THE CHARTERHOUSE. FROM THE SQUARE.
“It was not till late in the autumn that we came to live with my father in Kensington,” writes Lady Ritchie, in one of her delightful prefaces to the Centenary Edition of Thackeray’s works. “We had been at Paris with our grandparents—while he was at work in London. It was a dark, wintry evening. The fires were lighted, the servants were engaged, Eliza—what family would be complete without its Eliza?—was in waiting to show us our rooms. He was away; he had not expected us so early. We saw the drawing-room, the empty study; there was the feeling of London—London smelt of tobacco, we thought; we stared out through the uncurtained windows at the dark garden behind; and then, climbing the stairs, we looked in at his bedroom door, and came to our own rooms above it.... Once more, after his first happy married years, my father had a home and a family—if a house, two young children, three servants, and a little black cat can be called a family. My grandmother, who had brought us over to England, returned to her husband in Paris; but her mother, an old lady wrapped in Indian shawls, presently came to live with us, and divided her time between Kensington and the Champs Elysees until 1848, when she died at Paris.”
Thackeray’s first name for Vanity Fair was Pencil Sketches of English Society. He offered the opening chapters of it under that title to Colburn for his New Monthly Magazine. Thereafter he seems to have reshaped the novel and renamed it, and even then had difficulty to find a publisher. At length, Messrs. Bradbury & Evans accepted it, and it was arranged that it should be published after the manner that Dickens had already rendered popular—in monthly parts; and the first part duly appeared on the 1st January 1847, in the familiar yellow wrappers that served to distinguish Thackeray’s serials from the green-covered serials of Dickens. But the sales of the first half-dozen numbers were by no means satisfactory.
“I still remember,” writes Lady Ritchie, “going along Kensington Gardens with my sister and our nursemaid, carrying a parcel of yellow numbers which had been given us to take to some friend who lived across the Park; and as we walked along, somewhere near the gates of the gardens we met my father, who asked us what we were carrying. Then somehow he seemed vexed and troubled, told us not to go on, and to take the parcel home. Then he changed his mind, saying that if his grandmother wished it, the books had best be conveyed; but we guessed, as children do, that something was seriously amiss. The sale of Vanity Fair was so small that it was a question at the time whether its publication should not be discontinued altogether.”
THACKERAY’S HOUSE. KENSINGTON.
At that critical juncture he published Mrs. Perkins’s Ball, which caught on at once, and this and a favourable review in the Edinburgh are supposed to have sent the public after the novel, for the sales of Vanity Fair rapidly increased, and the monthly numbers were soon selling briskly enough to satisfy even the publishers, and so in his thirty-seventh year Thackeray found himself famous. James Hannay first saw him when the book was still unfinished but its success assured. He says that Thackeray pointed out to him the house in Russell Square “where the imaginary Sedleys lived,” and that when he congratulated him on that scene in Vanity Fair in which Becky Sharp cannot help feeling proud of her husband whilst he is giving Lord Steyne the thrashing that must ruin all her own chances, Thackeray answered frankly, “Well, when I wrote that sentence I slapped my fist on the table and said, ‘That is a touch of genius!’” Which reminds one of the story told by Ticknor Fields of how, when he was making a pilgrimage around London with Thackeray in later years, and they paused outside 16 Young Street, which was no longer his home, the novelist cried with a melodramatic gesture, “Go down on your knees, you rogue, for here Vanity Fair was penned, and I will go down with you, for I have a high opinion of that little production myself!”