“My object is not to make a perfect character of anything like it,” he wrote to his mother when “Vanity Fair” was appearing in monthly parts. “Our friend is not Amadis or Sir Charles Grandison,” he wrote of Philip Firmin, “and I don’t for a moment set him up as a person to be revered or imitated, but try to draw him faithfully as Nature made him.”
The late Anthony Trollope stigmatised Thackeray as an unmethodical writer. Certainly the great man, as author, bound himself by no hard and fast rules. His plan was to create mentally two or three of his chief characters and write from page to page, with only a general notion of the course he would be taking a few chapters later. But then to compensate for the lack of method he lived with his characters, shared their joys and sorrows, and spoke of them as if they were real creatures of flesh and blood. “Being entirely occupied with my two new friends, Mrs. Pendennis and
THE STRANGERS’ ROOM, REFORM CLUB
Showing the portrait of Thackeray by Samuel Laurence, and busts of Sir William Molesworth and Charles Buller
(Reproduced by kind permission of the Committee of the Reform Club)
her son Arthur Pendennis,” he wrote to Mrs. Brookfield from Brighton in 1849, “I got up very early again this morning. He is a very good-natured, generous young fellow, and I begin to like him considerably. I wonder if he is interesting to me from selfish reasons, and because I fancy we resemble each other in many parts.” “I wonder what will happen to Pendennis and Fanny Bolton,” he remarked in another letter to the same correspondent; “writing and sending it to you, somehow it seems as if it were true.” Mrs. Ritchie remembers entering her father’s study one morning about two years later and being motioned away, and how, an hour later, he went to the school-room and, half-laughing, half-ashamed, said: “I do not know what James can have thought of me when he came in with the tax-gatherer after you left, and found me blubbering over Helen Pendennis’s death.”