NO. 13 (now 16), YOUNG STREET, KENSINGTON
Thackeray’s home from 1846 to 1853, where “Vanity Fair,” “Pendennis,” and “Esmond” were written
“I don’t control my characters,” he asserted one day. “I am in their hands, and they take me where they please.” And when a friend remonstrated with him for having made Esmond marry “his mother-in-law,” he only replied: “I didn’t make him do it; they did it themselves.” It may be because the characters were so real to the creator that they live in the memory of the reader. If Thackeray was the first to shed tears over the death of Helen, certainly he has not been the last. Who can read with dry eyes of the reconciliation of mother and son at the death-bed? “As they were talking the clock struck nine, and Helen reminded him how, when he was a little boy, she used to go up to his bed-room at that hour and hear him say Our Father. And once more, oh once more, the young man fell down at his mother’s sacred knees, and sobbed out the prayer which the Divine Tenderness uttered for us, and which has been echoed for twenty ages since by millions of sinful and humble men. And as he spoke the last words of the supplication, the mother’s head fell down on her boy’s, and her arms closed around him, and together they repeated the words ‘for ever and ever’ and ‘Amen.’”
NO. 36 ONSLOW SQUARE, BROMPTON
Where Thackeray lived from 1853 to 1862, during which period he wrote the “Lectures on the Georges,” the end of “The Newcomes,” “The Virginians,” part of “Philip,” and many of the “Roundabout Papers.”
Readers of Thackeray’s works must have noticed how frequently the characters reappear in tales other than that in which they are first introduced. Reference is made to them and to their doings in book after book, until we feel that we know them personally. Thackeray loved to reintroduce his old friends, and it was his intention—frustrated by an all too early death to write a novel of the times of Henry V., in which the ancestors of his Pendennises and Warringtons should have foregathered. A long and fascinating article might be written tracing the subsequent careers of the characters from the glances we obtain of them at odd moments.
How many novelists are there who have such a gallery of characters as can be collected from Thackeray’s books? What admirable realism! What marvellous insight into the natures of men and women!