href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@44563@[email protected]#Page_465" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">465

CHAPTER XX. Commencement of the 'Cornhill Magazine'—'Roundabout Papers'—'Lovel the Widower'—The 'Adventures of Philip on his Way through the World'—Lectures on the 'Four Georges'—Editorial Penalties—The 'Thorn in the Cushion'—Harass from disappointed Contributors—Vexatious Correspondents—Withdrawal from the arduous post of Editor—Building of Thackeray's House in Kensington Palace Gardens—Christmas 1863—Death of the great Novelist—The unfinished Work—Circumstances of the Author's last Illness—His Death 488

THACKERAYANA.

CHAPTER I.

Voyage from India—Touching at St. Helena—School days at the Charterhouse—Early Reminiscences—Sketches in School Books—Boyish Scribblings—Favourite Fictions—Youthful Caricatures—Souvenirs of the Play.

The fondness of Thackeray for lingering amidst the scenes of a boy's daily life in a public grammar school, has generally been attributed to his early education at the Charterhouse, that celebrated monastic-looking establishment in the neighbourhood of Smithfield, which he scarcely disguised from his readers as the original of the familiar 'Greyfriars' of his works of fiction. Most of our novelists have given us in various forms their school reminiscences; but none have produced them so frequently, or dwelt upon them with such manifest bias towards the subject, as the author of 'Vanity Fair,' 'The Newcomes,' and 'The Adventures of Philip.' It is pleasing to think that this habit, which Thackeray was well aware had been frequently censured by his critics as carried to excess, was, like his partiality for the times of Queen Anne and the Georges, in some degree due to the traditional reverence of his family for the memory of their great-grandfather, Dr. Thomas Thackeray, the well-remembered head-master of Harrow.

Sketches of Indian life and Anglo-Indians generally are abundantly interspersed through Mr. Thackeray's writings, but he left India too early to have profited much by Indian experiences. He is said, however, to have retained so strong an impression of the scene of his early childhood, as to have wished in later life to revisit it, and recall such things as were still remembered by him. In his seventh year he was sent to England, and when the ship touched at St. Helena, he was taken up to have a glimpse of Bowood, and there saw that great Captain at whose name the rulers of the earth had so often trembled. It is remarkable that in his little account of the second funeral of Napoleon, which he witnessed in Paris in 1840, no allusion to this fact appears; but he himself has described it in one of his latest works—the lectures on 'The Four Georges,' first delivered in the United States in 1855-56, and afterwards described by the Athenæum as 'an airy, humorous, and brilliant picture of English life and manners, produced by honest reading out of many books, and lighted with the glow of individual sympathy and intellect.'

We fancy that Thackeray was placed under the protection of his grandfather, William Makepeace Thackeray, who had settled with a good fortune, the fruit of his industry in India, at Hadley, near Chipping Barnet, a little village, in the churchyard of which lies buried the once-read Mrs. Chapone, the authoress of the 'Letters on the Improvement of the Mind,' the correspondent of Richardson, and the intimate friend of the learned Mrs. Carter and other blue-stocking ladies of that time.

In the course of time—we believe in his twelfth year—Thackeray was sent to the Charterhouse School, and remained there as a boarder in the house of Mr. Penny. He appears in the Charterhouse records for the year 1822 as a boy on the tenth form. In the next year we find him promoted to the seventh form; in 1824 to the fifth; and in 1828, when he had become a day-boy, or one residing with his friends, we find him in the honourable positions of a first-form boy and one of the monitors of the school. He was, however, never chosen as one of the orators, or those who speak the oration on the Founder's Day, nor does he appear among the writers of the Charterhouse odes, which have been collected and printed from time to time in a small volume. We need feel no surprise that Thackeray's ambition did not lead him to seek this sort of distinction; like most keen humorists, he preferred exercising his powers of satire in burlesquing these somewhat trite compositions to contributing seriously to swell their numbers. Prize poems ever yielded the novelist a delightful field for his sarcasms.

While pursuing his studies at 'Smiffle,' as the Carthusians were pleased to style 'Greyfriars,' Thackeray gave abundant evidences of the gifts that were in him. He scribbled juvenile verses, towards the close of his school days, displaying taste for the healthy sarcasm which afterwards became one of his distinctive qualities, at the expense of the prosaic compositions set down as school verses. In one of his class books, 'Thucydides,' with his autograph, 'Charter House, 1827,' are scribbled two verses in which the tender passion is treated somewhat realistically:—