Notes

Note for: Mary Ann Terry, ABT JUN 1788 - AFT 1851 Index

Occupation:
     Date:   1851
     Place:   Pew (?) Opener

Notes

Note for: Sarah Haselby, ABT 1754 - 22 JAN 1813 Index

SHE WAS WIDOW OF WM. HY. TREMLETT & MOTHER OF HY. AU G. TREMLETT, CAPT.17TH.
M.N.I.(MADRAS NATIVE INFANTRY). SHE DIED AT 5 CAMDEN C RES.DOVER. WILL DATED

Notes

Note for: William Vine, 29 SEP 1820 - Index

Christening:
     Date:   5 NOV 1820
     Place:   Holy Trinity, Clapham, Surrey
Occupation:
     Date:   1881
     Place:   Yarn Colonial & Foreign Stock Commercial Clerk To Carriers

Individual note:
Dwelling:9 Benhill Rd
Census Place:Camberwell, Surrey, England
Source:FHL Film 1341156 PRO Ref RG11 Piece 0672 Folio 109 P age 29
MarrAgeSexBirthplace
William VINEM60 MHurstmonceux, Sussex, England
Rel:Head
Occ:Yarn Colonial & Foreign Stock Commercial Clerk To Carriers
Elizabeth VINEM54 FClapham, Surrey, England
Rel:Wife
William F. VINEU21 MPaddington, Middlesex, England
Rel:Son
Occ:Commercial Insurance Clerk

Notes

Note for: Thomas Vine, ABT MAR 1818 - Index

Christening:
     Date:   8 MAR 1818
     Place:   Saint Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey,

Notes

Note for: Antoinne Ambrose Pierre de l'Etang, 1757 - 1840 Index

After the loss of Chandernagore to the British in 1755, a large numb er of French soldiers led by Moniseur Law made their way to Lucknow and we re employed by Nawab Shuja-ud-daula to train his own troops in the Europe an manner. More French officers and men arrived after the fall of the Fren ch town of Pondicherry in 1761 and the battle of Buxar. Some of the more p rominent of these Frenchmen were Antoine Polier, Colonel J.B.I. Genti l, a mercenary, Monsieur Gairard, a well known firework maker, and Antoi ne de L'Etang, a former horseman in the court of Louis XVI at Paris. Howev er, the most famous was Claude Martin. When the English East India Compa ny forced the new nawab Asaf-ud-daula to dismiss all Frenchmen in his serv ice, Martin was retained not only because he was now an English company so ldier, but also because he could continue working with the French speaki ng Indian labourers.

Notes

Note for: William Makepeace Thackeray, 18 JUL 1811 - 24 DEC 1863 Index

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811. Both h is parents were of Anglo-Indian descent, and his father, Richmond Thackera y, was appointed to a lucrative position as Collector of a district near C alcutta soon after William's birth. Richmond Thackeray died of a fev er in 1815, and his son was sent home to England at five years old to be e ducated, stopping at St. Helena on the way and having a servant point o ut to him the prisoner Napoleon, who "eats three sheep every day, and a ll the little children he can lay hands on" (Ray 1.66). The separation fr om his mother, who stayed in India to marry her childhood sweetheart, w as recalled by Thackeray nearly half a century later--"A ghaut, or river-s tair, at Calcutta; and a day when, down those steps, to a boat which w as in waiting, came two children, whose mothers remained on shore" ( Ray 1 .65)--and his reunion with her a few years later informs young Henry Esmon d's first vision of Lady Castlewood. Though Thackeray's recollections of h is early years in India were scanty, the culture of Anglo-Indians figur es prominently in a number of his works, including The Tremendous Adventur es of Major Goliah Gahagan, Vanity Fair, and The Newcomes.

Thackeray was given the "education of a gentleman" at private boarding sch ools (so-called "public schools"), including six years at Charterhouse, a nd the canings and other abuses he suffered in these institutions became t he basis for remembrances in essays, such as The Roundabout Papers, as we ll as episodes in novels (Vanity Fair and The Newcomes, again, offer impor tant examples). He also recalled the dryasdust lessons in the classical la nguages he was forced to learn and their deleterious effect on his feelin gs for classical literature, along with the grateful escapes he made to t he popular fictions of the day, works such as Scott's Heart of Midlothi an or Pierce Egan's Life in London. He was not a standout as a student, b ut he went on to Cambridge, where he entered Trinity College in 1819. H is tutor was William Whewell (philosopher of natural science, nowada ys of interest for his theory of discovery), but Thackeray saw little of t he inaccessible don, preferring to spend his time at wine parties. Than ks to such amusements, his own inability to excel at mathematics, the po or preparation he had received at Charterhouse, and a penchant for gambli ng and trips to the Continent, Thackeray left the university without a deg ree after two years. The life of the undergraduate at "Oxbridge" is repres ented obliquely--for "the life of such boys does not bear telling altogeth er"--in Pendennis. Thackeray did, however, form friendships at Cambridge t hat were lasting, the most important of which was with Edward Fitzgeral d. And while he failed to distinguish himself at school, he did develop t he fondness for Horace and other classical authors his childhood experienc es had almost robbed him of.

After leaving Cambridge, Thackeray traveled on the Continent, spending a w inter at Weimar, which included an introduction to the aged Goethe. Thacke ray took away from Weimar a command of the language, a knowledge of Germ an Romantic literature, and an increasing skepticism about religious doctr ine. The time he spent here is reflected in the "Pumpernickel" chapte rs of Vanity Fair.

On his return from Germany, Thackeray lived the life of a propertied you ng gentleman, including more gambling, drinking in taverns, and, undoubted ly, sexual encounters with women. Though just how wild Thackeray's life w as at this time remains ambiguous--Ray prints a journal entry in whi ch he is repelled by William Maginn's taste in brothels--he most probab ly first developed at this time his "stricture of the urethra," a conditi on which would plague him for the rest of his life and which Monsarrat spe culates was a consequence of gonorrhea.

Thackeray's next attempt at finding an occupation led him to the Inns of C ourt, where he tried briefly to study law and gathered instead more of t he atmosphere of "gentlemanly idleness" (Ray 1.149) that was to find its w ay into Pendennis. Ray next places Thackeray in the shady world of bill-di scounters in London, but soon he invested part of his patrimony in a week ly paper, The National Standard, which he took over as editor and propriet or. Though the paper went under quickly, it gave Thackeray his first tas te of the world of London journalism, where he was soon to begin a long a nd haphazard apprenticeship.

Thackeray's father had left him an estate of approximately 17,000 pound s, but this fortune was lost, mostly through the failure of an Indian ban k, an event from his life that Thackeray once again found use for in The N ewcomes. This financial disaster forced Thackeray out of idleness and in to serious work as a journalist. After trying out briefly the life of an a rtist in bohemian London and Paris in 1834 and 1835, Thackeray began to p ut both pen and pencil to work for such periodicals as Fraser's Magazin e, The Morning Chronicle, and, most successfully, Punch. It was in Pari s, as well, that he met his wife, Isabella Shawe, and the two settled brie fly here when first married (in 1836) before returning to London.

Before the success of Vanity Fair, Thackeray worked as a free-lance journa list for about ten years, publishing literary criticism, art criticism, to pical articles, and fiction either anonymously or under a number of com ic pseudonyms. The Yellowplush Papers (1837-38), Catherine (1839-40), A Sh abby Genteel Story (1840), Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamo nd (1841), and Barry Lyndon (1844) all appeared in Fraser's, while The Bo ok of Snobs (1846-7) gave Thackeray his first notoriety when it appear ed as The Snobs of England in Punch.

During this apprenticeship, Thackeray also produced his first books, colle ctions of essays and observations published as travel books. The Paris Ske tch Book (1840) sold enough to cover its costs, provide its author with de cent payment, and, perhaps most importantly for Thackeray, interest publis hers in seeing more of his work. He sold The Irish Sketch Book (1843) to C hapman and Hall, the publishers of Dickens and Carlyle, and also turn ed a comic series done for Punch about a trip to the East into another boo k, Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846). In additi on he considered doing a series for Blackwood's on Belgium.

This arduous combination of hack writing (often completed in London clu bs for the peace and quiet they afforded) and frequent travel took Thacker ay away from home quite a bit, and--as he later recognized--kept him fr om detecting the seriousness of his wife's growing depression. Thackeray a nd Isabella Shawe had had a happy marriage during their first years of pen ury. But as financial demands forced Thackeray into more and more work, Is abella was more isolated and lonely. After the birth of her third child (t he second had died at six months), she began to withdraw, becoming apathet ic and fitful by turns and fighting with her husband's grandmother, "a pes tering old body." Thackeray was told by doctors that all Isabella needed w as a change of air. When she became suicidal, leaping into the ocean duri ng a trip to see her unsympathetic mother in Ireland (whom her son-in-l aw later represented as the termagent Mrs. Mackenzie in The Newcomes), Tha ckeray began a series of futile searches for a cure. He took Isabella to v arious spas and sanitoriums, at one point undergoing a "water cure" with h er, since she wouldn't do it alone. He continued to hope for some time th at she would make a full recovery. For the next several years he shuttl ed back and forth between London and Paris, from the journalism that suppo rted himself and his debt-laden family, to his parents and children in Par is, and to his wife in French asylums.

Once Thackeray had established himself as a writer with the moderate succe ss of his travel books, the greater success of his Punch series, and the b eginning of a full-fledged novel, he brought his daughters and wife over f rom the Continent (lodging Isabella not in one of the terrible asylu ms he toured but with two women in Camberwell). Eventually he resigned him self to Isabella's condition, an indifference to seemingly all around he r, including himself and the children, and he maintained his wife in insti tutions while raising his daughters with the help of his mother, who nev er was to be satisfied with the governesses Thackeray tried. He seems to h ave been a loving, if busy, father, as is testified by the touching remini scences of Anne Thackeray Ritchie's biographical introductions to his work s.

In 1847-48 he hit the big time with Vanity Fair. The novel had a slow star t--the first chapters were rejected by several publishers--but eventual ly it sold in the neighborhood of 7,000 numbers a month. Just as important ly, it was the talk of the town, and Thackeray finally had a name that gai ned notice and reviews in journals such as the Edinburgh Review. He also f inally found relief from the harrowing grind of writing anything that wou ld sell so he could support his household.

Pendennis followed in 1849-50, but it was interrrupted at roughly the midp oint for 3 months by a severe illness which may have been cholera. This no vel ran concurrently with David Copperfield, and their dual appearance bro ught about the first of many comparisons with Dickens, by David Mass on in the North British Review (May 1851). Thackeray now felt that he a nd Dickens were battling for king of the novelists' hill, though he wou ld never equal Dickens's popularity, except with the critics. The nov el is a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman that draws on, among other thi ngs, Thackeray's disappointments in college, ambivalent relation with h is mother, and insider's knowledge of the London publishing world.

In 1852, The History of Henry Esmond was published as a 3-volume novel wit hout first being serialized and with special type meant to imitate the app earance of an eighteenth-century book. This was the most carefully plann ed of Thackeray's novels, and for it he did a considerable amount of histo rical research. The book was celebrated for its brilliance, and Thacker ay recognized it as "the very best I can do. . . my card" (Monsarrat 285 ), despite the "cutthroat melancholy" he felt it was infused with. At t he time, it caused a sensation thanks to its controversial ending, where in the hero marries a woman who early in the novel seemed a "mother" to hi m.

During these years of success, Thackeray lived virtually a bachelor li fe in London, even though now he had his daughters and grandmother with hi m. He spent much time with friends, enlivening the weekly staff dinners f or Punch, attending the social functions of a fashionable society hither to closed to him, and becoming the constant attendant on Jane Brookfiel d, the wife of an old friend from Cambridge. Thackeray and the Brookfiel ds were involved in an increasingly tense emotional triangle, until his fi rst trip to America in 1852 provided the time and distance for Thacker ay to extricate himself emotionally. William Brookfield's coldness and per emptory desire to dominate his wife, her resistance and the accompanying n eed for someone to turn to, and Thackeray's loneliness and characterist ic susceptibility to a fascinating woman combined to create a complicat ed affair. A curate who was disappointed in his wish for advancement in t he Church, Brookfield alternately ignored or forbade his wife's warm commu nications with the successful novelist. Jane returned Thackeray's ardent e xpressions of friendship, lamented her husband's inability to understand h er, and then surprised her platonic lover by getting pregnant by the husba nd she supposedly had no sympathy for. Thackeray, for his part, profess ed for the wife a devotion that was pure and remained a companion of the h usband, but nonetheless felt betrayed by Jane's tendency to cool down t he correspondence when Brookfield complained. Thackeray eventually caus ed a dramatic break in these arrangements by berating Brookfield for his n eglectful treatment of his wife. The curate packed up his household f or a vacation in Madeira, and, by the time Thackeray heard of Jane's seco nd pregnancy, during his own trip to America, he had decided never to retu rn to the vassalage he had endured for seven years. Various aspects of Ja ne Brookfield appear in Amelia Sedley and Beatrix Castlewood, and the affa ir itself informs the triangle of Henry Esmond, Rachel, and Lord Castlewoo d.

Thackeray followed in Dickens's footsteps with a lecturing tour of Americ a. A reprise of his tour of the British Isles speaking on The English Humo urists, these lectures were profitable for Thackeray and also provided inf luential--if now exploded--views of both Swift and Sterne. Thackeray saw A merica through the eyes of friendly hosts, and he was more careful n ot to offend than Dickens had been, choosing, for instance, not to wri te a profitable account of his journey. Thackeray was also more tolera nt of slavery--he wrote home to his mother that he did not recognize blac ks as equals, though he did condemn the institution on moral grounds. Susc eptible to criticism from his hosts that the living conditions for Engli sh workers were worse than those for slaves, he chose to believe (at lea st on this first tour) that the whipping of slaves was rare and that famil ies were not normally separated on the auction block.

Thackeray made enduring friendships during his trip, most significantly wi th the Baxter family of New York. The eldest daughter, Sally, enchanted t he novelist--as a number of vibrant, intelligent, beautiful young women h ad done before her--and she became the model for Ethel Newcome. He visit ed her on his second tour of the States when she was married to a South Ca rolina gentleman, and he lamented her sad life when she sat alone in Charl eston, dying of tuberculosis, after the outbreak of the Civil War.

The panoramic novel The Newcomes (1853-55)--one of the books Henry James c alled "loose, baggy monsters"--brought Thackeray back to both novel-writi ng (after more than a year off) and his own century, as well as to the soc ial satire of Vanity Fair. The main targets of this novel are snobbery a nd mercenary marriages. He also brought out in 1855 his most enduring Chri stmas book, the fairy tale The Rose and the Ring, which he called a "Fires ide Pantomime."

After a second profitable lecturing tour on The Four Georges (that is, t he Hanoverian kings of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries), Th ackeray stood for Parliament as an independent and was defeated when a wel l-known politician was substituted for the man he thought he was to run ag ainst. Thackeray believed his advocacy of entertainment on the Sabbath w as also crucial in his defeat.

In 1857-59, he published The Virginians, a novel set before and during t he American Revolution, which is a sequel to Henry Esmond, and which Thack eray intended as a fond tribute to the country where he made a number of f riends--though he inadvertently angered some particularly patriotic Americ ans with his mild but not-especially-heroic portrait of George Washingto n. The novel is noteworthy for the problems Thackeray had with the plot, i ts action being repeatedly forstalled by narrative intrusions, and the Rev olutionary War being postponed till the book is almost over. In place of t he action are Thackeray's philosophical meditations on the staleness of no vel plots--in effect, a radical questioning of the value of fiction--and o ther problems of representation.

Of the several literary quarrels in which Thackeray had engaged during h is life, the "Garrick Club affair" was to be the best known, for thou gh he and Dickens had scuffled over the "Dignity of Literature" and oth er minor disagreements (often exacerbated by the interference of John Fors ter), this fight caused a breach in their friendship that almost last ed to the end of Thackeray's life--it was healed only in his last month s, through a surprise meeting and handshake on the steps of a London clu b. Thackeray had taken offense at some personal remarks in a column by Edm und Yates and demanded an apology, eventually taking the affair to the Gar rick Club committee. Already upset with Thackeray for an indiscreet rema rk about his affair with Ellen Ternan, Dickens championed Yates, helping h im to write letters both to Thackeray and, in his defense, to the club's c ommittee. Despite Dickens's intervention, Yates eventually lost the vo te of the Club's members, but the quarrel was stretched out through journ al articles and pamphlets. "What pains me most," Thackeray was to tell Cha rles Kingsley, "is that Dickens should have been his adviser, and next th at I should have had to lay a heavy hand on a young man who, I take it, h as been cruelly punished by the issue of the affair, and I believe is hard ly aware of the nature of his own offence, and doesn't even now understa nd that a gentleman should resent the monstrous insult which he volunteere d" (Monsarrat 393).

In 1860, Thackeray accepted the editorship of a new magazine to be publish ed by George Smith, and he was both astounded and delighted with the mon ey he was offered for his name and labors. The Cornhill began its histo ry with a record circulation and a number of distinguished contributors, s everal of whom were persuaded to contribute by Thackeray's participatio n. Never completely comfortable with editorial duties, however, he resign ed after a tenure of approximately two years. "Thorns in the Cushion," o ne of The Roundabout Papers--a series of conversational essays modelled af ter his own favorites, Montaigne and Howell--humorously details the pai ns he felt in rejecting manuscripts and receiving criticism of the magazin e. He also published his last complete novel, The Adventures of Philip (18 61-62) in the magazine, and the incomplete Denis Duval (1864) appeared the re after his death.

Toward the end of his life, Thackeray was proud that through his writi ng he had recouped the patrimony lost to bank failures and gambling, and t hat he passed on to his daughters an inheritance sufficient for their supp ort and a grand house in Kensington he had built during his Cornhill year s. He had also taken pride in his daughter Anne's first steps in her own c areer as a writer--her novel The Story of Elizabeth had appeared in the Co rnhill.His health had been declining for some years--he had had recurri ng pain from the stricture -- but he died suddenly from the bursti ng of a blood vessel in the brain on December 24, 1863. He was buried in K ensal Green Cemetary on December 30, with an estimated two thousand mourne rs paying their respects.

Bibliography
Peters, Catherine. Thackeray's Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination a nd Reality. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Monsarrat, Ann. An Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man. New York: Dodd, Me ad, 1980.

Ray, Gordon N. Thackeray. 2 volumes. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955, 1958.

Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. "Introductions" to the Biographical Edition of t he Works of William Makepeace Thackeray. New York: Harpers, 1899.