NO. 18, ALBION STREET, HYDE PARK
The residence of Thackeray’s mother, where the novelist lived for a time on his return from Paris in 1837
NO. 13, GREAT CORAM STREET, BRUNSWICK SQUARE
Thackeray’s residence from 1837 to 1840, where “The Paris Sketch-Book” was written
character of Major Pendennis, for instance, is simply a great lighthouse or beacon tower, not merely of social satire, but of eternal ethical philosophy. In Major Pendennis, consciously or unconsciously, is traced the valuable truth that almost every man is, by the nature of things, an idealist. To go to great houses, to wear the latest and yet the most dignified attire, to know the right people, to do and say at every instant the thing which is most perfectly and exquisitely ordinary, this is a principle of life against which a sane man might have a great deal to say; but one thing he could not say, he could not say that it is materialistic. One moral merit it has: at least it is totally useless. A place in Society is not something to drink; an invitation card from Lord Steyne is not something to eat. Poor old Pendennis did not sleep softer in his incomparable clothing; he was a poor man, lonely and constantly troubled. Nothing supported him but his own monstrous and insane religion. He was, as it were, a glorious heretic, a martyr to false gods; and nothing sadder or more honourable has ever been conceived in fiction than that scene in the end of “Pendennis,” in which the old man, having, with a valour and energy that stirs us like a cavalry charge, defeated all machinations that would have robbed his nephew of name and fame, suddenly finds the nephew himself ready to fling down the whole laborious edifice in the name of an unintelligible scruple. “And Shakespeare was right, and Cardinal Wolsey, begad. If I had served my God as I’ve served you——” It has the pathos of the meeting of two faiths; the good Moslem staring at the good Crusader.