In the course of time—we believe in his twelfth year—Thackeray was sent to the Charterhouse School, and remained there as a boarder in the house of Mr. Penny. He appears in the Charterhouse records for the year 1822 as a boy on the tenth form. In the next year we find him promoted to the seventh form; in 1824 to the fifth; and in 1828, when he had become a day-boy, or one residing with his friends, we find him in the honourable positions of a first-form boy and one of the monitors of the school. He was, however, never chosen as one of the orators, or those who speak the oration on the Founder's Day, nor does he appear among the writers of the Charterhouse odes, which have been collected and printed from time to time in a small volume. We need feel no surprise that Thackeray's ambition did not lead him to seek this sort of distinction; like most keen humorists, he preferred exercising his powers of satire in burlesquing these somewhat trite compositions to contributing seriously to swell their numbers. Prize poems ever yielded the novelist a delightful field for his sarcasms.
Early efforts at Drawing
While pursuing his studies at 'Smiffle,' as the Carthusians were pleased to style 'Greyfriars,' Thackeray gave abundant evidences of the gifts that were in him. He scribbled juvenile verses, towards the close of his school days, displaying taste for the healthy sarcasm which afterwards became one of his distinctive qualities, at the expense of the prosaic compositions set down as school verses. In one of his class books, 'Thucydides,' with his autograph, 'Charter House, 1827,' are scribbled two verses in which the tender passion is treated somewhat realistically:—
Love 's like a mutton chop,
Soon it grows cold;
All its attractions hop
Ere it grows old.
Love 's like the cholic sure,
Both painful to endure;