William Makepeace Thackeray Books In Order

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Publication Order of William Makepeace Thackeray Collection Books

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William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray was born an only child July 18, 1811 in Calcutta, India to Richmond Thackery, secretary to the Board of Revenue in the East India Company. His mom, Anne Becher, was Harriet Becher and John Harman Becher’s second daughter, John was also a secretary (writer) for the East India Company. William was an illustrator, novelist, and author.

He is best known for his satirical works, especially his 1848 book “Vanity Fair”, as well as “The Luck of Barry Lyndon”, which Stanley Kubrick adapted into a movie in the year 1975.

His dad died in 1816 which led Anne to send William, then age five, to England that same year, as she stayed behind in India. The ship he traveled on made a short stop in Saint Helena, where the imprisoned Napoleon was pointed out to him. During his time in England, he was educated at schools in Chiswick and Southampton, and then at Charterhouse School, where he became close friends with John Leech. He hated Charterhouse, parodying it in his work as “Slaughterhouse”.

The illness he suffered during his final year there, during which he grew up to his full height of six foot three inches, postponed his attending Trinity College, until early 1829.

He went to Trinity College, Cambridge for a time, however, was never too keen on academic studies, and left Cambridge in 1830, but some of his earliest published writing appeared in two university periodicals The Snob and The Gownsman.

William then traveled for a bit of time on the continent, visiting Weimar, where he met Goethe. He went back to England, starting to study law at Middle Temple, but quickly gave up on that. When he hit the age of 21 he came into his inheritance from his dad, but squandered a lot of it on gambling and on funding two different unsuccessful papers The Constitutional and The National Standard, for which he was hoping to write.

Additionally, he lost a good chunk of his fortune in the collapse of a pair of Indian banks. Forced to consider a profession to support himself, he turned first to art, which he studied in Paris. However, this was something he did not pursue, except in his later years when he illustrated some of his own novels and his other work.

His semi-idleness ended when he married Isabella Gethin Shawe on August 20, 1836. They had three kids, all daughters: Anne Isabella, Jane, and Harriet Marian.

At this time, he started ‘writing for his life’, as he stated it, turning to journalism in order to support his young family. Mainly, he worked for Fraser’s Magazine, for whom he produced short fictional sketches, art criticism, and two longer fictional works.

Between 1837 and 1840 he also reviewed books for The Times and was a regular contributor to The Foreign Quarterly Review and The Morning Chronicle.

Later on, through is connection to John Leech, an illustrator, he started writing for Punch, a new magazine at the time. He published The Snob Papers in this publication, which was later collected as “The Book of Snobs”. It was this work that popularized the modern meaning of the term “snob”. Between 1843 and 1854, he contributed regularly to the Punch.

Tragedy struck in William’s personal life as Isabella, his wife, succumbed to the birth of their third child in the year 1840. Finding that he couldn’t get any work done at home, he spent an increasing amount of time away until September of 1840, when he finally realized just how grave her condition was.

During the early 1840s, he achieved some success with “The Paris Sketch Book” and “The Irish Sketch Book, with the latter being marked by its hostility towards Irish Catholics. But, while the book appealed to anti-Irish sentiment in Britain at the time, William was given the task of being Punch’s Irish expert, often under the pen name of Hibernis Hibernior. He became the one responsible for creating the notoriously hostile and negative depictions of the Irish during the Great Irish Famine of 1845 until 1851 the Punch had.

William gained more recognition with his Snob Papers, but “Vanity Fair” is the work that fully established his fame. It first appeared in serialized installments starting early in 1847. Even before “Vanity Fair” finished its serial run, William had become a celebrity, sought after by the same ladies and lords that he satirized. They hailed him as Charles Dickens’ equal.

For the rest of his life, he stayed “at the top of the tree”, as he put it. During this time, he produced many large novels, notably “The Newcomes”, “Pendennis”, and “The History of Henry Esmond”. This is dispute the various illnesses, including one near-fatal one that hit him in the year 1849 while he was writing “Pendennis”.

During the 1850s, his health worsened and was plagued by a recurring stricture of the urethra that laid him up for days at a time. He also felt that he lost much of his creative impetus. He worsened matters by excessive drinking and eating, and avoiding exercise, however, he did enjoy riding, keeping a horse. William has been described as “the greatest literary glutton that ever lived”. Apart from writing, his main activity was “gorging and gutting”. He also couldn’t break his addiction to spicy peppers, which further ruined his digestion.

In the year 1860, he became the editor of the newly established Cornhill Magazine, however, he was never comfortable in this role, preferring to contribute to the magazine by writing a column called “Roundabout Papers”.

On December 23, 1863, after he returned from dining out and before he began dressing for bed, he had a stroke. William was found dead in his bed the next morning. His death at only 52 was entirely unexpected, and shocked the reading public, his family, and his friends.

Around seven thousand people attended his funeral at Kensington Gardens. William was buried on December 29 at Kensal Green Cemetery. A memorial bust sculpted by Marochetti can be found at Westminster Abbey. He was also honored in the Charterhouse Chapel with a monument after he died.