Thackeray's London: a description of his haunts and the scenes of his novels

by William H. Rideing

By William Henry Rideing.

LONDON:

S. AND J. BRAWN, PRINTERS, 13, GATE STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS

The portrait is engraved from the large etching by G. B. Smith in “ENGLISH ETCHINGS,” by kind permission of the proprietor.

We also have to acknowledge, with thanks, permission from Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., to introduce the various excerpts from Thackeray’s Works found in the following pages.

THE PUBLISHERS.

I.

Thackeray does not give the same opportunities for the identification of his scenes as Dickens. The elaboration with which the latter localizes his characters, and the descriptive minutiæ with which he makes their haunts no less memorable than themselves, are not to be found in the works of the author of Vanity Fair. No faculty was stronger in Dickens, or of more service to him, than his power of word-painting. He reproduces the objects by which the persons he describes are surrounded with a fidelity which would be tedious, if it were not relieved by the humor which humanizes bricks, and imparts a grotesque sort of sensibility to articles of furniture; and it is not easy to think of any of his leading characters without being reminded of the neighborhoods in which they played their parts.

Thackeray, on the contrary, is not topographical. The briefest mention of a street suffices with him, and it is the character, not the locality, which has permanence in the reader’s mind. Every feature of Becky Sharp is remembered with a vividness which disassociates her with fiction; but the situation of the little house in which the unfortunate Rawdon finally discovers her duplicity, in the famous scene with the Marquis of Steyne, escapes the memory. When the book is no longer fresh to him, the reader may recollect that after her marriage she went to live in Mayfair, and may picture to himself a small, fashionable dwelling in that aristocratic neighbourhood; but he cannot remember that the author places it in Curzon street, nor that the Sedleys lived in Russell Square, Philip in Old Parr street, and Colonel Newcome in Fitzroy Square.

We have one example in Thackeray of the grotesquely humorous descriptive power of which Dickens was a master. It hits at the absurd nomenclature of modern London suburbs, where every box of a house has some high-sounding name of the sort which ornaments the fiction of the “Chambermaid’s Companion,” and it describes the neighbourhood into which the Sedleys moved after their failure—“St. Adelaide Villa, Anna Maria Road, West, where the houses look like baby houses; where the people looking out of the first floor windows must infallibly, as you think, sit with their feet in the parlors below; where the shrubs in the little gardens in front bloom with a perennial display of little children’s pinafores, little red socks, caps, etc. (polyandria polygenia); whence you hear the sound of jingling spinets and women singing; and whither, of an evening, you see city clerks plodding wearily.”