Harvard Classics Volume 28 / Essays English and American

William Makepeace Thackeray, one of the greatest of English novelists, was born at Calcutta, India, on July 18, 1811, where his father held an administrative position. He was sent to England at six for his education, which he received at the Charterhouse and Cambridge, after which he began, but did not prosecute, the study of law. Having lost his means, in part by gambling, he made up his mind to earn his living as an artist, and went to Paris to study. He had some natural gift for drawing, which he had already employed in caricature, but, though he made interesting and amusing illustrations for his books, he never acquired any marked technical skill.
He now turned to literature, and, on the strength of an appointment as Paris correspondent of a short-lived radical newspaper, he married. On the failure of the newspaper he took to miscellaneous journalism and the reviewing of books and pictures, his most important work appearing in Fraser's Magazine and Punch. In 1840 his wife's mind became clouded, and, though she never recovered, she lived on till 1894.
Success came to Thackeray very slowly. Catherine, The Great Hoggarty Diamond, Barry Lyndon, and several volumes of travel had failed to gain much attention before the Snob Papers, issued in Punch in 1846, brought him fame. In the January of the next year Vanity Fair began to appear in monthly numbers, and by the time it was finished Thackeray had taken his place in the front rank of his profession. Pendennis followed in 1850, and sustained the prestige he had won.
The next year he began lecturing, and delivered in London the lectures on the English Humourists, which he repeated the following winter in America with much success. Esmond had appeared on the eve of his setting sail, and revealed his style at its highest point of perfection, and a tenderer if less powerful touch than Vanity Fair had displayed. In 1855 The Newcomes appeared, and was followed by a second trip to America, when he lectured on the Four Georges. After an unsuccessful attempt to enter Parliament, the novelist resumed his writing with The Virginians (1857-59), in which he availed himself of his American experiences.