Biography
William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811. He was the only son of Richmond Thackeray, an administrator in the service of the East India Company, and of Anne Becher. His father died in 1815 and the boy was sent to England, where he went through boarding schools in Southampton and Chiswick before entering Charterhouse School, which he attended from 1822 to 1829 without enjoying it. He then enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, but left in 1830 without a degree. He travelled to Germany, where he met Goethe, began studying law, then went to Paris to study drawing, without persevering.
His fortune collapsed in the early 1830s: he squandered a good part of his inheritance on gambling and on two newspapers doomed to fail, and the collapse of Indian banks took the rest. He turned to the press, in Paris and then in London, and contributed notably to Fraser's Magazine, The Times and the Morning Chronicle. He wrote under several masks, among them Michael Angelo Titmarsh, and illustrated his own texts. In 1836 he married Isabella Shawe. After the birth of their third child, in 1840, she sank into a mental illness from which he would never see her recover, and he had to raise his daughters alone.
In 1844, it was this still little-known journalist who accepted, almost on impulse, a berth offered by the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. He sailed from Southampton on 22 August and travelled through the eastern Mediterranean: Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malta, Athens, Constantinople, Beirut, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Cairo. He brought back the Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, published in London in 1846 under the name of Titmarsh. The book mocks the first tourists of the steam age, himself included, while letting a graver look show through at the peoples and religions encountered.
From 1843 to 1854 he contributed regularly to Punch, where his columns on snobs appeared, later collected in a volume under the title The Book of Snobs. There he at last gained an audience, then fame with Vanity Fair, published as a serial from 1847 to 1848. Notably followed Pendennis, Henry Esmond, The Newcomes and The Virginians, as well as Christmas tales. In 1860 he took over the editorship of the new Cornhill Magazine, a post that weighed on him and in which he gave chiefly his Roundabout Papers.
Thackeray died in London on 24 December 1863, of a stroke, at the age of fifty-two, and was buried on 29 December at Kensal Green Cemetery. A bust by Carlo Marochetti is dedicated to him in Westminster Abbey. His second daughter, Harriet Marian, married Leslie Stephen and was thus the first wife of Virginia Woolf's father. Archives are held at the University of Leeds library, and the Beinecke Library at Yale holds a collection in his name. His works, including the Notes of 1846, are today available in public-domain digital editions.
