Читать книгу The Times Great Victorian Lives - Ian Brunskill - Страница 14

MR. THACKERAY was found dead in his bed on Thursday morning. Sudden as the loss of Peel, or of Talfourd, or of Lord Macaulay, whose death saddened the Christmas holydays three years ago, – sudden, also, as other recent deaths of able men who laboured worthily in the world’s eye, but whose calling did not bring them so near as that of a foremost novelist to the world’s heart, has been this new cause of public grief. For a few days past Mr. Thackeray had been slightly unwell, yet he was about among his friends, and he was out even on Wednesday evening. But when called at about 9 o’clock on Thursday morning he was found dead in his bed, with placid face, having apparently died without suffering pain. Mr. Thackeray’s age was but 52, and he seemed a man large, vigorous, cheerful, with yet a quarter of a century of life in him. There were some parts of his character that never felt the touch of his years, and these were tenderly remembered yesterday at many a Christmas fireside. There was to the last in him the sensibility of a child’s generous heart that time had not sheathed against light touches of pleasure and pain. His sympathy was prompt and keen, but the same quick feeling made him also over sensitive to the small annoyances that men usually learn to take for granted as but one form of the friction that belongs to movements of all kinds. He was sensitive to his sensitiveness, and did in his writings what thousands of men do in their lives, shrouded an over tender heart in a transparent veil of cynicism. Often he seemed to his readers to be trifling or nervously obtruding himself into his story when he was but shrinking from the fell discovery of his own simple intensity of feeling. In his most polished works, Vanity Fair, Esmond, or the Newcomes – in which last book the affected cynicism, that, after all, could not strike deeper than into the mere surface of things, is set aside, and more nearly than in any other of his works discharge is made of the whole true mind of William Makepeace Thackeray – in these his masterpieces there is nothing better, nothing more absolutely genuine and perfect in its way than the pure spirit of frolic in some of his comic rhymes. He could play with his ‘Pleaseman X,’ very much as a happy child plays with a toy; and how freely and delightfully the strength of his wit flowed into the child’s pantomime tale of the Rose and the Ring. It is not now the time for taking exact measure of the genius of the true writer we have lost. What sort of hold it took upon the English mind and heart his countrymen knew by the sad and gentle words that yesterday connected the sense of his loss in almost every household with the great English festival of lovingkindness. There are men who, appealing to widely spread forms of ignorance or prejudice, have more readers than Mr. Thackeray, and yet the loss of one of these writers on the eve of Christmas would have struck home nowhere beyond the private circle of his friends. Whatever the extent or limit of his genius, Mr. Thackeray found the way to the great generous English heart. And the chief secret of his power was the simple strength of sympathy within him, that he might flinch from expressing fully but that was none the less the very soul of his successful work. Quickly impressible, his mind was raw to a rough touch; but the same quality gave all the force of its truth to his writing, all the lively graces to his style. That part of him which was the mere blind he put up at the inconveniently large window in his breast, degenerated into formula; and there were some who might be pardoned for becoming weary at the repetition of old patterns of sarcasm at the skin-deep vanities of life. But the eye was a dull one that could not look through this muslin work into a mind that so to speak, was always keeping Christmas, although half ashamed to be known at the clubs as guilty of so much indulgence in the luxuries of kindly fellowship, and so continual an enjoyment of the purest side of life. Whatever little feuds may have gathered about Mr. Thackeray’s public life lay lightly on the surface of the minds that chanced to be in contest with him. They could be thrown off in a moment, at the first shock of the news that he was dead. In the course of his active career there are few of his literary brethren with whom he has not been brought into contact. At one time he was a fellow-worker with us in this journal. He worked much and variously; many and various also were his friends. To some of the worthiest in the land he was joined in friendship that had endured throughout the lifetime of a generation, and there are very humble rooms in London where there were tears yesterday for him whose left hand did not know what his right hand had done in silent charity.—Examiner

Thackeray was found dead on Christmas Eve morning in 1863 at the house he had built for himself at Palace Green in Kensington. The obituary reflects both the admiration and affection in which he was held by his contemporaries, but it makes no mention of his education, his early struggles to make a name for himself in the literary world and, above all, of his difficult private circumstances. In 1836, by which time he had squandered most of his inheritance, he married Isabella Shawe who was to bear him three daughters (two of whom survived into adulthood). In 1840, after an attempted suicide, Isabella was diagnosed as incurably insane and was confined to a private mental asylum. She was not to die until 1894. Charlotte Brontë, who was ignorant of Isabella’s condition, had caused some real embarrassment to Thackeray when she dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him in January 1848. There was idle speculation concerning a supposed connection between the character of Mr. Rochester and Thackeray himself.