His letters of 1847 and the early half of 1848 are full of references to the strenuous toil with which he is writing his monthly instalments of Vanity Fair, and in one of them, to Edward Fitzgerald, he mentions that he is giving a party: “Mrs. Dickens and Miss Hogarth made me give it, and I am in a great fright.” Perhaps that was the famous party to which Charlotte Brontë, Carlyle and his wife, and other of his great contemporaries came, and things went wrong, and he became so uncomfortable that he fairly bolted from his guests, and went to spend the rest of the evening at the Garrick Club.
Pendennis was written at the Young Street house, and Thackeray put a good deal of himself into that hero of his. Pen had chambers at Lamb Building, in the Temple, and there is some likeness between his early journalistic experiences and Thackeray’s own. The opening chapters of Pendennis, though, were written at Spa. Thackeray had wanted to get away to some seaside place where he could set to work on his new book, and had asked his mother, who was going to Brighton, if she could not get a house for £60 that would have three spare rooms in it for him. “As for the dignity, I don’t believe it matters a pinch of snuff. Tom Carlyle lives in perfect dignity in a little £40 house at Chelsea, with a snuffy Scotch maid to open the door, and the best company in England ringing at it. It is only the second or third chop great folks who care about show.”
In Pendennis there is an allusion to Catherine Hayes, the dreadful heroine of Thackeray’s Catherine, that had been published a few years before, and a hot-tempered young Irishman, believing the reference was to Miss Catherine Hayes, the Irish vocalist, chivalrously came over to England, took lodgings opposite Thackeray’s house in Young Street, and sent him a warning letter that he was on the watch for him to come out of doors, and intended to administer public chastisement by way of avenging Miss Hayes’s injured honour. After getting through his morning’s work, Thackeray felt the position was intolerable, so he walked straightway out across the road, knocked at the opposite door, and boldly bearded the lion in his den. The young Irishman was disposed to bluster and be obstinate, but Thackeray explained matters, calmed him, convinced him that he had made a mistake, parted from him amicably, and had the satisfaction of seeing the young fire-eater come forth on his way back home that evening.
W. M. THACKERAY
Writing of Pendennis, Lady Ritchie says, “I can remember the morning Helen died. My father was in his study in Young Street, sitting at the table at which he wrote. It stood in the middle of the room, and he used to sit facing the door. I was going into the room, but he motioned me away. An hour afterwards he came into our schoolroom, half laughing and half ashamed, and said to us, ‘I do not know what James can have thought of me when he came in with the tax-gatherer just after you left and found me blubbering over Helen Pendennis’s death.’”
At Young Street, Thackeray wrote also his Lectures on the English Humorists, and having delivered them with gratifying success at Willis’s Rooms, he journeyed to America in 1852, and was even more successful with them there. Meanwhile, he had written Esmond, and it was published in three volumes just before he left England. “Thackeray I saw for ten minutes,” Fitzgerald wrote to Frederick Tennyson concerning a flying visit he had paid to London; “he was just in the agony of finishing a novel, which has arisen out of the reading necessary for his lectures, and relates to those times—of Queen Anne, I mean. He will get £1000 for his novel; he was wanting to finish it and rush off to the Continent to shake off the fumes of it.” His two daughters, both now in their teens, were sent out to join their grandparents before he sailed for the States, and in a letter to Anne (Lady Ritchie) he explains his motive in crossing the Atlantic: “I must and will go to America, not because I want to, but because it is right I should secure some money against my death for your poor mother and you two girls.”
There are several drawings made by Thackeray in those Young Street days of his daughters and himself, and one of his study at breakfast time, and here is a word-picture of the study given by Lady Ritchie in her preface to Esmond: “The vine shaded the two windows, which looked out upon the bit of garden and the medlar-tree, and the Spanish jasmines, of which the yellow flowers scented our old brick walls. I can remember the tortoise belonging to the boys next door crawling along the top of the wall where they had set it, and making its way between the jasmine sprigs.... Our garden was not tidy (though on one grand occasion a man came to mow the grass), but it was full of sweet things.... Lady Duff Gordon came to stay with us once (it was on that occasion that the grass was mowed), and she afterwards sent us some doves, which used to hang high up in a wicker cage from the windows of the schoolroom. The schoolroom was over my father’s bedroom, and his bedroom was over the study where he used to write, and they all looked to the garden and the sunsets.”
On his return from the American lecturing, in 1853, when he had already made a beginning of The Newcomes, he gave up the Young Street house and moved to 36 Onslow Square, South Kensington (or Brompton, as it was called at that period); and during the seven years of his residence there he finished The Newcomes, wrote The Four Georges, The Virginians, many of the Roundabout Papers, began the writing of Philip, and founded and entered upon his duties as editor of the Cornhill Magazine. The front room on the second floor was his study.
