V
I must dwell on another point, too. The Thackerays (or Thackwras—which I suppose to be another form of Dockwras) had for some generations prospered and multiplied as Anglo-Indians in the service of the old East India Company. Their tombs are thick in the old graveyard of Calcutta, and I would refer anyone who would ponder their epitaphs, or is interested in the stock from which Thackeray sprang, to a little book by the late Sir William Hunter entitled The Thackerays in India and some Calcutta Graves (Henry Frowde, London: 1897). Thackeray himself was born at Calcutta on the 18th of July, 1811, and, according to the sad fate of Anglo-Indian children, was shipped home to England at the age of five, just as Clive Newcome is shipped home in the novel; and when he pictured the sad figure of Colonel Newcome tottering back up the ghaut, or river-stairs, Thackeray drew what his own boyish eyes had seen and his small heart suffered. Turn to the “Roundabout Paper” On Letts’s Diary and you will read concerning that parting:
I wrote this, remembering in long, long distant days, such a ghaut, or river-stair, at Calcutta, and a day when down those steps, to a boat which was in waiting, came two children, whose mothers remained on the shore. One of those ladies was never to see her boy more.... We were first cousins; had been little playmates and friends from the time of our birth; and the first house in London to which I was taken was that of our aunt, the mother of his Honour the Member of Council.
This young cousin and playmate returned in time, as Thackeray never did, to the shore they were leaving; and died Sir Richmond Shakespeare (no vile nomen!), Agent to the Governor-General for Central India. The news of his death gave occasion to the tender little essay from which I have been quoting.
On the passage their ship touched at St. Helena, and their black servant took them a long walk over rocks and hills “until we reached a garden, where we saw a man walking. ‘That’s he,’ said the black man: ‘that is Bonaparte! He eats three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands upon.’”—After which terrible vision no doubt the youngsters resumed their Odyssey—as Homer would put it—
ἀκαχήμενοι ἦτορ,
ἄσμενοι ἐκ θανάτοιο.
“Stricken at heart yet rejoicing to have escaped perdition.” They reached London to find it plunged in mourning (and, for many reasons, in very genuine mourning) by the death of the Princess Charlotte: and young Thackeray proceeded to Chiswick, to the charge and care of his aunt Mrs. Ritchie. One day she caught the child trying on his uncle’s large hat, and, finding to her alarm that it accurately fitted him, swept him off to the fashionable physician, Sir Charles Clark: “Reassure yourself, madam,” the doctor is reported as saying: “he has, to be sure, an abnormal head; but I think there’s something in it.” He was put to school first at a young gentlemen’s academy at Chiswick, maybe next door to Miss Pinkerton’s Seminary for Young Ladies through the portals of which (if you remember, and into the garden) Miss Rebecca Sharp hurled back her “leaving copy” of Dr. Johnson’s “Dixonary.” The master would seem to have been a Dr. Swishtail, compounded of negligence and tyranny, as so many “private schoolmasters” chose to be even to days of my own experience. But here is the child’s first letter, dated February 18, 1818, to his mother in India and composed in a round hand between ruled lines:
My dear Mama—I hope you are quite well. I have given my dear Grandmama a kiss. My aunt Ritchie is very good to me. I like Chiswick, there are so many good boys to play with. St. James’s Park is a very nice place. St. Paul’s Church, too, I like very much. It is a finer place than I expected. I hope Captain Smyth is well: Give my love to him and tell him he must bring you home to your affectionate little son.
William Thackeray.
The separating sea was wide: but what a plucky little letter!