The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family

by William Makepeace Thackeray

“I hear baby crying,” says Laura. Oh, Laura, Laura! how could you tell your husband such a fib?—and she quits the room without deigning to give any answer to that “Why?”

Let us pay a brief visit to Newcome in the north of England, and there we may get some answer to the question of which Mr. Pendennis had just in vain asked a reply from his wife. My design does not include a description of that great and flourishing town of Newcome, and of the manufactures which caused its prosperity; but only admits of the introduction of those Newcomites who are concerned in the affairs of the family which has given its respectable name to these volumes.

Thus in previous pages we have said nothing about the Mayor and Corporation of Newcome the magnificent bankers and manufacturers who had their places of business in the town, and their splendid villas outside its smoky precincts; people who would give their thousand guineas for a picture or a statue, and write you off a cheque for ten times the amount any day; people who, if there was a talk of a statue to the Queen or the Duke, would come down to the Town All and subscribe their one, two, three undred apiece (especially if in the neighbouring city of SLOWCOME they were putting up a statue to the Duke or the Queen)—not of such men have I spoken, the magnates of the place; but of the humble Sarah Mason in Jubilee Row—of the Reverend Dr. Bulders the Vicar, Mr. Vidler the apothecary, Mr. Puff the baker—of Tom Potts, the jolly reporter of the Newcome Independent, and —— Batters, Esq., the proprietor of that journal—persons with whom our friends have had already, or will be found presently to have, some connexion. And it is from these that we shall arrive at some particulars regarding the Newcome family, which will show us that they have a skeleton or two in their closets, as well as their neighbours.

Now, how will you have the story? Worthy mammas of families—if you do not like to have your daughters told that bad husbands will make bad wives; that marriages begun in indifference make homes unhappy; that men whom girls are brought to swear to love and honour are sometimes false, selfish, and cruel; and that women forget the oaths which they have been made to swear—if you will not hear of this, ladies, close the book, and send for some other. Banish the newspaper out of your houses, and shut your eyes to the truth, the awful truth, of life and sin. Is the world made of Jennies and Jessamies; and passion the play of schoolboys and schoolgirls, scribbling valentines and interchanging lollipops? Is life all over when Jenny and Jessamy are married; and are there no subsequent trials, griefs, wars, bitter heart-pangs, dreadful temptations, defeats, remorses, sufferings to bear, and dangers to overcome? As you and I, friend, kneel with our children round about us, prostrate before the Father of us all, and asking mercy for miserable sinners, are the young ones to suppose the words are mere form, and don’t apply to us?—to some outcasts in the free seats probably, or those naughty boys playing in the churchyard? Are they not to know that we err too, and pray with all our hearts to be rescued from temptation? If such a knowledge is wrong for them, send them to church apart. Go you and worship in private; or if not too proud, kneel humbly in the midst of them, owning your wrong, and praying Heaven to be merciful to you a sinner.

When Barnes Newcome became the reigning Prince of the Newcome family, and after the first agonies of grief for his father’s death had subsided, he made strong attempts to conciliate the principal persons in the neighbourhood, and to render himself popular in the borough. He gave handsome entertainments to the townsfolk and to the county gentry; he tried even to bring those two warring classes together. He endeavoured to be civil to the Newcome Independent, the Opposition paper, as well as to the Newcome Sentinel that true old Uncompromising Blue. He asked the Dissenting clergyman to dinner, and the Low Church clergyman, as well as the orthodox Doctor Bulders and his curates. He gave a lecture at the Newcome Athenæum, which everybody said was very amusing, and which Sentinel and Independent both agreed in praising. Of course he subscribed to that statue which the Newcomites were raising; to the philanthropic missions which Reverend Low Church gentlemen were engaged in; to the races (for the young Newcomite manufacturers are as sporting as any gents in the North), to the hospital, the People’s Library, the restoration of the rood-screen and the great painted window in Newcome Old Church (Rev. J. Bulders), and he had to pay in fine a most awful price for his privilege of sitting in Parliament as representative of his native place—as he called it in his speeches “the cradle of his forefathers, the home of his race,” etc., though Barnes was in fact born at Clapham.

Lady Clara could not in the least help this young statesman in his designs upon Newcome and the Newcomites. After she came into Barnes’s hands, a dreadful weight fell upon her. She would smile and simper, and talk kindly and gaily enough at first, during Sir Brian’s life; and among women, when Barnes was not present. But as soon as he joined the company, it was remarked that his wife became silent, and looked eagerly towards him whenever he ventured to speak. She blundered, her eyes filled with tears; the little wit she had left her in her husband’s presence: he grew angry, and tried to hide his anger with a sneer, or broke out with gibe and an oath, when he lost patience, and Clara, whimpering, would leave the room. Everybody at Newcome knew that Barnes bullied his wife.

People had worse charges against Barnes than wife-bullying. Do you suppose that little interruption which occurred at Barnes’s marriage was not known in Newcome? His victim had been a Newcome girl, the man to whom she was betrothed was in a Newcome factory. When Barnes was a young man, and in his occasional visits to Newcome, lived along with those dashing young blades Sam Jollyman (Jollyman Brothers and Bowcher), Bob Homer, Cross Country Bill, Al Rackner (for whom his father had to pay eighteen thousand pounds after the Leger, the year Toggery won it) and that wild lot, all sorts of stories were told of them, and of Barnes especially. Most of them were settled, and steady business men by this time. Al, it was known had become very serious, besides making his fortune in cotton. Bob Homer managed the Bank; and as for S. Jollyman, Mrs. S. J. took uncommon good care that he didn’t break out of bounds any more; why, he was not even allowed to play a game at billiards; or to dine out without her——I could go on giving you interesting particulars of a hundred members of the Newcome aristocracy, were not our attention especially directed to one respectable family.

All Barnes’s endeavours at popularity were vain, partly from his own fault, and partly from the nature of mankind, and of the Newcome folks especially, whom no single person could possibly conciliate. Thus, suppose he gave the advertisements to the Independent; the old Blue paper the Sentinel was very angry: suppose he asked Mr. Hunch, the Dissenting minister, to bless the tablecloth after dinner, as he had begged Dr. Bulders to utter a benediction on the first course, Hunch and Bulders were both angry. He subscribed to the races—what heathenism! to the missionaries—what sanctimonious humbug! And the worst was that Barnes being young at that time, and not able to keep his tongue in order, could not help saying not to but of such and such a man, that he was an infernal ass, or a confounded old idiot, and so forth—peevish phrases, which undid in a moment the work of a dozen dinners, countless compliments, and months of grinning good-humour.

Now he is wiser. He is very proud of being Newcome of Newcome, and quite believes that the place is his hereditary principality. But still, he says, his father was a fool for ever representing the borough. “Dammy, sir,” cries Sir Barnes, “never sit for a place that lies at your park-gates, and above all never try to conciliate ’em. Curse ’em! Hate ’em well, sir! Take a line, and flog the fellows on the other side. Since I have sate in Parliament for another place, I have saved myself I don’t know how much a year. I never go to High Church or Low; don’t give a shillin’ to the confounded races, or the infernal souptickets, or to the miserable missionaries; and at last live in quiet.”

So, in spite of all his subscriptions, and his coaxing of the various orders of Newcomites, Sir Barnes Newcome was not popular among them; and while he had enemies on all sides, had sturdy friends not even on his own. Scarce a man but felt Barnes was laughing at him; Bulders in his pulpit, Holder who seconded him in his election, the Newcome society; and the ladies, even more than the men, were uneasy under his ominous familiarity, and recovered their good-humour when he left them. People felt as if it was a truce only, and not an alliance with him, and always speculated on the possibility of war: when he turned his back on them in the market, men felt relieved, and, as they passed his gate, looked with no friendly glances over his park-wall.