Books: Eminent Victorian

THE LETTERS AND PRIVATE PAPERS OF WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Volume I: 1817-1840; Volume II: 1841-1851 —Collected and Edited by Gordon N. Ray — Harvard University Press ($12.50).

William Makepeace Thackeray, the eminent Victorian novelist ( Vanity Fair, Pen-dennis), was a passionate gambler and for years indulged an enigmatic infatuation for the wife of a fashionable London clergyman. These somewhat Elizabethan lapses have been whispered about. But they could never be fully confirmed. Reason: before his death, Thackeray told his daughter, Anne, to see to it that there were no Thackeray biographies. She did—by the simple expedient of locking away the bulk of her father’s correspondence and other vital data.

Faithful Fury. For 76 years, Anne Ritchie and her daughter Hester Thackeray Fuller guarded this biographical treasure with the faithful fury of dragons.

But on the eve of World War II, Gordon N. Ray, a young Thackeray enthusiast, traveled to England on a money grant from Harvard University and, somewhat to his surprise, induced Mrs. Fuller to let him carry off the horde. She also turned over to him heaps of Thackeray material that she had been amassing for years. Harvard promptly pressed another money grant on lucky Editor Ray. The Guggenheim Foundation sped him a fat check. Libraries, museums, private collectors deluged him with additional material. Last month from the Harvard University Press dropped The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, two volumes, 1,375 pages, weight: 7 Ibs. Two concluding volumes are promised for next spring.

A Kiss for Grandma. The current volumes are the most important and inclusive work ever published on Thackeray,’and a first-rate editing job. Three-fifths of the letters have never before been published. They range from Thackeray, aged 6 (“My dear Mama I hope you are quite well: I have given my dear Grandmama a kiss”), to Novelist Thackeray, 40, famed and love-sick (“My dearest Mammy … the griefs of my elderly heart can’t be talked about. . . . What can any body do for me?”). Editor Ray has also included enlightening extracts from Thackeray’s private diaries and account-books, scores of his sketches, brief biographies of his chief correspondents, explanatory footnotes—in short, practically everything that could be helpful to the general reader and valuable to the scholar.

Wine Parties & Cards. The letters in these volumes cover Thackeray’s life (he was born in Calcutta, 1811) from 1817 to 1851. The earlier letters, written chiefly to his mother, light up his undergraduate days from 1829 when he primly entered Cambridge University (“The wine par ties are miserably stupid things. . . .”) until 1830, when he abruptly left (“I begin to get into the knack of the wine parties. . . .”). He had gambled away a large part of the £20,000 his father had left him. (“I am twenty years old . . .” he mourned, “& [my life is] a melancholy succession of idleness & dis sipation.”) Also illuminated are Thackeray’s passion for lovely Melanie von Spiegel, maid of honor at the court of Weimar, his Paris art-student days, his rise to fame as a novelist and Punch writer and caricaturist, his uneasy relations with his fellow liter ary lion, Charles Dickens (Dickens thought Thackeray cynical and insincere; Thackeray thought Dickens sincere but vulgar), and the two high points in Thack eray’s love life.

“Brother” & “Sister.” One was his marriage with Isabella Shawe, whom he charged with “coldness” but who bore him three children in less than three years.

Then she tried to drown herself, was rescued, went insane, lived on in a state of amiable withdrawal from life for 53 years. Thackeray would not divorce her but he sought distraction by “falling in love with twenty women at a time,” and dining out in society. (“I wallow in turtle [soup] and swim in claret.”) He also sought distraction in the com pany of the wife of his old college chum, the Rev. William Brookfield. To this “dear lady” he poured out his heart in outbursts of unpremeditated ardor which he signed “your brother.” Jane Brookfield signed herself “your sister.” Later, when in need of money, Jane erased the more indiscreet lines from Thackeray’s love notes and sold them to a publisher. Says Editor Ray: “It is impossible, indeed, to overlook a rather repellent element of calculation in her character. . . .”

Eventually the relationship reached a point where Parson Brookfield recognized Thackeray’s special rights to Jane’s affections. For five years the compliant clergyman turned the other cheek. But whether the lover’s passion ever became more than epistolary, these letters do not reveal. The strange Victorian arrangement blew up one day when Thackeray charged his “dear lady’s” husband with “outrageous” behavior toward Jane. As usual the novelist confided in his mother:

“… I go about and grin from party to party & dinner to dinner, and work a good deal and put a tolerably good face upon things, [but] I have a natural hang dog melancholy within.” It was no longer much of a compensation to be able to say: “I am become a sort of great man in my way.”