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Thackeray's Recantation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joseph E. Baker
Joseph E. Baker*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, Iowa City
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Extract

Very early in his career, Thackeray published his Catherine (1839-40) as part of Fraser's Magazine's campaign against fiction that glamorized criminals and sinners. In a note to Chapter i, he singled out for criticism Bulwer's Ernest Maltravers because it “opens with a seduction; but then it is performed by people of the strictest virtue on both sides; there is so much religion and philosophy in the heart of the seducer, so much tender innocence in the soul of the seduced, that—bless the little dears!—their very peccadilloes make one interested in them; and their naughtiness becomes quite sacred, so deliciously is it described.” In Fraser's, August 1832, Bulwer had been accused of parallel confusions: “having to paint an adulterer, you describe him as belonging to the class of country curates, among whom, perhaps, such a criminal is not met with once in a hundred years.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 5 , December 1962 , pp. 586 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

Note 1 in page 586 vi, 68 (in “Elizabeth Brownrigge,” sometimes erroneously ascribed to Thackeray).

Note 2 in page 586 So Philip's father reports at the end of Ch. xxxvi.

Note 3 in page 586 Ch. xi. Works of W. M. Thackeray, Special Biographical Edition (N. Y. and London, 1898–1900), xx, 208–209. This edition is used for volume and page references throughout the text of this paper.

Note 4 in page 586 J. E. Tilford, Jr., “The ‘Unsavoury Plot’ of Henry Esmond,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, Sept. 1951, p. 122. The second phrase is quoted by Tilford from the Times, 23 December, 1852.

Note 5 in page 587 “Epilogue,” Thackeray, the Age of Wisdom, 1847–1863 (N. Y., 1958). As for the title of this book, see Gordon Ray's “Preface.”

Note 6 in page 587 “Vanity Fair and the Celestial City,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, Sept. 1955, pp. 89–98.

Note 7 in page 587 W. M. Thackeray, L'Homme—Le Penseur—Le Romancier (Paris, 1932), p. 299.

Note 8 in page 587 Thackeray, the Sentimental Cynic (Evanston, Ill., 1950), pp. 1, 2.

Note 9 in page 589 xxi, 515. (In the previous volume, p. 212, Thackeray equates his phrase “pulled the long-bow” with “twanged a famous lie out.” It is a euphemism for lying.)

Note 10 in page 589 xxi, 601, referring to Agnes Twysden, who turned from Philip to marry Woolcomb.

Note 11 in page 589 xx, 262; General Baynes says it to the writer, after they have heard Philip speaking of his own future prospects “in his lordly way.”

Note 12 in page 591 Gordon Ray, The Buried Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 118.

Note 13 in page 591 xx, 267. And near the end of the novel, he mentions “the Samaritans who came to Philip's help in these his straits” (xxi, 617).

Note 14 in page 592 “On a Chalk-Mark on the Door,” xxiii, 285–286. Thackeray seems to have forgotten that, as Lewis Mumford says, “insolence battens on servility” (The City in History, New York, 1961, p. 370); and this is relevant to the fact that the “good” people in Philip think its insolent hero is charming.

Note 15 in page 593 “Vanity Fair and the Celestial City,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, Sept. 1955, pp. 89–98.

Note 16 in page 594 Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman, ed. Anne Mozley (London, 1891), ii, 479 (27 Dec. 1863), quoted by Tillotson, Thackeray the Novelist, p. 265.