William Makepeace Thackery (1811-1863) was one of the best loved of Victorian novelists, and continues through `Vanity Fair’ (1847-1853), his `Pendennis’ series, along with the `The Luck of Barry Lyndon’ (1844) to enjoy popularity. His works are written with great energy and vitality, despite the fact that his life was one which was touched by tragedy. His wife, Isabelle, succumbed to persistent depression after the birth of their third child in 1840, something that consumed his energies throughout the rest of his life. She attempted to commit suicide during a sea trip in 1840, then stayed in clinics near Paris till 1845 when she was brought back to London, and looked after there. Due to her condition, while Thackery never divorced, he remained in effect separated from her and single. His wife survived him by several decades.
One of his works which is most closely linked to Kent is `A Shabby Genteel Story’ from around 1840. This was precisely the time that Thackery’s domestic troubles referred to above were starting. The piece, not published till 1853, was initially to be a full novel. It now exists more as a novella. Starting in Brussels, it tells of a James Gann esq who comes to the city `for a month, for the purpose of perfecting himself in the French language’ (Thackery, `A Shabby Genteel Story and Other Tales’, Appleton and Company, New York, 1853, 12) . There he ends up married to Juliana, and her three daughters. Via London they end up in Margate, where they survive by running a lodging house and `a mysterious business’:
`In fact, Mr Gann had nothing to do from morning till night. He was now a fat, bald-headed man of fifty; a dirty dandy on week-days, with a shawl, a waistcoat, a tuft of hair to his great double-chin, a snuffy shirt-frill and enormous breast-pin and seals: he had a pilot coat, with large mother-of-pearl buttons, and always wore a great rattling telescope, with which he might be seen for hours on the sea-shore or the pier, examining the ships, the bathing machines, the ladies’ school as they paraded up and down the esplanade, and all the other objects which the telescopic view might give him. He knew every person connected with every one of the Deal and Dover coaches, and was sure to be witness to the arrival or departure of several of them in the course of the day’ (Ibid, 19-20)
A frequenter of hostelries with such evocative names as `The Bag of Nails and the Magpie and Punchbowl’ Gann promises to be a comic creation on the scale of those being devised around the same time by Dickens. However, the story shifts to the arrival of the rascal, George Branden, a true bankrupt on the run who settles on their house to accommodate him and then proceeds to try to seduce each of the three daughters. With the last, Caroline, he has some success, finally, after a few adventures, marrying her.
That even in its heyday Thackery saw the more atmospheric human side of Margate and the kind of people that drifted there is interesting. Thackery himself however was more closely associated with the ostensibly somewhat more refined environment of Tunbridge Wells, where, after his very early years in India, the future writer had spent summer holidays from 1823. The town figures partly in `The Virginians’ (1857-1859). From 1860, he came to stay at `Rock Villa’, since renamed `Thackery’s House’ and converted to a successful restaurant. While there, as part of the `Roundabout Papers’ in the Cornhill Magazine, he wrote `Tunbridge Toys.’
Two of his descriptions of the town are wroth repeating:
`”I stroll over the Common and survey the beautiful purple hills around, twinkling with a thousand bright villas, which have sprung up over this charming ground since first I saw it. What an admirable scene of peace and plenty ! What a delicious air breathes over the heath, blows the cloud shadows across it, and murmurs through the full-clad trees ! Can the world show a land fairer, richer, more cheerful ? I see a portion of it when I look up from the window at which I write. But fair scene, green woods, bright terraces gleaming in sunshine, and purple clouds swollen with summer rain – nay, the very pages over which my head bends – disappear from before my eyes. They are looking backwards, back into forty years off, into a dark room, into a little house hard by on the Common here, in the Bartlemy-tide holidays. The parents have gone to town for two days; the house is all his own, his own and a grim old maidservant’s, and a little boy is seated at night in the lonely drawing-room – poring over Manfroni, or the One-Handed Monk, so frightened that he scarcely dares to turn round.’
And later, in talking of the famous Pantiles:
`”Who knows ? They may have kept those very books at the library still – at the well-remembered library on the Pantiles, where they sell that delightful, useful Tunbridge ware. I will go and see. I went my way to the Pantiles, the queer little old-world Pantiles, where, a hundred years since, so much good company came to take its pleasure. Is it possible, that in the past century, gentlefolks of the first rank (as I read lately in a Lecture on George II. in this Magazine) assembled here and entertained each other with gaming, dancing, fiddling, and tea ? There are fiddlers, harpers; and trumpeters performing at this moment in a weak little old balcony, but where is the fine company ? Where are the earls, duchesses, bishops, and magnificent embroidered gamesters ? A half-dozen of children and their nurses are listening to the musicians ; an old lady or two in a poke bonnet passes, and for the rest, I sec but an uninteresting population of native tradesmen. As for the library, its window is full of pictures of burly theologians, and their works, sermons, apologues, and so forth” (`Roundabout Papers’, No VII, Cornhill Magazine, 1860, 384)
He died in 1863, in London, his funeral attended by several thousand.