[In the following review, Busch offers a mixed assessment of Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman: William Makepeace Thackeray, maintaining that the book “is very well done for what it is—a salute to a decent, pained, and gifted man.”]

John Carey's study is fascinating, persuasive, and most useful—and it is written in the crisp, lucid, and pungent style that makes Carey one of the most admired of present-day writers about Victorian life and literature. His The Violent Effigy (1973) is an invaluable study of Dickens and a delight to rely upon.

I can think of no better refresher for the experienced reader of Victorian fiction, and no better introduction for the student, than Carey's first chapter, a description of the writing life of his subject. Whether he describes William Makepeace Thackeray's glorification of his awful Charterhouse career or relates the novelist's artistic decline to his social rise, Carey is charming without being coy. He is never irrelevant: his goal is to study the man's art through his life, and that goal is kept in sight. So, for example, in his discussion of Thackeray's fondness for flagellation, Carey uses this predilection as a way of enlightening us on all of Thackeray's art; we come to understand how Thackeray's inability to study this foible satirically—Thackeray seemed pleased to overlook this characteristic in himself—can represent a failing in his art in general. When he was not fully conscious of events, Carey tells us, he was incapable of artistic transformation of them.

Carey's very valuable contribution to Thackeray studies lies, first, in a willingness to consider his subject worthy of his fullest attention—which means a deep steeping in the biography, letters, and published works that for another critic might well involve decades instead of years of effort. It is such attention that made The Violent Effigy so distinctive and that does the same for Thackeray. But then comes the creative side of Carey's scholarship. He is able to get to the metaphoric heart of his author. In eight chapters, little more than two hundred pages, he isolates those themes—“Food and Drink,” “Theatre”—which, by the end of the book, add up to more than the sum of Thackeray's parts. They become a pointillistic portrait of what probably mattered most, in life as well as in efforts at art, to Thackeray. Carey offers a courageous verdict; instead of declaiming upon Thackeray as Dickens's equal and as a great writer—did Carey not invest thousands of hours at his study?—he rewards the reader by telling the truth about Thackeray as Thackeray at his best might have told it. He shows us where Thackeray was great in early occasional pieces, good in Lovel the Widower, often penetrating and delightful in his many failed works, and how truly brilliant he was in Vanity Fair.

Thackeray: Prodigal Genius leaves the reader content that he understands as much of the life, particularly in relationship to the art, as he might wish to understand. Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, a fictionalized autobiography of Thackeray by the English novelist Margaret Forster, is less satisfactory. Forster goes to great lengths to show that she has invented nothing—that although she has rejected Gordon Ray's biography, she has, as Carey has, relied heavily on the letters and on her own love of Thackeray, her fascination with his life, and her novelist's skill at making people live on the page. Thackeray, through passages from the letters and Forster's invention of his voice, tells us his life.

Although the result is charming—Forster's Thackeray is the bluff and self-deprecatory one—its usefulness is questionable. The Charterhouse experience is full of jolly lads and none of those years' miseries: it is Thackeray's myth—his fiction. He “had the temerity not to want to be Dickens” (p. 123); but we know too how much he wished, if not patently for Dickens's talent, at least for his command of vast numbers of readers. Surely in the tension between the statement and the wish lies much explanation of Thackeray's cheap sale of his talents, in his latter years, for his readers' and his dinner companions' affections. Forster's Thackeray is no fool, however. He does, ultimately, see the decline in his work. He does not see all of its causes, and he doesn't satisfactorily see his response to the Edmund Yates contretemps as having awfully much to do with his feelings about his own and Dickens's artistic achievements.

In Memoirs, the Thackeray persona writes charmingly but not well. For although we have much touching detail, including the sad Jane Brookfield affair, we have Thackeray at his often least analytic. Forster chose to write neither biography nor fiction; she imitated Thackeray's illusions about his life. To rely on Carey once more, “To write well he had to be fully conscious—either of his own absurdity, or of other people's, or both” (p. 29). The approach Forster has selected denies the novelist's, or biographer's, fullest consciousness, and we are left with a Thackeray who is only partly awake to himself. The book is very well done for what it is—a salute to a decent, pained, and gifted man—but because it does not attempt art, it is insufficient on Thackeray the artist.