Life
1811-1863 [William Makepeace Thackeray; pseud. ‘M. A. Titmarsh’,
abbrev. for ‘Michael Angelo’]; English novelist, and author
of The Irish Sketchbook (1843) which first appeared under the pseudonym,
ill. by himself as proclaimed in the 1843 edn. [ ‘with numerous engravings
on wood drawn by the author’]; an uncle, Elias Thackeray (1771-1854),
was Anglican vicar of Dundalk; also issued Barry Lyndon
(1844), drawing on Irish character and material, as to some extent in
Phineas Finn: The Irish Member (q.d.); his English Humourists
of the Eighteenth Century [lectures of 1851] contains an account of
Swift among the other writers treated; his comic song “The Battle
of Limerick” trivialises Young Ireland and caused offence, though
William Carleton remarked that he ‘writes very well about Ireland,
for an Englishman’; issued The Irish Sketch-book (1843), containing
travel anecdotes and allusions to Dr. Doyle [JKL], John Wilson Croker,
Thomas Crofton Croker, William Maginn, Theobald Mathew, Robert Ashton
(author of Battle of Aughrim), et al., and opening with an account
and drawing of Daniel O’Connell’s triumphant procession as Lord
Mayor of Dublin, 1841; Thackeray was a friend of Robert Bell and Francis
Mahony; he satirised Dionysius Lardner in The History of Dionisius
Diddler; Thackeray coined the expression ‘the great unwashed’
in Pendennis (Chap. 29); there is a portrait in Maclise’s
Portrait Gallery (p.95); his fg. contributed to The Women’s
World, published by Cassell, under the editorship of Oscar Wilde.
IF OG OCEL DNB [FDA] OCIL
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Works
[Irish Interest only:] The Irish sketch-book, by M. A. Titmarsh [i.e.
W. M. Thackeray] (London Chapman & Hall 1842; new edn. 1863), with
num. engravings on wood by the author; John Gamble, intro., Irish Sketchbook
(Belfast: Blackstaff ed. 1985), 368pp. [incls. index of places visited];
The Irish Sketchbook 1843] [Gill’s Irish Classics] (Dublin:
Gill & Macmillan 1990), 394pp. Also, John Sutherland, ed., William
Makepeace Thackeray, The book of snobs [Victorian texts 5] (Queensland
UP; Prentice Hall [1978]); John Sutherland, ed. & intro., William
Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis his fortunes and misfortunes,
his friends and his greatest enemy with illustrations by the author
(Oxford University Press 1994).
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Criticism
Constantia Maxwell, ‘William Makepeace Thackeray, the Cockney Traveller’,
Chap. XXIII, The Stranger in Ireland (1954), pp.296-314.
John A. Gamble, FRGS, Introduction [vi-xiii], Sketch Book (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1985).
Cunther Klotz, ‘Thackeray’s Ireland: Image and Attitude in The Irish Sketch Book and Barry Lyndon’, in Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok eds., Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World, Vol. II: Comparison and Impact (Tübingen: Guntar Narr Verlag, 1987), pp.95-02.
Judith L. Fisher, Thackeray’s Skeptical Narrative and the “Periolous Trade” of Authorship (London: Ashgate 2002), 310pp.
Robert Hampson, ‘From Cornhill to Cairo: Thackeray as Travel-Writer’, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (MHRA [2004]), pp.214-29.
Irish Book Lover 1-4.
Charles Lever, reviewing An Irish Sketchbook (1843) in Dublin
University Magazine (June 1843).
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Patrick Kennedy, Modern Irish Anecdotes, Humour Wit and Wisdom, Routledge n.d.): ‘there were snobs before the day of the lamented William Makepeace Thackeray’ [remark in the course of a story about Sir Teague O’Regan and his Warhorse in the Williamite War; p.9).
G. B. Shaw: ‘You can always find something better than a good Englishman and something worse than a bad one; but this is not so in Ireland; a bad Irishman is the vilest thing on earth, and a good one is a saint. Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon [The Luck of Barry Lyndon] is a very accurate sketch of the sort of thorough-paced scoundrel Ireland can produce, not when she is put to it, but quite wantonly, merely for the fun of being mischievous’ (1913; rep. in Weintraub, A Composite Biography, 1969; quoted in Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Derry: Field Day 1991, Vol. 2, p.498.)
John A Gamble [FRGS] ed., The Irish Sketchbook [1843; rep. of 1863 Edn.] (Belfast: Blackstaff 1985), 365pp., with contemp. frontispiece engraved portrait by F. Hall after S Lawrence, 1859; verso title-page, rep. orig. publ. Chapman & Hall 1843. Introduction quotes Maxwell (op. cit. 1954): ‘It is gay and well written, and liberally supplied with clever and amusing illustrations.’ An ancestor Elias Thackeray, was Vicar of Dundalk, 1771-1854 [sic]; m. Irishwoman Isabella Craggy Shaw of Doneraile (d.1894), in Paris 1836; dg. Col Matthew Shawe, CB, mil. sec. to Wellesley in India, living with her mother in Paris; an unhelpful mother-in-law impaled on his pen in later novels; Anne Thackeray, dg., b. 1837, d. 8 months later; another, Harriet, b.1840, the mother becoming mentally unbalanced after; by 1844 the marriage had broken down; contract for forthcoming tour book signed with Chapman & Hall, 8 Sept. 1840, Thackeray leaving for Cork, 12 Sept.; Isabella throws herself overboard, and rescued; tour abandoned; returned to Ireland, 1842; Sketch Book published 1843; befriended by Lever, then editor of Dublin University Magazine; advised him to go to London and offered financial support; Sketch Book ded. to Lever; the orig. preface, prancing decidedly for Home Rule suppressed by publishers [Thackeray, ‘I am not a Chartist, only a Republican’]; Lever embarrassed in giving fulsome review, and Ferguson withdrew support because he disliked the dedication [‘Harry Lorrequer needs no complimenting in a dedication ..’, and signed W. M. Thackeray, ‘laying aside for a moment the travelling title’, London, April 27th 1843]; Thackeray’s comic piece on Lever, calling him Phil Fogarty [but see note, infra], led to breach of friendship; Lever responded with ‘Elia Howle, the Cockney Traveller’, implying the book was written for money; refers to the DNB article’s call for more impartiality in the Sketch Book; Thackeray touched by poverty of the Irish people; orig. editor recommended readers to see Spenser’s State, Tone’s Autobiography, and Thackeray’s Sketch Book; Irish acquaintances incl. Maginn, ed. Fraser’s magazine, where The Luck of Barry Lyndon appeared in 1844, based on Irish experiences; Thackeray declined to subscribe to Maginn memorial claiming to have given Maginn £500 in his lifetime and received back £20; Shandon based on Maginn; The O’Mulligan prob. based on William O’Connell, a br. of Daniel; tour began June 1842; zigzag from Dublin to Bantry, Waterford to Giant’s Causeway, visiting Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Killarney, Galway, Wicklow, etc; saw potential of hedge-school children in Waterford; regarded religious intolerance as detestable on either side and did not understand its necessity; at Cork, ‘I think in walking in the streets and looking at the ragged urchins crowding there that every Englishman must remark that the superiority of intelligence is here and not with us ... I never saw such a collection of bright eyed, wild, clever, eager faces.’ disapproved of Ulster Synod and also Archbishop MacHale; praised Christian brothers work; found Maynooth students living in ‘lazy squalor’; rollicking visit to races; high spirited peasants and comic coachmen; on hunger, ‘In this fairest and richest of countries, men are starving and suffering by the millions, stretched in the sunshine of their doors with no work ... lying in bed with hunger ... tearing up unripe potatoes to exist now’; ‘I was shocked at the Irish cabins. An ordinary pigsty in England is really more comfortable’; his sources include Henry Inglis, A Journey through Ireland in 1834, in the first place; Leigh’s New Pocket Road Book of Ireland [3rd edn.], ed. C. C. Hamilton (1835); also prob. Fraser’s Guide Through Ireland (Dublin 1838; also 1844 rev. ed.); mentions works by Willis [recte J. G. Wills], Croker, Barrow, Lover, and Curry [O’Curry?]; orig. MS of The Sketch Book in Houghton Library, Harvard Univ., Cambridge (USA). British Library holds among miscellaneous and add. edns., The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan, Holberth Lib. No 11 (London; printed in Vienna [1924]), 10o; The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a romance of the last century, 2 vols. (NY: Appleton 1853), and Do. [another edn.] (Routledge & Son 1887, 1892, 1893), 8o; with Stubb’s Calendar, the Fatal Books; Barbara Cox, and The Cutting of His Comb (London: Routledge 1893), vi, 376pp.); Confessions of Fitzboodle [and] some Passages in the Life of Major Gahagan (NY: D. Appleton 1852), 12o.
Constantia Maxwell, ‘William Makepeace Thackeray, The Cockney Traveller, 1842’, in Strangers in Ireland (1954), Chap. XXIII, pp.296-314, notes: Thackeray dedicated The Irish Sketch Book [published 3 May 1843] to the Irish novelist Charles Lever, with whom he had made friends in the summer of 1842 and in whose house nr. Dublin he had written most of the book. Thackeray was still comparatively unknown ... the next month it was reviewed by Lever in his journal [Dublin University Magazine], ‘that any Englishman, without long and intimate acquaintance with Ireland, the result of residence in the country, and constant habits of intercourse with all classes of the population, could write a valuable book, and one which might be deemed an authority, we hold altogether impossible.’; ‘Few men have ever come to Ireland, without having their theory in their portmanteau. He, however, has hone, his object is, simply to stroll about the island,, see what he can, make a note of it when he gets home, and print the same as soon as he may. Our friend Titmarsh [the pseud. used in the Paris Sketch Book] has wisely seen that a tourist’s sphere if vision is but a very limited one at best [and therefore does not attempt] to decide any one of the thousand disputed questions which agitate Ireland ... A desire for even-handed justice, however, leads him into the common error of attacking both sides, if he censures a parson to-day, he is quite prepared to serve you up a priest tomorrow, landlords and tenants, Whigs and Tories, town folk and country folk - all come in for their share; but so good-humouredly withal, that he must be a sour critic who could find fault with him’; ‘As the pleasantest reading for a morning in our country, and the most amusing text for an evening’s conversation in town, we safely advise our readers to possess and peruse the Irish Sketch Book.’ / Later in revenge for a parody which Thackeray made of him entitled Philip Fogarty, Lever retaliated with a sketch of Elias Howle, the cockney traveller who had written of Ireland ‘not to counsel or console, not to lament over nor bewail our varied mass of errors and misfortunes, but to laugh at us.’; ‘His mission was to make Punch out of Ireland, and no one was more capable for the office.’ Thackeray’s analysis - gathering up observations of this sort, ‘pigs and men need not live together’ - are akin with those of other English writers, such as Forster and Macaulay, cited by Maxwell in a footnote (n.13). Thackeray wrote, ‘Is it not too monstrous to howl about English tyranny and suffering Ireland, and call for a Stephen’s Green Parliament to make the country quiet and the people industrious? The people are not politically worse treated than their neighbours in England. The priests and the landlords, if they chose to co-operate, might do more for the country now than any kings or laws could. What you want here is not a Catholic and a Protestant party, but an Irish party. (Maxwell, op. cit., p.313.)
Roy Foster, Modern Ireland (1988), quoting Thackeray’s assessment of the partisan climate of Irish politics, ‘Where is the truth to be found in that country ... [&c.; as infra]?’ (From Irish Sketch Book.)
John F. Fallon, “Irishman’s Diary” ([column], Irish Times, ?12 Feb. 2000), writes: ‘The author of Vanity Fair acknowledged the good work done by the Brothers [of the Franciscan friary in Roundstone, Connemara], but he railed against the pretentious title given to his Lordship in the inscription carved on the front of the building: “his Grace the Lord Archbishop of Tuam”.’
Irish talent: ‘Only one instance of Irish talent do we read
of, and that, in a desponding tone, announces its intention of quitting
its native country. All the rest of the pleasures of the evening are importations
from Cockneyland.’ (Irish Sketch Book, p.276); also, on Irish
cabins, ‘An ordinary pigsty in England is really more comfortable
... I declare I believe a Hottentot kraal has more comforts in it, even
to write of the place makes one unhappy.’ (Irish sketch Book,
end of Chap. VIII, Smith Elder’s [Works] edition of 1874,
12 v [sic]; Vol. 7 p.290.)
Truth about Ireland: ‘To have “an opinion about Ireland”, one must begin by getting the truth; and where is it to be had in the country? Or rather, there are two truths, the Catholic truth and the Protestant truth. The two parties do not see things with the same eyes. I recollect, for instance, a Catholic gentleman telling me that the Primate had forty-three thousand five hundred a year; a Protestant clergyman gave me, chapter and verse, the history of a shameful perjury and malversation of money on the part of a Catholic priest nor was one tale more true than the other. But belief is made a party business; and the receiving of the archbishop’s income would probably not convince the Catholic any more than the clearest evidence to the contrary altered the Protestant’s opinion. Ask about an estate, you may be sure almost that people will make misstatements, or volunteer them if not asked. Ask a cottager about his rent, or his landlord; you cannot trust him. I shall never forget the glee with which a gentleman in Munster told me how he had sent off MM. Tocqueville and Beaumont with such a set of stories.’ ‘Inglis was seized, as I am told and mystified in the same way. In the midst of all these truths, attested with “I give ye my sacred honour and word”, which is the stranger to select? And how are we to trust philosophers who make theories upon such data? Meanwhile it is satisfactory to know, upon testimony so general as to be equivalent almost to fact, that, wretched as it is, the country is steadily advancing, nor nearly so wretched now as it was a score of years since, and let us hope that the middle class, which this increase of prosperity must generate (and of which our laws have hitherto forbidden the existence in Ireland, making there a population of Protestant aristocracy and Catholic peasantry), will exercise the greatest and most beneficial influence over the country. Too independent to be bullied by priest or [364] squire - having their interest in quiet, and alike indisposed to servility or rebellion; may not as much be hoped from the gradual formation of such a class as from any legislative meddling? It is the want of the middle class that has rendered the squire so arrogant and the clerical or political demagogue so powerful; and I think Mr. O’Connell himself would say that the existence of such a body would do more for the steady acquirement of orderly freedom than the occasional outbreak of any crowd, influenced by any eloquence from altar or tribune.’ (END; Blackstaff, Edn., pp.364-65.)
Grovelling heathenisms: ‘Leave such figments to magazine writers and ballad-makers; but, corbleu! it makes one indignant to think that people in the United Kingdom, where a press is at work and good sense is abroad … should countenance such savage superstitions and silly, grovelling heathenisms.’ ‘The loud nothings, windy emphatic tropes and metaphors’; ‘If I were a Defender of the Faith, I would issue an order to all priests and deacons to take to the book again … msitrusting te dangerous facility given active jaw and a hot imagination [… &c.]’ (Sketchbook, 1880, p.221; quoted in Luke Gibbons, ‘Allegory, History and Irish Nationalism’, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork UP 1996), p.146.
Anglo-Irish verses: ‘With conscious proide / I stud insoide / And look’d the World’s Great Fair in, / Until me sight / Was dazzled quite, / And I couldn’t see for staring.’ ( ‘Mr Maloney’s Account of the Crystal Palace’, in Ballads and Contributions to Punch, 1842-1850, Oxford 1908, cited in Chris Morash, Writing the Famine, 1995, pp.53-54.)
Jonathan Swift: ‘That Swift was born at No 7, Hoey’s Court, Dublin on 30 Nov. 1667, is a certain fact, of which nobody will deny the sister island the honour and glory; but, it seems to me, he was no more an Irishman than a man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo’ (The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, 1853; quoted in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed., Seamus Deane, Derry: Field Day 1991, Vol. 2, p.1,007).
Eccles Street (Dublin): ‘[...] you pass from some of the stately fine streets straight into the country. After No. 46 Eccles Street, for instance, potatoes begin at once. You are on a wide green plain, diversified by occasional cabbage-plots, by drying grounds white with chemises, in the midst of which the chartered wind is revelling; and though in the map some fanciful engineer has laid down streets and squares, they exist but on paper; nor, indeed, can there be any need of them at present, in a quarter where houses are not wanted so much as people to dwell in the same. (Thackeray, Irish Sketchbook, 1883, p. 555; quoted in Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s World, 1957, pp. 52-53 & 72; see note, infra.)
Glengarriff (again): ‘ Were such a bay lying upon English shores it would be a world’s wonder. Perhaps if it were on the Mediterranean or the Baltic, English travellers would flock to it in hundreds.’ (Cited in Shell Guide, 1967).
Dictionary of National Biography includes entry on Elias Thackeray
(1771-1854), an uncle, vicar of Dundalk, mentioned in Sketch Book; Barry Lyndon, appearing in Fraser’s Magazine, 1844,
probably owed something to his Irish experiences [sic]; Novel by Eminent
Hands (frist publ. in Punch, 1847); Barry Lyndon, from
Fraser, 1844; Eyre Crowe, Thackeray in America (1893[? or 97]),
and Thackeray’s Haunts and Homes (1897). [Chk, Novel[s] by Eminent Hands - sing or pl.] See also references to William
Maginn, in Maginn, Rx.
Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction (Maunsel 1919): Lever’s acceptance of Thackeray’s dedication of ‘The Battle of Limerick’ to him caused Samuel Ferguson to sever his connection with the Dublin University Magazine. Incidents in Barry Lyndon derived from chapbook read in Galway [see Irish Sketchbook]. Irish characters include The O’Mulligan, founded on WJ O’Connell; Capt. Shandon, based on William Maginn; Capt. Costigan and his famous daughter, based on Miss O’Neill. Brown quotes Trollope, ‘Ye hates us, Mr Thackeray, ye hate the Irish,’ said to Trollope’s old Irish coachman. ‘Hate you? God help me, when all I ever loved was Irish!’, and his eyes filled with tears. Thackeray’s wife was Irish.’ [Check the question of the dedication - ballad or book?]
Sir Paul Hervey, ed., Oxford Companion to English Literature (1951 Edn.), notes that Lever took exception to a splendid spoof Thackeray did on the songs in Charles O’Malley; mutual acquaintances got involved, taking sides, then mediating. Harvey further notes under Lever that the Irish novelist is caricatured by Thackeray in Novels by Eminent Hands [n.d.] Note that Margaret Drabble (Companion, new edn.) strikes a different note: ‘Lever received much encouragement and advice from Thackeray and was admired by G. Eliot and A. Trollope.’
Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English: The Romantic Period, 1789-1850 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980), Vol. 2, relates that Thackeray married to a native of Doneraile, Co. Cork; narrates story to the effect that an old Irish groom looking after Thackeray while staying with Trollope produced a copy of the Sketch Book and said, ‘You hate us, Mr. Thackeray,’ to which the novelist: ‘Hate you! God help me, all that I have loved best in the world is Irish!’ Bibl., John S. Crone, ‘Thackeray in Ireland’, Irish Book Lover, III no. 1 (Aug. 1911), p.3. See also Rafroidi Irish Literature in English (Vol. 1), pp.208-09.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2, contains an editorial allusion to Wilde’s the The Newcombes, viz., ‘the noble gentleman from whom the same great sentimentalist [Thackeray] drew Colonel Newcombe died, a few months after The Newcomes [1853-55] had reached a fourth edition, with the word “Adsum” on his lips’, thus showing how life imitated art in keeping with Wilde’s theory: ‘Literature always anticipates life’; further, ‘it does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose; the nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac’ (‘The Decay of Lying’, Intentions, 1891; FDA2, p.385). See also quotations, infra.
Library of Herbert Bell (Belfast) holds The Irish Sketch-book (London 1843); The Book of Snobs: Sketches & Travels in London (London 1886).
Eric Stevens Catalogue (1995), lists The letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray 1817-1863, collected and ed. by Gordon N Ray, 4 vols. (Harvard UP 1945-46).
University of Ulster Library (Morris Collection) holds Irish Sketchbook (1843). Belfast Central Public Library holds Irish Sketchbook (Blackstaff ed. 1985).
William Carleton met Thackeray - whom he greatly admired - in London,
and received complements from him (D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland
[first ser.], Vol. II; quoted in Kiely, Poor Scholar, 1947, p.158.)
Phil Fogarty occurs in the fourth of the “Novels by Eminent Hands” by Thackeray where the novelist caricatures Lever’s manner of writing in a piece called Phil Fogarty: A Tale of the Fighting Onety-Oneth purportedly by ‘Harry Rollicker’ and ascribed to Lever in his Charles O’Malley vein.
Sequel to The Irish Sketchbook (1843) Lever’s fulsome review in the Dublin University Magazine following his own receipt of the dedication signed by Thackeray under his own name resulted in the resignation of Samuel Ferguson from the Dublin University Magazine; Thackeray later caricatured Lever in “Phil Fogarthy, a Tale of the Fighting Onety-Oneth by Harry Rollicker”, and was himself pilloried as Elias Howle, a painter and an archetypal English traveller in Lever’s Roland Cashel; it was Thackeray who dubbed T. F. Meagher ‘Meagher of the Sword’, while his ‘Captain Shandon’ is generally taken to represent William Maginn;
Laetitia Pilkington: Thackeray drew heavily on Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs (2 vols., Dublin 1748; 3rd Vol. London 1754) for his view of Swift in English Humourists. For extract from Thackeray’s ‘Life of Goldsmith,’ in English Humourists, see under Goldsmith, supra.
Barry Lyndon: Thackeray based his Barry Lyndon on the real character of Redmond Barry of Barryogue, and modelled him on two other adventurers, Stoney Bowes of King’s County, and Hugh Maguire of Fermanagh, who both preyed on heiresses and ended up on debtors’ prisons. His Irish Sketchbook describes how he found the tone of voice he had been looking for - a voice of calm complacency in recounting personal villainy - in a collection of chapbooks, ‘strictly Irish’ read in boredom in a Galway hotel. The Adventures of Mr James Freney (1764; reps. up to 1861 [rep. edn. Frank McEvoy, 1991]) is the autobiography of a notorious highway-man who has left his mark on the folklore and topography of Co. Kilkenny, and lived to serve repentently working for the muncipality of Ross harbour. Thackeray found his idea of the moral insensitive answered perfectly by his way of accounting his criminal activities ‘with such noble naivety and simplicity’. (See review, Mary Campbell, Books Ireland, May 1992.)
Eccles Hotel: Staying at Eccles Hotel, Glengarriff, Thackeray witnesses an altercation involving some Cockneys one of whom avers the importance of their station by saying, ‘I pay my way’; Thackeray reflects, ‘I have met more gentlemen here than in any place I ever say, gentlemen of high and low ranks ... “I am a gentleman, and pay my way ...” I have not heard a sentence near so vulgar from any man in Ireland.’ (Sketch Book; cited in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.191). Note that James Joyce assigns the offending line to Mr. Deasy, giving evidence that he had read the book, and taken cognisance of the connection between Eccles and Glengarriff; can it be coincidental that the literary technique called the epiphany, which he first used in Glengarriff St., was fictionally sited in Eccles St., and that the protagonist in the first epiphany should be a ‘young gentleman’? Conjecturally, the phrase ‘on paper’ [quoted supra] is echoed in Finnegans Wake as ‘on papel or off of it’.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)