-
William Makepeace
Thackery
萨克雷简介
1811-1863 The Book of
Snobs
势利者集
;V
anity
Fair
名利场
;History of Pendennis
潘丹尼斯的历
史
;The
History
of
Henry
Esmond
亨利
·
< br>艾斯芒的历史
;The
Newcomes
纽可谟一家
;The
Virginians
弗吉尼亚人
ntroduction
born
July 18, 1811, Calcutta, India
died Dec. 24, 1863, London,
Eng.
?
William
Makepeace Thackeray, detail of an oil painting by
Samuel
Laurence; in the National
Portrait …
English
novelist
whose
reputation
rests
chiefly
on
Vanity
Fair
(1847
–
48),
a novel of the Napoleonic period in
England, and
The History of Henry
Esmond, Esq.
(1852), set in
the early 18th century.
Life.
Thackeray
was
the
only
son
of
Richmond
Thackeray,
an
administrator
in
the
East India Company. His
father died in 1815, and in 1816 Thackeray was
sent
home
to
England.
His
mother
joined
him
in
1820,
having
married
(1817)
an engineering officer with whom she
had been in love before she met
Richmond Thackeray. After attending
several grammar schools Thackeray
went
in 1822 to Charterhouse, the London public
(private) school, where
he led a rather
lonely and miserable existence.
He was
happier while studying at Trinity College,
Cambridge (1828
–
30).
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.
All his
efforts at this time have a dilettante air,
understandable in a
young man who, on
coming of age in 1832, had inherit
ed
?20,000 from his
father. He soon lost
his fortune, however, through gambling and unlucky
speculations and investments. In 1836,
while studying art in Paris, he
married
a
penniless
Irish
girl,
and
his
stepfather
bought
a
newspaper
so
that
he
could
remain
there
as
its
correspondent.
After
the
paper's
failure
(1837) he took his
wife back to Bloomsbury, London, and became a
hardworking and prolific professional
journalist.
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.
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 tried to find consolation in
travel, lecturing in the United
States
on
The
English
Humorists
of
the
18th
Century
(1852
–
53;
published
1853)
and
on
The
Four
Georges
(1855
–
56;
published
1860).
But
after
1856
he settled in London. He stood
unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1857,
quarreled with Dickens, formerly a
friendly rival, in the so-called
“Garrick
Club
Affair”
(1858),
and
in
1860
founded
The
Cornhill
Magazine,
becoming its editor. After he died in
1863, a commemorative bust of him
was
placed in Westminster Abbey.
Early writings.
The 19th century was the age of the
magazine, which had been developed
to
meet the demand
for family
reading
among the growing
middle class. In
the late
1830s Thackeray became a notable contributor of
articles on
varied
topics
to
Fraser's
Magazine,
The
New
Monthly
Magazine,
and,
later,
to
Punch
. His work was unsigned
or written under such pen names as Mr.
Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Fitz-Boodle,
The Fat Contributor, or Ikey
Solomons.
He
collected
the
best
of
these
early
writings
in
Miscellanies
,
4
vol. (1855
–
57). These
include
The Yellowplush
Correspondence,
the
memoirs
and
diary
of
a
young
cockney
footman
written
in
his
own
vocabulary
and style;
Major Gahagan
(1838
–
39), a fantasy of
soldiering in India;
Catherine
(1839
–40), a burlesque of the popular
“Newgate novels” of
romanticized
crime
and
low
life,
and
itself
a
good
realistic
crime
story;
The
History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty
Diamond
(1841),
which
was
an
earlier
version
of
the
young
married
life
described
in
Philip;
and
The
Luck
of
Barry
Lyndon
(1844;
revised
as
The
Memoirs
of
Barry
Lyndon,
1856),
which
is
a
historical
novel
and
his
first
full-length
work.
Barry
Lyndon
is an excellent,
speedy, satirical narrative until the final
sadistic scenes and was a trial run for
the great historical novels,
especially
Vanity Fair
.
The
Book of Snobs
(1848) is a collection of
articles that had appeared successfully
in
Punch
(as “The
Snobs of
England, by One of
Themselves,” 1846–
47). It consists of
sketches of
London characters and
displays Thackeray's virtuosity in quick
character-drawing.
The
Rose
and
the
Ring,
Thackeray's
Christmas
book
for
1855,
remains
excellent
entertainment,
as
do
some
of
his
verses;
like
many
good
prose
writers,
he
had
a
facility
in
writing
light
verse
and
ballads.
Mature writings.
With
Vanity
Fair
(1847
–
48),
the
first
work
published
under
his
own
name,
Thackeray adopted the system of
publishing a novel serially in monthly
parts that had been so successfully
used by Dickens. Set in the second
decade of the 19th century, the period
of the Regency, the novel deals
mainly
with the interwoven fortunes of two contrasting
women, Amelia
Sedley and Becky Sharp.
The latter, an unprincipled adventuress, is the
leading personage and is perhaps the
most memorable character Thackeray
created.
Subtitled
“A
Novel
Without
a
Hero,”
the
novel
is
deliberately
antiheroic:
Thackeray states that in this novel his object is
to