Thackeray: Amazon.co.uk: D.J. Taylor: Books

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Amazon.co.uk Review
It could be argued that the best biographies are written by novelists: Ackroyd's Dickens would be the classic example. Taylor is a deft if underrated novelist (his Trespass is particularly absorbing), who has also written a number of good critical studies of the contemporary novel. Tackling a topic as major as Thackeray is a bold move and one that takes him out of his usual arena. But he pulls it off with spectacular aplomb; it is hard to see how this could have been done better.

Everything about this book is just right: from the Thackerayan illustrated initial letters that decorate each chapter opening, to the fluid intelligent tone, and the broad grasp of subject. Taylor points out that, from a biographer's point of view, Thackeray presents an "elusive, or even protean" character; a function of the vigorous compartmentalisation that he undertook in his life.

However, Taylor provides a convincing a sense of him. His wife confined to an insane asylum, he fell in love with Jane Brookfield, the wife of a friend; a passion which lasted throughout his life, which cost him his friendship and which brought him a great deal of melancholy as well as joy. Taylor is particularly touching in the latter part of his biography, sketching in this unfulfilled love affair.

His accounts of the novels are good too; and he pauses at moments in the chronological flow to ponder questions such as "Why Thackeray Matters?" The greatest praise of this fine biography is that you come away in no doubt that Thackeray matters a great deal. --Adam Roberts

Review
"Brilliant...the most enjoyable and skillful biography I have read this year." --A.N. Wilson, "Literary Review"

"Outstanding...a formidable critical and imaginative intelligence at work." --Frank McLynn, "Evening Standard"

"From the Trade Paperback edition."

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4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Boigraphy - but Thackeray remains an enigma!, 25 Oct 2001

By	Donal A. O'Neill - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thackeray (Paperback)

Even after reading this very competent and entertaining biography Thackeray remains an enigma. He wrote one novel, Vanity Fair, which ranks with the greatest in English and another, Esmond, can be argued as the finest and most convincing historical novel in the language. Pendennis and The Newcomes are still enjoyable today and Barry Lyndon has a cynical realism that makes it a more chilling work than the elegiac cinematic masterpiece that Stanley Kubrick made from it. Yet much of the remainder of his work is tedious to the modern reader (this reviewer must be one of the few to have read The Virginians cover to cover and has no desire to repeat the experience). As this biography details so clearly, Thackeray regarded writing as necessary drudgery for much of his career and never ceased to look for alternative sources of income. Today this shows through in his work to an extent that may not have been obvious to his contemporaries, who read much of it in the form of magazine contributions and monthly parts. The inevitable comparison, today as in his lifetime, is with Dickens and the difference is primarily one of character. Thackeray, for all his mildly satirical stance, remained a man uncritical of, even content with, the world he lived in, incapable of feeling the indignation with which Dickens viewed social abuses, even if he seldom proposed concrete solutions for them. At its best this tolerance of things as they were led to Thackeray's greatest gift - his ability to portray real and credible characters, often flawed and weak at the same time as they are well-meaning, loveable and fundamentally decent. It also means however that his work is largely devoid of any larger message and that it so rooted in his time and culture that much of it loses universal appeal. This theme of essentially uncritical acceptance of his society - and to a great extent also of others such as the Western Europe and United States of his time (the latter on the brink of the Civil War) - is perhaps linked to the somewhat brutishly sybaritic attitude which is a disturbing theme through the biography. Thackeray's contemptuous attitude the prostitutes he consorted with in his early life, and perhaps later, and his acceptance of women and slaves as beings to be used and patronised, strikes a very unpleasant note, even allowing for the standards of his time. This also as echoes in his slow disengagement from his insane wife. Reading the American-tours section of this biography sent me back, for comparison purposes, to Dickens' "American Notes". The contrast between Dickens' honest indignation at the realities of Slavery is in stark comparison to Thackeray's half-tolerance, half-disgust, whole disengagement when coming in direct contact with the institution.

Thackeray himself lamented that the cultural mores of his age prevented a fictional hero being presented with the honesty with which Fielding portrayed Tom Jones. This is borne out not only by his treatment of Pendennis, but by the obscurity with which he seems to have cloaked so many of his own comings and goings. Beyond the farcical platonic affairs he conducted with a married Englishwoman and with a young New York socialite in his later life, it is difficult in the extreme to know what was going on under the cover of extreme busyness. Thackeray was almost constantly on the move around Europe, when he wasn't similarly active in Britain and the United States, but one can only wonder what he actually did during his endless visits to France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. Comfortable they can't have been - the latter chapters make grim reading as his life was made miserable from complaints arising from earlier venereal infection. The overall impression, for all the friendships, literary and other, is of a sad and unfulfilled individual. The writer of this biography is to be complimented for bringing Thackeray so well to life, not just through the formal biographical sections, but via a few fictional vignettes in which third-party observers comment on Thackeray at various stages of his life. One in particular - of Thackeray and his mentally unstable wife as viewed by a French waiter - is poignant in the extreme, a small masterpiece in its own right.

(Shortly after penning the above, I stumbled on a tattered late-nineteenth century edition of a collection of Thackeray's marginal drawings in books he possessed in his lifetime. This was in a street market in Andover and I picked it up for 25p!. The volume is totally fascinating and wholly complementary to the Taylor biography. The most chilling detail however is a pen sketch, made in Paris in the early 1830's, of a young woman attired in male clothing for a ball. It corresponds with the description Thackeray gave of an English governess who had embraced the Bohemian life - and if Taylor's surmise is correct she may be the individual who infected him initially, to dreadful later effect. The coincidence of reading the biography and finding this volume so serendipitously was remarkable in the extreme)

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4.0 out of 5 stars A very readable biography. Highly recommended., 1 Aug 2001

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Even after reading this very competent and entertaining biography Thackeray remains an enigma. He wrote one novel, Vanity Fair, which ranks with the greatest in English and another, Esmond, can be argued as the finest and most convincing historical novel in the language. Pendennis and The Newcomes are still enjoyable today and Barry Lyndon has a cynical realism that makes it a more chilling work than the elegiac cinematic masterpiece that Stanley Kubrick made from it. Yet much of the remainder of his work is tedious to the modern reader (this reviewer must be one of the few to have read The Virginians cover to cover and has no desire to repeat the experience). As this biography details so clearly, Thackeray regarded writing as necessary drudgery for much of his career and never ceased to look for alternative sources of income. Today this shows through in his work to an extent that may not have been obvious to his contemporaries, who read much of it in the form of magazine contributions and monthly parts. The inevitable comparison, today as in his lifetime, is with Dickens and the difference is primarily one of character. Thackeray, for all his mildly satirical stance, remained a man uncritical of, even content with, the world he lived in, incapable of feeling the indignation with which Dickens viewed social abuses, even if he seldom proposed concrete solutions for them. At its best this tolerance of things as they were led to Thackeray's greatest gift - his ability to portray real and credible characters, often flawed and weak at the same time as they are well-meaning, loveable and fundamentally decent. It also means however that his work is largely devoid of any larger message and that it so rooted in his time and culture that much of it loses universal appeal. This theme of essentially uncritical acceptance of his society - and to a great extent also of others such as the Western Europe and United States of his time (the latter on the brink of the Civil War) - is perhaps linked to the somewhat brutishly sybaritic attitude which is a disturbing theme through the biography. Thackeray's contemptuous attitude the prostitutes he consorted with in his early life, and perhaps later, and his acceptance of women and slaves as beings to be used and patronised, strikes a very unpleasant note, even allowing for the standards of his time. This also as echoes in his slow disengagement from his insane wife. Thackeray himself lamented that the cultural mores of his age prevented a fictional hero being presented with the honesty with which Fielding portrayed Tom Jones. This is borne out not only by his treatment of Pendennis, but by the obscurity with which he seems to have cloaked so many of his own comings and goings. Beyond the farcical platonic affairs he conducted with a married Englishwoman and with a young New York socialite in his later life, it is difficult in the extreme to know what was going on under the cover of extreme busyness. Thackeray was almost constantly on the move around Europe, when he wasn't similarly active in Britain and the United States, but one can only wonder what he actually did during his endless visits to France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. Comfortable they can't have been - the latter chapters make grim reading as his life was made miserable from complaints arising from earlier venereal infection. The overall impression, for all the friendships, literary and other, is of a sad and unfulfilled individual. The writer of this biography is to be complimented for bringing Thackeray so well to life, not just through the formal biographical sections, but via a few fictional vignettes in which third-party observers comment on Thackeray at various stages of his life. One in particular - of Thackeray and his mentally unstable wife as viewed by a French waiter - is poignant in the extreme, a small masterpiece in its own right.

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