Vol. 22 No. 2 · 20 January 2000
pages 35-36 | 3295 words
Wife Overboard
John Sutherland
- Thackeray by D.J. Taylor
Chatto, 494 pp, £25.00, October 1999, ISBN 0 7011 6231 7
All Thackeray biographers should feel a pang of guilt. Disgusted by Victorian whitewash memorials, he instructed his daughters: ‘Mind, no biography ... consider it my last testament and desire.’ He believed that biography – insofar as it presumed to explain another human being – was futile in any case. ‘Ah, sir,’ he observed (with that cynicism which so vexed his contemporaries), ‘a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine ... you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow islands a little more or less near to us.’ Above all, though, Thackeray was averse to having his skeletons rattled by any intruding hand. What were they? He contracted venereal disease at Cambridge, failed to get a degree, lost his patrimony gambling, married injudiciously a wife who went mad, fell in love with his best friend’s wife (probably unadulterously), got involved in a series of bad-tempered rows with Dickens and his bohemian hangers-on. Many authors’ cupboards contain worse.
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 4 · 17 February 2000
From D.J. Taylor
As a long-term admirer of John Sutherland, I was fascinated to read his review of my biography of W.M. Thackeray (LRB, 20 January). Naturally I take his correction of certain errors of fact on the chin. However, it isn't true to say (Sutherland's line about this being a 'Cockney biography') that no institution outside London was consulted or acknowledged. In fact, the preface thanks manuscript holders as comparatively far-flung as the National Library of Scotland, Eton College and the Surrey County Record Office. Neither, and much more important, is it especially 'impudent' of the publishers, or rather their blurb-writer (myself), to advertise the existence of new material. Leaving aside various unpublished letters, newspaper reports and medical records, all noted in the 'meagre' critical apparatus, Sutherland doesn't seem to have noticed the numerous references to Thackeray's recently discovered 1830s scrapbook, and the light it sheds on both his artistic development and the origins of Vanity Fair, or indeed the dozen or so illustrations – one of which looks very like a post-madness portrait of Isabella – taken from it.
Elsewhere, Sutherland charges me with a general disparagement of all Thackeray's post-Vanity Fair work. While it's certainly true that I like his post-1848 novels less than his early books, I seem to remember including relatively elaborate discussions of works such as Pendennis, The Newcomes and Lovel the Widower, at least two of which – if Vanity Fair is taken as the peak of Thackeray's achievement – are judged to end up on a subsidiary crag.
As for Isabella's crinolines, or their absence, I look forward to one of Sutherland's mini-essays on the subject, but would point out that they were certainly a feature of 1840s couture. After all, Thackeray's 1847 parody of Mrs Gore's novels is entitled Crinoline. Sutherland ends his review with a rueful remark or two to the effect that he wishes he'd had a closer look at the typescript of Thackeray which he (very kindly and instructively) read for me this time last year. I might wish that he'd taken a closer look at the finished copy.
D.J. Taylor
London SW15
Vol. 22 No. 5 · 2 March 2000
From John Alpe
John Sutherland demonstrates a clear and reasoned understanding of maritime matters in his discussion of Isabella Thackeray's suicide attempt (LRB, 20 January). What a pity he made the error of giving a steamship speed in knots per hour. The term 'knot' expresses ship speed in nautical miles per hour.
John Alpe
Kampar, Malaysia
