reasonably decent mortals.
It begins in flashback: Pendennis, still an unattached young buck, has a chance meeting with Clive Newcome, a younger boy he had known at school. Clive and his father, Colonel Newcome—“a gentleman with a lean brown face and long black mustachios, dressed in very loose clothes”—have come to a dive called the Cave of Harmony for “supper and a song.”
The Newcomes is the Colonel’s book, and in Thackeray’s lifetime the Colonel was his most beloved character. It is sometime in the 1840s, and the Colonel, a widower, has been in India for thirty-five years. Having made his fortune, he has returned to England to see Clive, and he is visiting the Cave, Clive says, because “all the wits used to come here,—Mr. Sheridan, Captain Morris, Colonel Hanger, Professor Porson.” But all he finds, to Pendennis’s own horror, are tables full of dissipated young men.
Pendennis and his friends have already quietly agreed to pull their punches on account of Clive’s youth, and the night is a success at first. Colonel Newsome, the narrator says,
laughed at the Derby Ram so that it did you good to hear him; and when Hoskins sang (as he did admirably) the Old English Gentleman, and described, in measured cadence, the death of that venerable aristocrat, tears trickled down the honest warrior’s cheek, while he held out his hand to Hoskins and said, “Thank you, sir, for that song; it is an honour to human nature.” On which Hoskins began to cry too.
To Clive’s silent horror, and as Pendennis holds his breath, the Colonel asks to sing as well, explaining that he loves music but was rarely allowed to hear it before he was sent to India. When he delivers the first verse of his ancient ballad in “an exceedingly pleasant voice, with flourishes and roulades in the old Incledon manner, which has nearly passed away,” Clive recovers, and the university men are riveted.
With this set piece, Pendennis makes it clear that the Colonel possesses a straightforwardness and simplicity granted to no one in Pendennis. In the company of the oldest boy of all, all the ostensibly disillusioned young men shed their self-protective wisdom and become boys themselves. It is a moment that Thackeray the titan could not have precipitated or learned from, but it sticks with Pendennis, the journeyman writer and reasonably decent Victorian who remembers that at twenty-two he had felt himself to be “as old as, ay, older than the Colonel.”
But after the song, Pendennis notices an old acquaintance, the bedraggled and permanently drunk Captain Costigan. It becomes apparent that egging Costigan into performing “what he called one of his prime songs” is now a common pastime at the Cave of Harmony, even if it wasn’t so in Mr. Sheridan’s time, and he delivers a vulgar performance that drives the Colonel out the door in loud, honorable protest.
If Pendennis shows how an unheroic figure might scrape through Thackeray’s age and make a creditable showing for himself, The Newcomes shows how difficult life can be for someone as virtuous as we might wish to be ourselves. The Colonel’s life in England is a series of repetitions and echoes of his night at the Cave of Harmony. A corner of English life is brightened by its proximity to him, then it’s embarrassed by his presence, and finally it forces him out.
Eventually English life is too much even for him: His desire to see Clive and his spoiled half-brother’s daughter make a match of it and his inability to examine the motivated kindness of his English neighbors overwhelms his simple goodness. The Colonel must watch his mistakes destroy his fortune and encumber Clive before the anachronistic and absurd nobility that had shamed Pendennis in the Cave of Harmony returns to console him in old age.
Pendennis and Thackeray share a fondness for discursive moralizing—one that ultimately ruins the final Pendennis novel, The Adventures of Philip—but Pendennis’s lectures are undercut by his insistence, sometimes endorsed by Mrs. Pen, on his own mediocrity. It’s important, too, that he is not so successful that he can’t observe a story without altering it. Thackeray and Trollope, chatting in the street, once agreed to loan one thousand pounds each to an acquaintance on the verge of ruin; Pendennis is capable, with Laura’s prodding, of making small gifts when his friends are in a scrape. By the time The Newcomes was published, Thackeray’s presence could solve problems that, for the purposes of a novel, must remain problems.
But what most separates Thackeray from Pendennis is the former’s skill and his ambition. The Thackeray of Vanity Fair could write a revered novel—perhaps the nineteenth-century novel most easily explained to the twenty-first—but he could not write one that married his utter distaste for the hypocrisies of the world around him to his easygoing fondness for it. Pendennis is a little complacent, even when he’s angry. He is constitutionally incapable of the destabilizing double irony of Vanity Fair, and is therefore the only man who could write about Colonel Newcome.
The original of Pendennis’s Colonel is Thackeray’s stepfather, Major Henry Carmichael-Smyth. Thackeray’s mother, Anne, fifteen and living with her grandmother, fell in love with the Major (then the Ensign). Her grandmother forbade the match, telling the Major that Anne had returned his letters and telling Anne that her suitor had died of a sudden fever. Anne was sent to India to find a husband, and did; her son with Richmond Thackeray, William, was born a year later. Soon after that, Richmond invited a military man to dinner and introduced him to his wife. Anne, after an incredibly uncomfortable evening, told Richmond who the man was and what had happened.
Richmond died of a sudden fever two years later, and Thackeray (like most Anglo-Indian children) was sent alone to England. His mother became Anne Carmichael-Smyth as soon as she was out of mourning. Thackeray pined while they were apart, but the Major seems to have been too simple and kind for anyone but Richmond Thackeray to have truly disliked him.
Having come back to life in front of the girl he loved, for a start, the Major succeeded at little else. But he failed in ways that endeared him to more capable people. Much of the family’s money, like the Colonel’s, evaporated in the predictable implosion of an Indian bank; he used some of what was left to help launch Thackeray by buying a small newspaper. The paper imploded, too, but he had tried it.
The picture of the Major that develops is of a man who, when he frustrates you, causes you to become frustrated by your own frustration. Taking his good qualities into account, you think, the world would be better if you could just accept this kind, ineffectual man for who he is. And that’s a Pendennis thought. Thackeray might ask you why it should be less frustrating for a nice man to squander your inheritance than a mean one, and then ask whether you’re asking that question to excuse some inborn defect of temper, and on and on.
Thackeray’s earliest surviving letter, written when he was six and attributed to “your affectionate son, William Thackeray,” ends, “I hope Captain Smyth is well; give my love to him, and tell him he must bring you home.” He drew Smyth on horseback beneath it, over his great-grandmother’s chatty postscript. Thackeray sent the letter three years before his parents returned to England, and he never wrote about their reunion, or about meeting the man he always called “father,” in a novel. It was not the kind of story you could trust to the author of Vanity Fair.
