Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 September 1886 — Thackeray’s Career. [ARTICLE]

Thackeray’s Career.

Thackeray was the son of an Indian civil servant, and his grandfathers ■were Indian civil servants, both on the father’s and the mother’s side. He was born at Calcutta, in July, 1811, and was thus but one year older than Charles Dickens. When he was five years old he lost his father, and his mother married again while he was a boy. From India William Makepeace Thackeray was brought to London as a child, and sent to the Charterhouse. He was gentle and sensitive, with a quick sense of fun then as in after years. He carried into manhood —as part of the strength of manhood—more of the charm of a child’s nature than men usually keep unspoilt by the experience of life. Pains of life only added to his kindliness. Much of his higher comic writing has its charm in a rare union of mature wit with a childlike playfulness. At the age of eighteen Thackeray kept a few terms at Trinity College, Cambridge. He did not stay to graduate. Then he went to Paris, to study art. When he came of age there was a little fortune for him of £SOO a year. It was soon lost, chiefly by a newspaper speculation. He felt that he was not born to succeed as a painter, and was drawn, as he had been even when a schoolboy, to the use of the pen. His nose had been broken in a school fight at the Charterhouse. Michael Angelo, too, had his nose broken. But Thackeray was not to be a Michael Angelo; he dubbed himself playfully “Michael Angelo Titmaish.” In 1837 and 1838 he was writing in Fraser’s Magazine “The Great Hoggarty Diamond,” and in the year 1837 he married. After the birth of three daughters, one of whom died in childhood, there came into Thackeray’s life an abiding sorrow. His wife’s mind failed. He worked on, all sensitive tenderness within, and half afraid of the unchildlike people against whom he asserted himself by making them the victims of his frolicsome burlesque or satire. Not long after the establishment of Punch, in 1841, Thackeray found in that paper a playground for his wit. But there was no full recognition of his genius until the appearance of “Vanity'Fair,” when he was thirty-six years old. “Pendennis,” another novel, followed, and while this was being written Thackeray had an illness which left him subject to painful spasmodic attacks. There was suffering enough in mind and body to bring the gray hairs before their time; but there remained the childlike heart, with the sympathetic insight of the man of genius, the ready play of humor, and the sociable yet sensitive nature, more of itself with three or four friends than with thirty. By his lectures on “The English Humorists” and “The Four Georges,” in England and in America, Thackeray secured lasting provision for his family. He added to his first novels, “The Newcomes,” “Esmond,” and “The Virginians,” before the Cornhill Magazine was established under his editorship. That was in 1859. He withdrew from the editorship in April, 1862, bn" continued to contribute. In 1863 all English Christmas days were saddened by the news that, on the day before, Thackeray had died suddenly.