Crawley was taken after the ball at Gaunt House. Among others, Pendennis and Warrington lived in the Temple; while Colonel Newcome and his son, Dr. Firmin and Philip, Pendennis, young Rawdon—to name a few—were educated at the Charterhouse. “The Newcomes” immortalised that public school, and earned for the author the well-deserved title of “Carthusianus Carthusianorum.” The clubs and Bohemian resorts of the day were introduced into the various stories: the visit of Colonel Newcome to the “Cave of Harmony” is not easily forgotten. In Mayfair was situated Gaunt House, and in Curzon Street, near by, Becky and Rawdon practised the art of living on nothing a year. It was in the Curzon Street house that Becky is made to admire her husband, when he gives Lord Steyne the chastisement that ruins her for life. “When I wrote that sentence,” Thackeray remarked subsequently, “I slapped my fist on the table and said, ‘That is a stroke of genius.’”
Lewis Melville.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
William Makepeace Thackeray
see frontispiece
Richmond Thackeray, Father of the Novelist
see page 3
Thackeray at the age of three, with his father and mother
see page 5
William Makepeace Thackeray, the only child of Richmond and Anne Thackeray, was born at Calcutta on July 18th, 1811. He was descended from Yorkshire yeomen who for several generations had been settled at Hampsthwaite, in the West Riding. In 1766 his grandfather, likewise named William Makepeace Thackeray, sailed for India at the age of seventeen, to enter the service of the East India Company. Under Cartier, the predecessor of Warren Hastings as Governor of Bengal, his promotion was very rapid. In 1776 he married Amelia Richmond, and the same year returned to England. His fourth son, Richmond Thackeray, father of the novelist, went to India in 1798 also in the service of the Company. In 1807 he became Secretary to the Board of Revenue at Calcutta, and undoubtedly possessed brilliant gifts for administration and public work. He married on October 13th, 1810, the reigning beauty of Calcutta, Anne, daughter of John Harman Becher. The painting by Chinnery, executed in 1814, gives a glimpse of the Thackerays at the time when their son had reached the age of three years. He is drawn perched on a large pile of books, with his arms round his mother’s neck, his father stiffly seated in a chair close by.