Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“VANITY FAIR” by William Makepeace Thackeray (first published in 1847-48)

You may or may not have noticed that sometimes on this blog, when I come to undoubted and world-renowned masterpieces (look up DonQuixote and War and Peace), I drop my habitual wearisome and long plot summaries, and give quite terse analyses. The point is, I don’t want to insult you by telling you what you already know. And in the case of these Great Books, there’s the strong possibility that you know the general drift of the plot even if you haven’t read the novel, so often has each of them been filmed, synopsised, turned into a television series and passed on as general cultural currency. The last two times I dealt with William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) on this blog, with The Newcomes and The Four Georges, I synopsised like mad because those two books are not widely read. With Thackeray’s most famous novel Vanity Fair I at first felt I wouldn’t have to do so, the general situation of the story (artful woman making her way unscrupulously in society) being so well known. But then I reflected that the plot has so many turns that it’s worth noting in some detail.

So here’s a lengthy reminder of how it goes after all.

Vanity Fair is a very long Victorian novel written when Thackeray was only in his late thirties but had already developed the blasé, gossipy, chittery-chattery tone of an elderly London clubman. It runs to 636 pages in my closely printed Collins Classics copy, and 746 pages in a much older edition I possess which is illustrated with Thackeray’s own line drawings. Unlike Dickens, Thackeray was a talented artist and didn’t have to hire illustrators, as he could illustrate his own works himself. When Vanity Fair was first published in serial form, beginning in 1847, it bore the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society. When it was first published in book form in 1848, the subtitle had become A Novel Without a Hero. This is a true enough description as men are subordinate in the novel to two contrasting women, one of whom could be called the anti-heroine.

Briefly, the novel contrasts the lives of

active, cunning, opportunist, social-climbing, sexually-exploitative, fortune-hunting adventuress Rebecca (“Becky”) Sharp, who comes from an impoverished background; and her schoolmate, passive, trusting, sedate, domestic, painfully-virtuous Amelia Sedley, whose background is (at first, at any rate) comfortably middle-class.

Becky makes it her business to woo or seduce any man who might give her a large fortune or raise her in society. She begins by trying to woo Amelia’s harmless fat brother Joseph Sedley. Amelia herself is wooed by the soldier George Osborne, but he tends to be rather neglectful of her and has to be reminded of his duty in courtship by his decent, plodding schoolmate William Dobbin (who himself carries a torch for Amelia but will not derail another fellow’s wooing). In fact George Osborne marries Amelia only because his family want him to marry somebody else, and he wants to prove his independence. He continues to treat her offhandedly even though Amelia sees him as her loving master.

Meanwhile Becky becomes governess at the home of the minor baronet Sir Pitt Crawley. She tries her seductive skills on a number of members of the Crawley family (including old and susceptible Sir Pitt himself) in the hope of marrying into a noble fortune. She marries the junior son, and lesser heir, of the family, the slightly rakish, sporting and basically empty-headed army officer Rawdon Crawley. Becky and Rawdon still hope to inherit at least part of the great Crawley family fortune, but in the meantime they live off credit and by card-sharping and sponging off George Osborne and others.

Comes Napoleon’s escape from Elba and return to France. The soldiers Rawdon Crawley, George Osborne and William Dobbin are all called to serve in the army in Belgium. Their wives and many civilians follow them across the Channel. Becky and Rawdon switch their modus operandi to sponging off affable, stupid General Tufto and cheating George Osborne out of money at cards. Rawdon uses Becky as a lure for George, who is now smitten with her. Becky Sharp and George Osborne plan an “assignation”… But before it can happen, George is killed at the Battle of Waterloo. By this time Amelia is pregnant. She gives birth to a son whom she dutifully calls George. She is reconciled to her parents (who had cut her off for her marriage, of which they didn’t approve) and lives with them as a virtuous young widow and mother.

Meanwhile Rawdon and Becky live it up in Paris for some months, running up debts they never pay and capitalising upon Rawdon’s claims to nobility. They have a son (of course Becky leaves his care to others). But various complicated manoeuvres in the Crawley family mean they lose any claim to an inheritance that might have come to them from the Crawleys. Becky and Rawdon relocate to Mayfair and continue to live by cardsharping and holding soirees. It is broadly hinted (but never directly stated) that Becky also sells herself to fashionable guests, becoming in effect a high-class courtesan. Whether Rawdon is fully aware of this or not is another matter. Later there is some reconciliation with the Crawleys, but Becky reaches the highest ranks of society (being presented at court) only by (apparently) becoming the mistress of old Lord Steyne.

At this time, virtuous Amelia Sedley’s material fortunes sink so low that, for some remuneration, she has to hand over her beloved young son to the Osborne family to be raised.

So the busy minx is in high society while the sinless widow is in dire financial straits. Virtue is not rewarded, but there is at least a temporary nemesis for Becky.

Becky had not exerted herself to get Rawdon bailed out of jail when he is imprisoned for debt. Somebody else bails him out. Rawdon had always considered himself as the pal and partner in mischief of his wife Becky, but he was beginning to get suspicious of all the male company she kept. Now returning home unexpectedly, he is finally disabused of Becky when he finds her canoodling with Lord Steyne. He loudly repudiates her and deserts her. Their marriage is over. Lord Steyne, suspecting he has been set up, also deserts her. Becky’s entrée into high society (and money) is now barred.

The years go by. Becky has made her living at seedy casinos on the continent and is no longer in high society but shines in the company of soldiers (whatever that may mean…). Poor William Dobbin still loves the widowed Amelia, but Amelia will not have him as she has an idealised image of the late George Osborne, her “one husband on earth and in heaven.” How susceptible Amelia is! She is weak enough to take up again with Becky, who now plays the pathetic part of the poor deserted wife and mother. Amelia is cured of her foolish, sentimental daydreams only when Becky – in what at first seems an uncharacteristic show of altruism - shows her the note (which she has kept for years) in which, before his departure for battle, George Osborne was making an assignation with Becky. With the scales fallen from her eyes, Amelia at last understands the truth about her late husband and feels free to marry Dobbin, the faithful chap she has spurned for so long. This she does.

But there is a nasty little coda – foolish Joseph Sedley is seduced by Becky and lives with her. It is strongly implied (but not directly stated) that Becky contrives to kill him for the insurance money – though the only punishment she receives is merely to no longer be in Amelia’s society.

Thackeray dismisses his characters with his famous closing words:

“Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? – Come children, let us shut up the box and puppets, for our play is played out.”

They are oddly distancing words, telling us that these characters are only the playthings of the author – they are not real – and that in the end they are no more important than children’s toys. But they also imply that, regardless of the vice of one and the virtue of the other, neither Becky nor Amelia is ever really fulfilled or happy.

As was the case with most of Dickens’ novels, Vanity Fair was originally published in serial parts, so when reading it you get used, every three or four chapters, to one of those dramatic cliff-hangers designed to make the original readers buy the next serial part. Some of these coups de theatre are still very compelling. At the end of Chapter 14, there’s the surprise revelation that Becky is already married, when libidinous old Sir Pitt Crawley comes courting. Chapter 22 ends with the sudden turn of the narrative when the soldiers are ordered to Belgium. The end of Chapter 29 has the regiment departing for battle as the bugles blow. Most famously (or shockingly), Thackeray waits until the very last sentence of Chapter 32 to tell us that, after the Battle of Waterloo, “Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart”. The novel’s other big shocker is the end Chapter 53, with Rawdon Crawley discovering Becky with Lord Steyne and repudiating her.

There’s the other obvious point that Vanity Fair, though written in the “hungry ‘40s”, is a retrospective novel, looking back to the Regency period. Spanning the years from 1813 to 1830, the action all takes place in Thackeray’s lifetime, but in decades that were already beginning to fade from living consciousness. Thackeray did write novels set in his “present” (like The Newcomes and Pendennis), but he much preferred to deal with the past and produced many historical novels, usually with 18^th century settings (Henry Esmond, Barry Lyndon, The Virginians). This was in contrast with Dickens, who produced only two historical novels (Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities) out of a larger corpus of novels.

Some would say that Victorian Thackeray’s spiritual homeland was the 18^th century coffee house and its literary gossip, and Vanity Fair has been described as a long exercise in pseudo-18^th century prose. Certainly it shares with Fielding’s novels the frequent intrusion of direct authorial comment, what with all those “Dear Reader” addresses that delight some readers and infuriate others as Thackeray instructs us on how to react to his characters. (I also can’t help feeling that Thackeray must have chosen the name Amelia for his virtuous woman in honour of the long-suffering heroine of Fielding’s Amelia).

In another sense it can be seen as a Victorian novel, which goes through the motions of tut-tutting over the loose morality of the Regency period, but which is half in sympathy with Regency views. It may be called Vanity Fair after John Bunyan’s vision in The Pilgrim’s Progress of a totally worthless life of frivolity and lax morality. But then in the end isn’t it a novel in which, for all the author’s periodical moralising, the immoral minx isn’t really punished and the moral woman is a passive and gullible bore? Only once, in Chapter 31 (when the soldiers have marched off to fight the Battle of Waterloo) does Amelia rouse herself to round on Becky and rebuke her for the misery she has caused. Otherwise Amelia is helpless and no exemplar of any sort of active virtue.

So, of course, we end up often identifying with, and laughing along with, Becky Sharp as she shows up the hypocrites and cowards and lechers of her age.

In Chapter 32, for example, it is gloriously funny to see Becky keeping her nerve, at the time of the Battle of Waterloo. By bargaining to sell horses at very high prices, she cheats out of their money panicky and rapacious Britishers who wish to escape after what rumour has told them has been a French victory. Chapters 36 and 37, “How to Live Well on Nothing a Year” and its sequel, almost celebrate Becky’s skill in gulling foolish and fashionable men out of their money. Could it be that, far from deploring her vice, Thackeray’s real business in Vanity Fair is to show Becky giving a corrupt society exactly what it deserves? (Yet, interestingly, in his own line illustrations for the novel, Thackeray the artist always depicts Becky as an evil-faced, nasty looking woman, like a stage villainess.)

Which brings me to what has most often been criticised in this novel by fastidious critics: its social perspective. Thackeray cries vanity to everything, say his critics, but he ignores how the Regency society he depicts gave way to the realities of the society in which he was writing. Unperceived by the novel is the process which led to a transition from a world with squire, aristocracy and country estate as power bases, to the Victorian world where merchant, speculator and industrialist call the tune. Vanity Fair shows no awareness of the industrial revolution that was already rumbling on in the 1810s and 1820s. Thackeray’s social criticisms are superficial ones. Vanity Fair shows the affairs of a large cross-section of middle-class and aristocratic society and their servants (but never the lower classes) at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Hostile critics occasionally compare it with another great novel that gives a social panorama at the time of the Napoleonic wars – Tolstoy’s War and Peace - and of course in any such comparison Vanity Fair will come off looking a very poor and distant second best. Set against the grandeur and profundities of War and Peace, Vanity Fair is trivial and frivolous.

I find the venerable critic Walter Allen grumbling “No novelist of genius has given us an analysis of man in society based on so trivial a view of life.” Allen goes on to quote the Victorian Walter Bagehot remarking dyspeptically (and snobbishly) that all Vanity Fair does is “to prove that tenth-rate people were ever striving to be ninth-rate people.” There may be schemers, connivers, social-climbers and a few plodding exemplars of virtue (plodding indeed – why else would Thackeray give one such the name Dobbin?); but there are no real intellectuals or thinkers.

Part of me says that all this is perfectly true, and I cannot pretend that whenever I have read and shamelessly enjoyed Vanity Fair, I have ever been looking for deep insights into human nature and society. I am painfully aware that Thackeray sometimes accepted complacently the worst prejudices of his age. I still shudder at Chapter 20 where Thackeray appears to expect us to be amused by the racist chatter about Miss Swartz (i.e. “Black”), the mulatto West Indian heiress whom one male almost marries. As I mentioned in an earlier post (see CulturalAppropriation and other Chimera), this was the passage that rightly offended a senior class of Palagi and Samoan schoolgirls to whom I once taught this novel.

But another part of me says it’s ridiculous to expect Vanity Fair to be War and Peace. It is simply not that sort of novel. Thackeray can do the “pathetic” as well as Dickens could (e.g. the sad scene in Chapter 22 where Amelia and George marry on a rainy day with neither of their fathers present), but he is mainly in the realm of satire and humour. Of course it’s funny to behold the fat civilian Joseph Sedley trailing along after the regiment in Belgium, dressing in quasi-military clothes, and then running away at the prospect of defeat. Of course it’s funny when (in Chapter 34) young James Crawley, trying to wheedle an inheritance out of a rich relative, is tricked into the vice of smoking and gets cut out of the will. And even if it is not the most profound of social comment, Thackeray does mock some social arrangements and social pieties. Clergymen of all stripes come off badly – Anglican or evangelical or “dissenter”, Thackeray treats them all as either shams or pompous fools. He gives a very good account of a “rotten borough” in Queen’s Crawley. We eventually join Becky Sharp in seeing the life of the country gentry – into which she has striven to be accepted – as a vacuous round of dull social engagements. Probably offending at least some Victorian sensibilities, Thackeray takes no sides in the Battle of Waterloo (Allies and French are equally heroic) and presents the Allies in Paris as rapacious carpetbaggers. He ridicules the sham gallantry of the court of George IV (formerly the Prince Regent) and by implication says that its habitués are all sharpers and social climbers just as Becky is. It is true that in showing greed, snobbery and fortune-hunting as being true of all social classes, Thackeray avoids having to make a true critique of society. (After all, if all are guilty, nobody is guilty.) Even so, he scores some palpable hits and justifies his chattery “man of the world” tone.

And yet… and yet… and yet.

There is one important element of Vanity Fair that really does irritate me. This is Thackeray’s nudge-and-wink approach to sex. We are all aware that the matter couldn’t be dealt with frankly in Victorian novels, but it is still irritating that Thackeray repeatedly hints, insinuates and snickers over the fact that Becky uses sex as a lure, probably prostitutes herself a number of times to wealthy clients, and probably serves as somebody’s mistress, as she seeks money and position. At a certain point it becomes ridiculous that a whole novel can be written about a sexual adventuress without the issue being addressed frankly. I sigh in exasperation at this evasiveness in such passages as the one near the end of Chapter 53. Rawdon Crawley comes home and finds Becky in a compromising position with Lord Steyne. It is implied that she is Lord Steyne’s mistress, and this is what Rawdon apparently understands. And what does the authorial voice of Thackeray at once do? It goes all sham coy and baits readers with questions, thus: “What had happened? Was she guilty or not? She said not; but who could tell what was the truth that came from those lips; or if that corrupt heart was in this case pure?” etc. etc. This sort of thing makes me want to shake Thackeray furiously and shout at him “You’re the ruddy author making all this up. TELL US FRANKLY WHAT HAS HAPPENED!”

I would of course be a cad and a bounder if I didn’t admit to greatly enjoying Vanity Fair whenever I have read it. But in this particular, I cannot help comparing it with what I believe is a better novel and which, as it happens, was first published the year before Vanity Fair appeared. I am referring to Honore de Balzac’s Cousin Bette (La Cousine Bette, 1846). It, too, deals with the impact of sex upon both bourgeois and aristocratic society (a spiteful, scorned spinster wrecks various wealthy Parisian men using a willing courtesan as bait). But unlike Thackeray, when Balzac is talking about a mistress he calls her a mistress, when a prostitute appears, she is called a prostitute, and so on. I much prefer this to Thackeray’s coy nudge and wink.

Not that I am condemning Thackeray for not being Balzac, anymore than I would condemn him for not being Tolstoy.

Cinematic footnote: I think as far as the great reading audience is concerned, Thackeray is a one hit wonder, known only for Vanity Fair. It would probably be true that Vanity Fair has been reprinted and read more than all his other (many) works combined. All the many novels of Dickens have been repeatedly dramatized, filmed, televised or turned into musicals. By contrast, I was aware that Stanley Kubrick made a slow and stately film out of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon; and Wikipedia informs me that there was once a Polish (!) film musical based on Thackeray’s children’s story The Rose and the Ring. Otherwise the ONLY one of Thackeray’s novels to be filmed or televised has been Vanity Fair. But it has been filmed many, many times.

I have made the acquaintance of five Becky Sharps on screen.

My first Becky Sharp was the young and very pretty Susan Hampshire in the 1967 BBC TV serial adaptation, which I saw as a teenager (apparently it was the first BBC serial shot in colour, but we were still watching black-and-white TV in New Zealand in those days). In retrospect, Susan Hampshire’s pert performance was a remarkably innocent one, almost as if Becky was a schoolgirl playing pranks. But I still recall vividly the sequence in which she dictates a begging letter for gormless Rawdon to write, and then sprinkles it with water to simulate that tears of sorrow which the letter claims Rawdon is shedding. 

            I thought Eve Matheson in the 1987 BBC adaptation – although only in her mid-twenties – was a more mature Becky and certainly one who suggested both Becky’s sexual appeal and her lowdown cunning. So far, I think she is the most satisfactory Becky I have seen.

            Natasha Little in the 1998 BBC adaptation was adequate but rather bloodless, and not as sexy as Eve Matheson. Becky Sharp gone a little too stately. Part of the problem was a messy adaptation that skipped over or simplified much of the novel – and also took the sting out of Becky’s final villainy.

Be it noted that all of these adaptations, while depicting Becky as a self-interested minx, nevertheless tend to see things her way without any overt moralising. She becomes an ingenious adventuress, knocking over gullible, pompous or otherwise despicable people.

Only within the last few years, thanks to Youtube, was I able to catch up with Rouben Mamoulian’s ancient 1935 Hollywood movie Becky Sharp, apparently one of the first four-strip Technicolor films made. It is very brief (88 minutes) and a very, very simplified (and stagey) version of the story. Adapted from a stage version of the novel, it is all shot in restricted sound-stage sets. Also, true to Hollywood codes of the day, the wicked woman has to be punished for at least some of the film, so Becky is appropriately degraded near the film’s conclusion before the pert and cynical exit lines. Even so, Miriam Hopkins (then in her mid thirties) was a good, if rather mature, Becky.

Finally, the strangest Becky Sharp of my ken. The 2004 film version of Vanity Fair was the first to be directed by a woman, Mira Nair, and it considerably softened the role of Becky.  After all, we now have the doctrine that women in patriarchal societies are fully justified in using any methods at hand to advance themselves, so why moralise over Becky Sharp’s connivances? Here Becky becomes a brisk, knowing and rather likeable character. Despite this, the film followed the plot of the novel fairly faithfully, save for a non-Thackerayan happy ending – Becky pairs with Joseph Sedley and the two of them visit India for a happy-ever-after. (Apparently another, equally sentimental, ending was also shot.) This Vanity Fair bombed at the box office, but oddly enough I found myself enjoying it, unfaithful to the novel or not. Reese Witherspoon convinced me of her Becky’s amiability and she is one of the modern breed of American actresses who can actually do convincing English accents. So I had a pleasant evening with her movie, even if I tut-tutted the way Thackeray would have and said this wasn’t really Thackeray.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

 “THE FOUR GEORGES” by William Makepeace Thackeray (first delivered as lectures 1855-56, and published in book form 1861)

As I have remarked before on this blog (see the post on The Newcomes), I have never delved as deeply into the works of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) as I could have, given that most of his works are within easy reach in my study. I have read three of his four best-known novels (Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond and The Newcomes) but have never been able to crack the fourth (Pendennis). The Virginians, Catherine and The Adventures of Philip sit unread on my shelves, though I did enjoy reading the bustling Barry Lyndon (very different in many ways from the solemn film Stanley Kubrick made of it) and a number of times read his children’s book The Rose and the Ring to my own children when they were younger. So my acquaintance with Thackeray’s “important” stuff is patchy. On the other hand, treated as bedside books to be nibbled at before sleep, I have often enjoyed dipping into his essays and occasional pieces – The Yellowplush Papers, The Roundabout Papers, The Book of Snobs and Sketches and Travels in London. It has sometimes been claimed that Thackeray was more naturally an essayist rather than a novelist, and this argument could be sustained were it not for the fact that his best novels really are great novels.

            It was in this bedside-book, dipping fashion that I first read and enjoyed Thackeray’s The Four Georges, a slim volume barely one hundred pages long in the small-print Smith and Elder reprint of 1888 which I possess.

A little background – Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde were not the only Victorians to hit the lucrative American lecture circuit when they felt the need for funds. Thackeray twice took the same path. In the early 1850s he went to the United States and gave lectures on The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. He returned in 1855-56 and gave his lectures on The Four Georges. When his four lectures were published in book form in 1861 (together with The English Humourists), they had the subtitle “Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court and Town Life”. Fair enough too, for these four lectures on England’s eighteenth and early nineteenth century Hanoverian monarchs tell us very little about weighty political matters, foreign affairs, wars and so forth in the reigns of Georges I, II, III and IV. Instead, they concentrate on personal gossip, rivalries at court and among the ruling classes, and amusing anecdotes.

Two sniffy litterateurs of long ago, Edith Batho and Bonamy Dobree, in The Victorians volume of their Introduction to English Literature, describe The Four Georges as “thoroughly bad” and say it has “been more responsible than any other work for disseminating false views of the early Hanoverian monarchs”.

“Poo to them,” I say, as I plunge in once more to Thackeray’s garrulous chitter-chatter.

What is it that Thackeray tells us of these four monarchs?

            That George I was a carpet-bagging German, who was received and accepted as King of England only by craven toadies who would have as readily supported the usurped Stuarts if the wind had been blowing differently.

That George II was a choleric bully with a filthy temper allied to a peculiarly German sort of sentimentality. Thackeray happily recounts the story of George II’s wife, on her death-bed, begging the king to re-marry when she was gone, and the king, with tears in his eyes, replying “Non, non – j’aurai des maitresses.” It is in the George II lecture that Thackeray also remarks on the fact that George II thought England far less important as a realm than his native Hanover. Says Thackeray: “The King’s fondness for Hanover occasioned all sorts of rough jokes among his English subjects, to whom Sauerkraut and Sausages have ever been ridiculous objects. When our present Prince Consort [he means Queen Victoria’s German husband Prince Albert] came among us, the people bawled out songs in the streets, indicative of the absurdity of Germany in general. The sausage shops produced enormous sausages which we might suppose were the daily food and delight of German Princes.”

That George III, though insane for some of his reign, was at least pious and kindly in his lucid intervals and did try to rein in some of his more overbearing aristocrats.

But that the Prince Regent – later George IV – was a pampered, lecherous, foolish, dishonourable sot.

These four affable, easy-going, anecdotal chats are the epitome of the Whig outlook. Thackeray regards all four Georges with easy superiority. They are, in his view, very inferior to the really great personages of their age. But at least, runs the subtext, these four buffoons were preferable to active and industrious tyrants for, as seen by Thackeray, kings should at best be regarded as ceremonial conveniences for the industrious middle-classes who are the people who really run the country.

Chuckling along with Thackeray’s contempt, I found two notable features in these lectures. First, the Victorian clubman Thackeray hankers for, and has a great fondness for, the club-world of the previous century, with all his admiring references to “Dick Steele” and Samuel Johnson and other such clubbable chaps. Second, it is the Prince Regent who earns his greatest contempt. Thackeray has great fun ridiculing the notion of “the First Gentleman of Europe” by showing what a bounder Beau Brummell’s “fat friend” was, but even more by suggesting that the Prince Regent’s years of power supplied far worthier genuine “gentlemen” that the royal one. Thackeray nominates Sir Walter Scott, Robert Southey (Lord knows why!) and of course George Washington. His praise of the last-named reminds us that he was addressing an American audience and, as all touring British lecturers do in the USA, was buttering them up big time. After all, what would a nineteenth-century Yankee enjoy more than a witty Englishman telling them how fatuous British kings were?

There are some unexpected elements in Thackeray’s outlook. Unlike Dickens, Thackeray himself maintained more of the roistering Regency outlook than the Victorian moralism that succeeded it (and which Dickens in part created). Nevertheless, even as he notes the decline in boxing and in card-playing, Thackeray brings quite a bit of his own moralism to bear in depicting the Prince Regent. Also, though in his other works generally negative or satirical towards Catholics, Thackeray joins Dickens in regarding Catholic Emancipation (in 1829) as a “good thing”.

In his text I find two palpable hits, both in the lecture on George IV.

Knowing that, in purely legitimist terms, the “Brunswicks” (Hanoverians) had usurped the English throne, which rightly belonged to the Stuarts, there were legitimist Jacobites who still supported the Stuarts. Yet as Thackeray correctly notes:

“The Brunswicks had no such defenders as those two Jacobite commoners, old Sam Johnson, the Lichfield chapman’s son, and Walter Scott, the Edinburgh lawyer’s.”

Quite so. The Tory Johnson was a bitter foe of the Whig ascendancy, and Walter Scott’s novels romanticised the pre-Hanoverian, pre-bourgeois past. Yet both writers supported royalism and established royalty and in effect, willy-nilly, legitimised the Hanoverian usurpers in the popular imagination.

Then there is one of Thackeray’s cracks against the sybaritic Prince Regent:

“Where my Prince did actually distinguish himself was in driving. He drove once in four hours and a half from Brighton to Carlton House – 56 miles. All the young men of that day were fond of that sport. But the fashion of rapid driving deserted England; and, I believe, trotted over to America.”

Yes indeed. The fat regent, whipping his horses along, was the precursor of petrolheads and nitwits heading down the highway looking for adventure, even if he relied on literal horsepower over unsealed dirt roads. That lust for speed was already an American lust by the mid-nineteenth century (see the closing remarks on my post concerning Nathaniel Hawthorne’s TheHouse of the Seven Gables).

As I said, The Four Georges is very pleasant bedside reading, no more nor less. You didn’t think I was touting great literature this week, did you?

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE NEWCOMES” by William Makepeace Thackeray (First published in 23 monthly serial parts, 1853-55. Published in book form 1855.)

            I admit to a rather fraught relationship with William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863). Of course I’ve read Vanity Fair (1848) a number of times, and once inflicted it on a class of Year 13 girls (who, after first baulking at its length, and making some acute comments about its snobbery, nevertheless ended up loving it). Despite its Whiggish view of history, I read and enjoyed Henry Esmond (1852) as one of the better historical novels of its age. One time, when I was visiting Italy, I had nothing else in the English language to read when I found a paperback copy of Barry Lyndon (1844) at a railway bookstall, and thoroughly enjoyed its galloping tale of rascality, quite different in tone from the rather solemn movie version that Stanley Kubrick made from it. I read Thackeray’s brief kiddies’ book The Rose and the Ring (1855) to my older children when they were young – to their apparent enjoyment. I found his lectures The Four Georges (1856), his Book of Snobs (1848) and especially his humorous magazine pieces The Roundabout Papers (1863) very satisfactory bedside books, to be nibbled at, a chapter at a time, before lights out. On the other hand, I was never able to finish his (apparently) most autobiographical novel Pendennis (1850) – about a young journalist. I got about a third of the way through it and found myself squirming with boredom and irritated by the eponymous Arthur Pendennis. Likewise his immensely long historical novel The Virginians (1859) sits unread on my shelves, as does The Adventures of Philip (1862).

Basically, Thackeray is remembered in two ways. First, as the author of Vanity Fair. Second, as the “second best” Victorian novelist after Dickens. The hard fact is, he cannot be mentioned without people at once comparing him with his much more popular contemporary. These constant comparisons with Dickens are really belittling. Thackeray had his own peculiar genius, and it is hard to imagine Dickens allowing himself to create a full-blown sexual adventuress like Becky Sharp.

Just observe the most common portrait of Thackeray (owlish, bespectacled and

grey-haired) and, apart from the somewhat sardonic curl of his lips, he almost looks like a comfy, avuncular member of the Establishment. With a jolt, we realize that he had aged prematurely and in fact died when he was only 52. (The equally workaholic Dickens died at 58). Also, he was never a comfortable member of the Establishment. He was on the fringes of high society, which he regarded with a mixture of satire and toadyism – the mainspring of the outbreaks of snobbery for which he has often been criticised. (I can’t refrain from quoting W.H.Auden’s naughty clerihew “William Makepeace Thackeray / Wept into his daiquiri / When he heard that St John’s Wood / Thought he was no good.”)

            George Saintsbury, a forgotten critic from the very early 20^th century, once described four novels by Thackeray as his “Quadrilateral” – the impregnable fortress of Thackeray’s literary achievement. They are Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond, Pendennis and The Newcomes. I shudder at the inclusion of Pendennis, but endorse the inclusion of The Newcomes. As another of Thackeray’s major works that I have read, The Newcomes (1853-55), subtitled Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, seems to me a sadly neglected and very sympathetic mid-Victorian novel.

Some context. I first read The Newcomes because I had read Don Quixote and was following up The Greatest Novel Ever Written by reading a number of works that were influenced by it. (Such as Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, comments on both of which you can find via this blog’s index.) An essay by Herbert Grierson tipped me off that a key character in Thackeray’s The Newcomes was based on Don Quixote and modelled his values on the Knight of the Woeful Countenance. So into The Newcomes I plunged, and I was mighty glad I did so.

Unlike most of Thackeray’s novels, The Newcomes is set in the times when Thackeray was writing it – or at least only a decade or so before publication date. Like most of Thackeray’s novels, it is centrally concerned with gradations of class feeling among the upper middle classes. As their name alerts us, the Newcomes are a nouveau-riche family, and the chief cleavage in the family is between those who are willing to admit their humble origins, and those who make pretensions to noble descent.

The tale opens with the widower Colonel Thomas Newcome, known to all as a perfect gentleman, coming back from India and taking his son Clive Newcome from boarding school. (Obviously an old officer in Britain’s Indian army would call his son Clive.) Colonel Newcome, generosity and honour personified, is specifically identified as the Don Quixote character. He always wants to think the best of people. Unlike some of his snobbish relations, he has no difficulty in paying social calls to, and being polite to, poor relations whom the social-climbing branches of the family would prefer to forget – such as poor old Sarah Mason, who lives back in the borough of Newcome; or members of the family of the colonel’s deceased wife – notably Miss Honeyman, who runs a boarding house in Brighton.

Much of the early part of the novel consists of Clive’s attempts to be an artist (reflecting some autobiography on the part of artist-novelist Thackeray). Colonel Newcome takes Clive’s modest talent to be a sign of genius. The comedy here consists of our awareness that the colonel is looking through the eyes of paternal pride. There is also much delicacy in the way Thackeray shows Clive protecting his father (from some of the more louche aspects of London life) as much as the colonel protects Clive. One of the chief delights of this novel is its depiction of a father and son who really love each other, despite their differences of temperament.

When, in its rambling way, the plot really gets going, it centres on Clive’s thwarted love for his cousin Ethel Newcome, whom he hopes to marry. Clive’s nemesis is Ethel’s boorish, domineering and very wealthy brother Barnes Newcome, who despises Clive and wants his sister to make a wealthy society match.

I will not summarise the plot in detail. It is fruitless to do so for a serially-published Victorian novel which, like Dickens’ novels, often runs off at tangents in its more than 800 pages. Suffice it to say that, repeatedly, Clive woos Ethel only to have her whisked away by yet another wealthy suitor acceptable to her brother. Clive himself gets caught up in the marriage market, where eligible girls are dangled, by their mothers, before eligible bachelors. A Mrs MacKenzie -  “Mrs Mack, the old campaigner” - makes strenuous efforts to get Clive to marry her daughter Rosey MacKenzie. Meanwhile Colonel Newcome’s financial fortunes rise when he returns to India and invests in the Bundelcund Banking Company (amusingly for a modern reader, it is often identified in the novel by its initials – B.B.C.)….. but later the colonel’s fortunes crash again when the company goes bankrupt and folds after the unwise speculations of other share-holders. Unusually for a Victorian novel, there are episodes concerning a very messy divorce, when the domineering Barnes Newcome proves to be a wife-beating brute and his wife deserts him.

Through the romantic ups-and-downs of Clive and Ethel, the novel works its way towards a sad and downbeat conclusion, regarding both Clive’s marital status and the material fortunes of his immediate family. This is fully credible in terms of the characters and their circumstances, as they have been revealed to us.

Unfortunately, Thackeray didn’t want to disappoint his serial-reading audience. So, in the last three or four chapters, he contrives a “happy ending” to set everything right again, regardless of its improbability. I really do wish the novel ended without those last chapters. They are as much of an intrusion, and a betrayal of what has gone before, as Dickens’ re-written ending to Great Expectations.

In making a sort of summary like this, I have naturally left out many characters who don’t contribute much to the plot, but who are part of the flavour of the novel. There is the painful fact that much of the novel is narrated (either in the first- or the third-person) by Thackeray’s alter ego, the tiresome Arthur Pendennis, whose wife Laura Pendennis is introduced very late into the proceedings as a female companion to some of the novel’s female characters. This, I think, is an awkward dodge to “justify” Arthur Pendennis’ having intimate knowledge of matters he couldn’t possibly witness.  A lot of excitable and funny Froggies are introduced as raw comic relief. There is some satire on art criticism in the person of Clive’s art critic friend Fred Bayham, who “puffs” Clive’s paintings. Early in the novel, the Reverend Charles Honeyman (Colonel Newcome’s brother-in-law) is a mildly satirical portrait of the fashionable churchman who tempers his homilies to the tastes of his affluent congregations.

To modern readers The Newcomes creates a whole vanished world of social arrangements, and I admit to being fully diverted by it in the fortnight or so that I dawdled my way through it. I cannot be ungrateful or churlish about its entertainment value. When I try to apply some rational criticism to it, however, I find myself doing what all the others do, and comparing Thackeray with Dickens.

As in Dickens’ early novels (such as Nicholas Nickleby), the young man who is supposedly the central character, Clive Newcome, is not particularly interesting. The novel droops in the central sections, when the generous Colonel Newcome is absent from the scene. Clive’s love for his father is believable, but too often Clive is shoved about at the convenience of the plot, especially in the matter of his marriage.

As I have already noted, there is considerable awkwardness in having Arthur Pendennis as observer and narrator. Frequently his narration resembles gossip or chitter-chatter and underlines the novel’s limited social perspective. (Attitudinising chitter-chatter was as much Thackeray’s abiding sin as sentiment was Dickens’ abiding sin.) Indeed, Thackeray himself seems to be so aware of the defectiveness of his narrative voice that he twice (at the beginnings of Chapter 24 and Chapter 49) makes defensive comments to justify it.

Unlike Dickens, Thackeray (who had Indian connections) does show an awareness of Britain’s accumulating empire and its wealth. He is also aware of the grubby ways in which much imperial wealth was acquired. In Chapter 48, there’s a passing reference to the opium trade as one of the means by which fortunes are made for the company in which Colonel Newcome invests. (The Newcomes was written less than a decade after the series of wars in which Britain forced opium on the Chinese empire.) The boyish high jinks of Thackeray’s male characters do come across as Regency morality modified a little for Victorian readership, quite unlike the wholesale embrace of Victorian morality in Dickens’ novels. However, again unlike Dickens, Thackeray has a more limited social perspective with regard to England itself. The world of The Newcomes is Mayfair, clubland, decaying gentry, arriviste upper middle classes and the marriage market, with a few bohemians in Clive’s arty set. The mercantile upper middle classes seethe with envy for the unearned wealth of the titled gentry; Thackeray satirises toadyism, social climbing and pretensions, yet at the same time he (as usual) half buys into these things. Save for some sentiment about poor relations, the lower classes scarcely make an appearance, as they so often do in Dickens. In offhanded remarks planted here and there, you can also see that Thackeray shares many of the prejudices of his age, race and class – against Catholics, funny Irish and excitable Froggies, for example.

Yet, for all his moments of windy attitudinising, Thackeray can bring off the strong dramatic scene. There is no coup de theatre as shocking as the “dead, with a bullet through his heart” moment in Vanity Fair. But there is Colonel Newcome’s anger at the smutty song he hears sung in a club. And Clive enraged enough by the brutish Barnes to throw a drink in his face. And Ethel attaching to herself a green ticket (like the ones put on ticketed paintings) as a sign that her brother regards her as being for sale in the marriage market. And Clive burning with frustration as he sees the unattainable Ethel on a public platform.

Hands up, too, for Thackeray’s witticisms. There’s the person in Chapter 8 who suggests Clive’s future thus: “I think I should send him into the army – that’s the best place for him – there’s the least to do and the handsomest clothes to wear.”

There’s the passage in Chapter 20, where Thackeray summarises the colonel’s care for his son, and how it is often returned:  “….the old man lay awake, and devised kindnesses, and gave his all for the love of his son; and the young man took, and spent, and slept and made merry.”

And as for philistinism, there is the passage in Chapter 35 on Clive’s idling in Italy, which begins “Our friend is an Englishman, and did in Rome as the English do.” There follows one of the most acute analyses on record of the mixed fear and envy that Protestant Englishmen felt when they came face-to-face with the art of Catholic Italy.

 It is an imperfect and lumpy novel, for sure, but it is still one of Thackeray’s best, and would reward a reading by anyone who loved Vanity Fair.

Random footnotes:

(A.) The Newcomes was published a decade before “Lewis Carroll” wrote Alice in Wonderland. But in Chapter 24 of The Newcomes I was surprised to find that somebody remarks “That woman grins like a Cheshire cat”, whereupon Thackeray comments “Who was the naturalist who first discovered this peculiarity of the cats in Cheshire?” Identifying the phrase with Lewis Carroll is a good instance of a traditional and proverbial phrase being ascribed to the one literary source that popularised it.

(B.) As a piece of pure imbecility, I note that the two-volume Collins Clear Type edition of The Newcomes which sits on my shelf was published in the very early 20^th century. Instead of the original illustrations, its illustrations are posed sepia photographs taken from an early 20^th century stage adaptation of The Newcomes. This reminds me that before television came along, with its frequent serial adaptations of long 19^th century novels, stage adaptations of them were quite common. However I struggle to see how the novel’s rambling and various narrative matter could be fitted into even a three- or four-hour play, and I can only assume that the stage adaptation was very pared-down in terms of plot. Or perhaps audiences had very different expectations of an evening’s entertainment in those days.