William Makepeace Thackeray Analysis

William Makepeace Thackeray published seven novels during his lifetime, and the unfinished Denis Duval was printed posthumously in 1864. Vanity Fair (1847-1848) and The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), which was filmed, are considered his masterpieces, both of them featuring memorable protagonists who exhibit both heroic and venal qualities. Thackeray was a prolific contributor to periodicals of parodies, satires, humorous sketches, essays, reviews, and articles. He was a correspondent for many newspapers and an editor of several magazines. He also issued popular Christmas annuals for many years.

In the last decade of his life, William Makepeace Thackeray was considered one of Great Britain’s most powerful novelists. His novels, taken together, form an appraisal of English social history and morals between 1690 and 1863. The lasting value of both the novels and his shorter works, however, rests in their huge cast of vivid characters, ranging from despicable, amoral scoundrels through attractive rascals to truly noble heroes, male and female, from every class. What brings these characters to energetic life is Thackeray’s command of style and narrative technique and his gift for satire. Thackeray experimented with every sort of first-person narration. By manipulating his various personae, he created subtle distinctions in tone. Even when Thackeray employed an omniscient narrator, he was always a mask, distinct from the author. For his Victorian audience, this mediating voice was one of the pleasures of reading Thackeray, who built on the oral nature of storytelling. To moderns, however, the tendency to tell rather than to dramatize can seem an intrusive disruption of illusion, and thus, they sometimes do not appreciate the very commentary that made him so popular in his own time.

Almost as valuable is the impression that remains of Thackeray’s personality. He was a man of good will and a loving father, financially improvident but generous and kindly. Even the difficult times in his own life he reshaped in his works into positive experiences. As a writer and talented caricaturist, he deftly skewered pretension and folly where he found them; as a man, he seemed to view human nature with charity and tolerance, above all affirming what he saw as its inherent good sense.

William Makepeace Thackeray’s career as a satirist and journalist contributed to his novelistic style. His works appeared in a number of periodicals, including The National Standard, which he owned; The Constitutional, for which he was Paris correspondent; and The New Monthly Magazine. More important, however, the bulk of his writing appeared in Fraser’s Magazine and in Punch, until, in 1860, he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine. In many of his reviews, short stories, burlesques, and travel writings, he adopts facetious pen names that reveal the snobbish preconceptions of his personae. “The Yellowplush Correspondence” appeared in Fraser’s Magazine in 1837-1838 as the supposed diary of Charles James Yellowplush, an illiterate footman who betrays all of the social prejudices of his employers. The story was later published as Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush in 1856.

Thackeray assumed two pseudonyms for some of his comic pieces. As M. A. Titmarsh, Thackeray published A Legend of the Rhine (1845), Mrs. Perkin’s Ball (1847), and The Rose and the Ring: Or, The History of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo (1855) among others, in addition to some nonfiction works such as The Paris Sketch Book (1840; 2 volumes), The Irish Sketch Book (1843; 2 volumes), and Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846). As George Savage Fitz-Boodle, an aging and susceptible bachelor, Thackeray wrote The Fitz-Boodle Papers (1852), The Confessions of George Fitz-Boodle, and Some Passages in the Life of Major Gahagan (1841-1842), and Men’s Wives (1843). “Punch’s Prize Novelists,” which appeared in Punch magazine, was a series of parodies of popular novelists of the day, such as Benjamin Disraeli and James Fenimore Cooper, and was perhaps even more effective than the burlesque Catherine (which he wrote as Ikey Solomons, Jr.). Thackeray’s other achievements include The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853) and The Four Georges: Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court and Town Life (1860); a number of tales and short stories, including A Shabby Genteel Story, and Other Tales (1852); and a series of ballads and verses, such as the nostalgic “The Ballad of Bouillabaisse” (1849).

William Makepeace Thackeray wrote much about snobbery. Was he a snob himself, particularly with reference to his early fiction?

Two bildungsromans, Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-1850), appeared serially at the same time. In what ways does Thackeray’s novel fall short of Dickens’s?

Was Thackeray more interested in the eighteenth century than in his own century?

What did Thackeray mean by calling Vanity Fair “a novel without a hero”?

Does Vanity Fair have two heroines, Amelia and Becky?

Was Henry Esmond Thackeray’s ideal gentleman?