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!
VI
I shall lay stress on it for a moment because, as it seems to me, if we read between the childish lines, they not only evince the pluck of the child, and not only breathe a waft of the infinite pathos of English children, Indian born: but because I hold that no one who would understand Thackeray can afford to forget that he was of Anglo-Indian stock, bone and marrow.
Now I want, avoiding so much of offence as I may, to say a word or two (and these only as a groping through private experience, to illustrate Thackeray) about the retired Anglo-Indian as he has come within the range of a long experience at an English town by the seashore. On the whole I know of no human being more typically pathetic. His retirement may be happier in some places such as Cheltenham, where he has a Club in which he can meet old Indian cronies or men from “the other side,” and tell stories and discuss the only politics which interest them. But in any odd angle of this capital yet most insular isle his isolation is horrible and fatal. Compared with it, the sorrows of a British child “sent home” (as conveyed, and to the very heart, in Mr. Kipling’s Wee Willie Winkie, for example) are tragically insignificant. Youth is elastic and can recover. But this grown man, through the “long, long Indian days,” has toiled and supported himself upon a hope, to end in England with fishing or shooting and a share of that happy hospitality which (God knows) he has earned.