Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference: Allusion in The Newcomes 9780773562929

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Texts of Thackeray Used
1 The Richest of Victorian Fictions
2 Literary Allusion in The Newcomes
English Poetry – Keats, Tennyson, Shakespeare
Horace and the Classics
The Bible
Novels
Theatre, Ballet, Songs
Childhood Reading and Lore
3 The Art World
4 History and India
5 France of the Citizen King
6 London and the Significance of Topography
7 Newspapers
8 Names
Notes
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

THACKERAY'S CULTURAL FRAME OF REFERENCE

Also by R.D. McMaster THE NOVEL FROM STERNE TO JAMES (with Juliet McMaster) TROLLOPE AND THE LAW GREAT EXPECTATIONS (editor) LITTLE DORRIT (editor)

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference Allusion in The Newcomes R.D. McMaster

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • Buffalo

R.D. McMaster 1991 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy, or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. First published in Canada by McGill-Queen's University Press ISBN 0-7735-0838-4 Legal deposit first quarter 1991 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd Printed in Great Britain

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data McMaster, Rowland Thackeray's cultural frame of reference: allusion in The Newcomes Includes bibliographical references: ISBN 0-7735-0838-4 1. Thackeray, William Makepeace, 1811-1863. Newcomes. I. Title. PR5614.M34 1991 823'.8 090-090383-x

To Lindsey, Loren, Geoffrey and Rawdon

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Acknowledgements Texts of Thackeray Used

ix x

1 The Richest of Victorian Fictions

1

2 Literary Allusion in The Newcomes English Poetry - Keats, Tennyson, Shakespeare Horace and the Classics The Bible Novels Theatre, Ballet, Songs Childhood Reading and Lore

8 13 25 43 52 64 78

3 The Art World

87

4 History and India

106

5 France of the Citizen King

120

6

134

London and the Significance of Topography

7 Newspapers

159

8 Names

165

Notes

172

Index

185

vn

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgements The following study was written with the assistance of study-leave from the University of Alberta and a travel grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The work in part grows out of annotations for The Newcomes I made for the Garland edition of Thackeray in Annotations for the Selected Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, edited by Edgar F. Harden, 2 vols (New York and London: Garland, 1990). I would like to acknowledge Professor Harden's constant helpfulness over a long period. Some comments on Fra Diavolo and The Newcomes appeared first in 'A Newcomes Query and an Answer', Thackeray Newsletter, 18 (November 1983) 1-2. My thanks to Peter Shillingsburg for permission to quote them. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Juliet, a seasoned Thackerayan, for her encouragement and advice in many a consultation. R. D. McMASTER

IX

Texts of Thackeray Used For Thackeray's works 1 have used the Oxford Thackeray, edited by George Saintsbury (London: Oxford University Press, 1908) 17 vols. Parenthetical page references in my text are to this edition. In my notes, the abbreviation, Letters, refers to The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, edited by Gordon N. Ray (London: Oxford University Press, 1945-6) 4 vols.

1 The Richest of Victorian Fictions Gordon N. Ray describes Thackeray's The Newcomes as 'in some respects the richest, not only of Thackeray's books but of all Victorian fictions'. And he suggests that, in comparison with that of The Newcomes, the 'saturation' Henry James saw as a characteristic note of the Edwardian novel seems slight.1 An essential feature of the richness, the 'saturation', of The Newcomes is its range and density of allusion. Few other novelists in English - one thinks, perhaps, of Sterne and Joyce - are as allusive as Thackeray. Allusions crowd his text: allusions to literature and history ancient and modern, major and minor - to mythology, fairy-tale, music and opera, popular songs, nursery rhymes, painting, sculpture, architecture, cities and places at home and abroad, spas, museums, restaurants, politics, imperial affairs, politicians, dancers, singers, pugilists - the list goes on. It is difficult to believe that the casual reader picks up much of this range of allusion now. Thackeray's contemporaries would have recognised much more of the topical and popular cultural reference than we do, but even then it would have been a rather well-educated, broadly-interested and alert reader who responded to anything like the whole skein of allusion. To sort out and consider some of its strands is to lay bare the peculiar conditioning and status of Thackeray's text, to speculate on the cultural and affective relationship the text bore to its readership, and to discern something like a map of Thackeray's consciousness. The full enjoyment of Thackeray's work places considerable demands on his readers. First, for comprehension, we must pick up a very wide range of cultural reference, arcane and familiar, high and low brow. He gives us not only a very elaborate society with complex codes and functions but its connections with large stretches of western culture, its literary and artistic traditions, its history and artifacts. This frame of reference enters the text in a thoroughly easy manner, neither donnish nor portentous. Secondly, moving from sentence to sentence, we must be prepared not for 1

2

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

single and straightforward exposition but for the most heterogeneous ideas yoked synchronically together, to vary Johnson's phrase about the metaphysicals. As John Loofbourow observes, Thackeray's prose 'must be read like witty poetry - a poetry expressed in delicate conceits and sustained allusions rather than in the traditional narrative rhetoric of his own time'.2 Allusion is a word with several meanings, ranging over its history from illusion, to word-play and puns, to symbolic reference or likening, or metaphor, to covert, implied, or indirect reference and passing or incidental reference. Harold Bloom stresses implied, indirect, or hidden reference in allusion, but notes that it begins to embrace 'direct, overt reference'.3 In his study, The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction, Michael Wheeler adopts this latter meaning as 'establishing itself already, often being applied to marked quotations, unmarked quotations, and references. I use allusion in this generic sense', he says, 'for two reasons: first, it is now part of critical usage, and secondly, no other word, such as quotation or reference, will do/ 4 I agree with Wheeler and use allusion in this generic or comprehensive sense, including quotations both marked and unmarked and references both direct and hidden. The question of indirection is one of degree. Even in 1611, Kindle Cotgrave, author of one of the Oxford English Dictionary's quotations for allusion, speaks merely, and perhaps not too helpfully, of 'an alluding, or applying one thing to another'. The degree to which a reference or quotation is effectively hidden or indirect will depend on time and readership. What will be plain as day to a contemporary, when an incident, saying, or text is news, may twenty years later be dark as night. Similarly, what is transparent to one layer of a total readership - say, an unmarked quotation from Horace to classically-educated graduates of public schools may be obscure to another not similarly prepared. A street name that suggests no more than part of an unfamiliar map to a present reader may have been laden with shared social, moral, or occupational significance to denizens of Thackeray's London. Marking a quotation or reference with quotation marks or an author's name or a title will alert some readers, others will need no such help, though the marking itself may affect response one way or another. Unmarked borrowings, to use Herman Meyer's term,5 allow for more subtle or mischievous connections by the author and in the reader's mind, as for example when Sterne inveighs against plagiarism in a passage plagiarised from Rabelais.

The Richest of Victorian Fictions

3

Extensive examination of allusion in a novelist so alert to social and class concerns as Thackeray naturally invites discussion of the work's context and the probabilities of who was being addressed. Allowing for all the provisos and cautions one must adopt in speculating about a work's readers, and of which Walter). Ong reminds us in his luminous article The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction',6 one recognises that the writing of novels is a commercial enterprise and that writers, however complicated the matter of 'intention' may be, write for readers even when they have, as Ong observes, to create their audience. For a work made up of so many elements as The Newcomes, it is probably a mistake to think in terms of a single readership; there are no doubt several, each responding to its own special areas of interest. The author of The Book of Snobs was astute at noticing the psychology of social compartments and in-groups. The Newcomes explores some of the lore of public schools and the purely social advantages of classical education, and it frequently quotes the Latin poets, gratifying thereby the tastes of readers who had struggled through their Latin classics. They would perhaps merge with readers participating in the popular Victorian tendency to identify England with imperial Rome as law-giver to the world. Modern Rome had a popular following too. The thirties and forties saw a major increase in travel and books of travel, as Victorians were seized with Mediterranean and other geographical passions.7 Thackeray had written some of these travelogues too, as in Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, and he mentions several other popular guides in the novel. The chapters on Clive's travels in Germany, France and Italy can be seen to exploit the sort of interest catered to in contemporary travel literature. Within the space of one page in chapter 27, we get Antwerp, the Grand Laboureur Inn, a relationship to Quentin Durward, Velasquez, Rubens, the Bourse, the Place de Meir, the Hotel de Suede at Brussels, Waterloo, Hougoumont, Bonn, and Drachenfels, with comments on nuns, wine, architecture, and students' festivities and duels. Nor was this mixed genre of novel and travelogue strange - Madame de Stael's Corinne (1807), combining commentaries on Italian scenery, books, and art with romance involving a female poet (and anticipating in some ways Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh) was very popular. Frequenters of the National Academy or Royal Academy exhibitions could be intrigued by the play in The Newcomes upon

4

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

contemporary fashions and quarrels in the art world, the status of artists, and the scores of allusions to artists from the ancient Greeks to Hunt and Landseer. Theatre-goers would find a constant stream of allusions to theatre, opera and shows of all sorts, as novel readers would find allusions to novels and fashions in novels from classics to ephemera. Club-men and frequenters of music-andsupper rooms, like Evans's in Covent Garden, could appreciate the political and social niceties of the one and the many songs mentioned from the other. Readers with historical and social interests could feed on the whole representation of a historical era, the fusion of commerce and religion, the complex of attitudes towards India, the description of England's amiable antagonist, France, in the age of the July Revolution and the Citizen King, and Thackeray's own speculations about the similarities between the writing of history and the writing of novels. These could all be interests of a middle-class readership but, as historians have cautioned us, the middle class is not single and uniform but made up of several and often conflicting interests and attitudes. In this densely allusive novel, Thackeray connects with many of them and I have tried to show such connections. In the end, what emerges in The Newcomes is a richly articulated cultural frame of reference played upon with wit, irony, parody, and occasionally solemn reflection. This range, elasticity, ease and wit probably accounted for Thackeray's high reputation as a novelist for readers of intellect and for the high esteem Victorians of solid intellect had for The Newcomes. Thackeray's fascination with documents (George's letters, or Rawdon's will in Vanity Fair, for example, and here in The Newcomes, the many letters, newspapers, etc.) bespeaks an interest in the world as textual and intertextual to a degree. Letters and newspapers abound. The era of the novel's action is that of a great expansion of the press, to which, in an unprecedented degree, the public could look for 'self definition. Looking farther into civilisation's penumbra of printed paper, we see that major characters in the novel are often intertextually appropriated, the Colonel as Don Quixote, the zealous Victor de Castillones, who wounds Lord Kew in a duel, as George Sand's Stenio. The delightful Mr. Binnie, a sceptical Scot and admirer of his countryman, Hume, is in part a compound of allusions to Gibbon, who, among other things, confesses equestrian ineptitude in his autobiography, saying horses 'never contributed to the pleasures of my youth'. 'No more

The Richest of Victorian Fictions

5

used to riding than the late Mr. Gibbon, whose person James's somewhat resembled', Binnie is lamed by a fall from a horse (p. 529). He enjoys demolishing Honeyman over their claret 'with the famous XVth and XVIth chapters of the Decline and Fall' (p. 529). The Duchesse d'lvry is a compound of Mary, Queen of Scots, Medee, and Phedre: That little duchesse is a Medee, a monstre, a femme d'Eugene Sue' (p. 472). Florae, who says this, identifies himself and his servant as Ravenswood and Balderstone from 'Valtare Scott' (p. 353). The major intertext, of course, is Ecclesiastes, along with its appendages, The Pilgrim's Progress and Thackeray's own Vanity Fair - major because it involves the whole vision of life encompassed in the plot and the aspirations it encapsulates. For a readership much more steeped in the Bible than we are, frequent allusion to Christian lore and parable, both in the novel's text and in its accompanying sketches, is natural, but in addition Thackeray's whole technique is parabolic. As in the history of painting generally, biblical allusion by Thackeray's time, and in Thackeray, dwells on the everyday and anecdotal, one might say secular and novelistic, episodes of the Bible rather than on the endlessly repeated major themes of Renaissance art, the annunciation, the birth of Christ, the crucifixion, the last judgement. Although allusion to the New Testament, as in other Victorian writers, implicitly criticises the harshness and cupidity of contemporary society, and promotes charity and humility, the encompassing vision of Ecclesiastes produces an ultimate sense of ephemeracy, repetition and weariness. The novel tells us over and over that The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.' The main action of The Newcomes takes place from about 1820, when Clive as a child arrives from India, to the late 1840's. The novel was published in parts from October 1853 to August 1855. The time described therefore comes close to that of the novel's publication and much of its social reference is to events through which its readers had lived. Thackeray, however, seems less inclined than Dickens to focus his description of a generation on some event out of immediately contemporary newspapers. In an extended commentary in chapter 28 on the exploitation of women in the marriage market, he does inform us 'that the diatribe wherein we lately indulged, about the selling of virgins, by no means applies to Lady Ann Newcome, who signed the address to

6

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Mrs. Stowe, the other day, along with thousands more virtuous British matrons' (p. 363). His readers would recognise news from November 1852 when a meeting at Strafford House devised 'An Affectionate Address of Many Thousands of Women of Great Britain and Ireland to their Sisters, the Women of the United States of America'. Inspired partly by enthusiasm for Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the anti-slavery address and its sentiments were still news in 1853 when a visit by Mrs. Stowe to England occasioned much sanctimonious advice to Americans. Her husband uncomfortably suggested that the English stop buying slave-produced cotton.8 Thackeray reacted negatively to what he perceived as humbug.9 However, the analogy between the position of women and slavery was much in the air in the early fifties and forms a background against which one should examine the women of Thackeray's novel. On a less vivid topic, one notices that in the elaborate comparison of the self-indulgent Reverend Charles Honeyman with ascetic St. Peter of Alcantara at the beginning of chapter 11, Thackeray mentions reading a 'life of St. Theresa' (p. 146). This was no doubt the Life of Saint Teresa, Written by Herself, translated by John Dalton and published in 1851. Again, though in a minor way this time, we see closely contemporary material feeding into the novel as part of the general literate discourse of the time. In general however, the range of shared consciousness about contemporary society covers the last generation. Within that generation however, the density of allusion is extraordinary. Thackeray describes himself as a natural historian of social evolution, and his sensitivity to passing time and evolution is often seen in his handling of contact between the generations of a family, and nowhere more effectively than in The Newcomes. Consider Lady Kew, relict of the licentious regency, who thoroughly enjoys a chance to reminisce with the aged Due d'lvry reviving faded scandals and naughty gossip: 'If haply the young folks came in, the elders modified their recollections, and Lady Kew brought honest old King George, and good old ugly Queen Charlotte, to the rescue' (pp. 413-14). The old lady's taste for raciness skips the intervening straight-laced generation of her daughter, Lady Ann, and her pious daughter-in-law, Lady Walham, to rejoice in the discourse of her livelier grandchildren and their friends, especially that of her grandson, Lord Kew. She savours their up-to-date jargon, as here:

The Richest of Victorian Fictions

7

'I beg your pardon, Lady Julia', broke in Jack Belsize. 'I can get on with most men; but that little Barney is too odious a little snob.' 'A little what - Mr. Belsize?' 'A little snob, ma'am. I have no other word, though he is your grandson. I never heard him say a good word of any mortal soul, or do a kind action.' Thank you, Mr. Belsize', says the lady. 'But the others are capital. There is that little chap who has just had the measles - he's a dear little brick. And as for Miss Ethel....' 'Ethel is a trump, ma'am', says Lord Kew, slapping his hand on his knee. 'Ethel is a brick, and Alfred is a trump, I think you say', remarks Lady Kew, nodding approval; 'and Barnes is a snob. This is very satisfactory to know.' (pp. 142-3) As well as in the clusters of witty allusion that Loofbourow draws attention to as a mark of Thackeray's style, period and evolution are conveyed in the language generally. The best general discussion of Thackeray's language of course is K. C. Phillipps's excellent study, The Language of Thackeray. The Newcomes is a great work, though Victorians, including exacting critics like George Eliot and Henry James, were surer of that fact than the twentieth century has been. Recent studies of Thackeray suggest that it may again be rising in esteem. Taking up and pursuing Gordon Ray's comments on its being perhaps the richest of all Victorian fictions, I hope the following study may not only account in good part for its initial reputation but contribute somewhat to its present lustre.

2 Literary Allusion in The Newcomes The opening pages of the book draw attention to its intense referentiality. It starts in the manner of Aesop: 'Crow, who had flown away with a cheese from a dairy window...' (p. 1). But this fable is a compound of characters and motifs from seven of Aesop's fables (the ones pictured in the novel's monthly cover design) and allusions to Perrault's Red Riding Hood (in French and English, and with the familiar dialogue, 'What Large Eyes you have got!' transferred to a lamb and wolf), La Fontaine's Fables, Moliere's Tartuffe, Plato's division of bipeds into feathered and featherless, Solomon as judge, and finally Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. As he had done in the first chapter of Vanity Fair, where Jones, reading the novel in his club, declares it 'excessively foolish, trivial, twaddling, and ultra-sentimental' (p. 8), so here Thackeray subverts the whole fictive enterprise of this thousand page novel by having 'the critic' exclaim 'What a farrago of old fables is this!', detect plagiarism in the narrative, and condemn not only the borrowing of conventional constructions but the low tone of the borrowings: 'scarce one of these characters he represents but is a villain' (p. 4). Implicitly the world of emblem and high moral generality is at war with the low mimetic. The owl and crow have already engaged in such a skirmish: T am the bird of wisdom,' says the owl; 'I was the companion of Pallas Minerva: I am frequently represented in the Egyptian monuments.' 'I have seen you over the British barn-doors,' said the fox, with a grin. 'You have a deal of scholarship, Mrs. Owl. I know a thing or two myself; but I am, I confess it, no scholar - a mere man of the world - a fellow that lives by his wits - a mere country gentleman.' 'You sneer at scholarship,' continues the owl, with a sneer on her venerable face. T read a good deal of a night.' 8

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

9

'When I am engaged in deciphering the cocks and hens at roost/ says the fox. 'It's a pity for all that you can't read; that board nailed over my head would give you some information.' 'What does it say?' says the fox. 'I can't spell in the daylight/ answered the owl. (p. 23) In conclusion, Thackeray responds to his critic with an archetypal view: that all stories and their characters are age old and recurrent. Again the double perspective operates. Viewed comprehensively, the underlying patterns stand out, or collapse into one another as in Finnegans Wake; but from the point of view of the particular character within the panorama, everything seems unique: There may be nothing new under and including the sun; but it looks fresh every morning, and we rise with it to toil, hope, scheme, laugh, struggle, love, suffer, until the night comes and quiet. And then will wake Morrow and the eyes that look on it; and so da capo' (p. 5). All this illuminates the significance of Doyle's little initialletter sketch at the head of the chapter, a central figure, modelled upon a seller of old clothes, dispensing his farrago or hotchpotch of used wares to a fresh and eager audience of children.

In the idea of literature that Thackeray has both presented and exemplified here, he is laying the ground for his technique of presentation throughout, one in which the central story is at once itself and, by implication (and through allusion), many others, both general and particular, moral and low. It is cyclic in structure, young Clive reliving the pattern of his father's unhappy love story and under his loving and exasperated guidance, trapped in the

10

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

endless human cycle of re-enactment. The tensions of an archetypal view of literature with that of mid nineteenth-century realism (the general with the particular) are also reflected in the way romance structures are constantly undercut and subverted by realism and irony.1 Everyone knows the startling paragraph in Vanity Fair, where in describing Dobbin's eventual conquest of Amelia, all the cliches of the romance pattern that the sentimental reader hopes to see fulfilled are piled up only to be smashed with a twist of phrase in the final sentence: The vessel is in port. He has got the prize he has been trying for all his life. The bird has come in at last. There it is with its head on his shoulder, billing and cooing, close up to his heart, with soft outstretched fluttering wings. This is what he has asked for every day and hour for eighteen years. This is what he pined after. Here it is - the summit, the end - the last page of the third volume. Goodbye, colonel - God bless you, honest William! Farewell, dear Amelia - Grow green again, tender little parasite, round the rugged old oak to which you cling! (p. 871) In The Newcomes the sentimental reader is similarly set up for a discordant closure. Expecting the satisfaction of the romance pattern, the final, summary chapter of the Victorian novel, in which boy finally gets girl, the reader expects to be told Clive married Ethel, but is left to fend for himself among a variety of options and opinions: It was provoking that he [Pendennis, the fictive narrator] should retire to the shades without answering that sentimental question ... Clive, Pendennis writes expressly, is travelling with his wife. Who is that wife?... My belief then is, that in fableland somewhere, Ethel and Clive are living most comfortably together . . . . But for you, dear friend, it is as you like. You may settle your fable-land in your own fashion, (pp. 1007-9) And it is not only in endings that Thackeray plays off one pattern of expectation against another (like Gay in The Beggar's Opera, or Shaw in Pygmalion); he does it repeatedly and throughout, as Jack P. Rawlins has amply demonstrated in his study, Thackeray's Novels: A Fiction that is True.2 The status and value of fictions are always in doubt and under inspection. His technique is reflexive,

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

11

and Thackeray constantly invites the reader to deliberate about kinds and degrees of knowingness in the making and interpreting of fiction.3 Allusion is a principal means of provoking such reflection. As modern theorists have pointed out, allusion involves a double interpretation of texts. The author, in glossing his own text by reference to another, is suggesting an analogy by which his text is to be understood. But in the process he may not only be calling up or identifying the text alluded to, but also implicitly offering a reading of it.4 To take a simple example: in chapter 28 Clive Newcome, as a rather green young man, encounters the international gambling set at Baden. His earnest young fellow-painter, J. J. Ridley, observing the scene, reflects: There was not one woman there who was not the heroine of some discreditable story. It was the Comtesse Calypso who had been jilted by the Due Ulysse. It was the Marquise Ariane to whom the Prince Thesee had behaved so shamefully, and who had taken to Bacchus as a consolation. It was Madame Medee who had absolutely killed her old father by her conduct regarding Jason: she had done everything for Jason: she had got him the toison d'or from the Queen Mother, and now had to meet him every day with his little blonde bride on his arm! J. J. compared Ethel, moving in the midst of these folks, to the lady amidst the rout of Comus. (pp. 355-6) This set of allusions first suggests an ironic contrast between the rather sordid and somewhat bourgeois world of Baden gamblers and the heroic world of Greek epic and tragedy. The affectation of domestically melodramatic language, 'absolutely killed her old father by her conduct ... she had done everything for Jason', reinforces the comic incongruity. At the same time however, Thackeray is also offering a comically bourgeois reading of The Odyssey and Greek legend. And ultimately, by suggesting that the legendary characters of epic and tragedy and the denizens of Baden behave alike, though in a changed setting, he is implicitly reiterating his general argument in The Newcomes that 'All types of all characters march through all fables.... So the tales were told ages before Aesop: and asses under lions' manes roared in Hebrew; and sly foxes flattered in Etruscan; and wolves in sheep's clothing gnashed their teeth in Sanscrit, no doubt' (p. 5).

12

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Starting from low mimetic, Thackeray recalls the heroic world of myth only to refashion that world in low mimetic terms. The whole set of intertextual relationships is further conditioned by the encompassing notion from Ecclesiastes, invoked in the farrago of old fables that opens the book, that there is nothing new under the sun, and that behind differences of era and mode - not only legendary Greece and novelistic Baden but the world of Milton's Com MS - are essential similarities. There they were, the fauns and satyrs: there they were, the merry pagans: drinking and dancing, dicing and sporting;... jeering at honest people who passed under their palace windows - jolly rebels and repealers of the law' (p. 356). Allusions, in other words, establish not a simple identity ('this is like that, or not like that') but a set of interactive relationships where conventions are not only invoked but undermined or held in doubtful suspension. How comic to see these self-important people as Ulysses, Calypso or Medea! But then reverse the comparison and perhaps Ulysses and Calypso and Medea were not so differently motivated. This, then, is to be a story, may it please you, in which jackdaws will wear peacock's feathers, and awaken the just ridicule of the peacocks; in which, while every justice is done to peacocks themselves, the splendour of their plumage, the gorgeousness of their dazzling necks, and the magnificence of their tails, exception will yet be taken to the absurdity of their rickety strut, and the foolish discord of their pert squeaking, (pp. 5-6) The general effect is that of an infinitely debatable text in which interpretation draws attention to the process and problems of interpretation itself. Thackeray's text repeatedly disintegrates itself in a welter of conflicting possibilities. In this process it is true to its age, an age of epistemological anxiety. 'We stand here too conscious of many things/ says Carlyle: 'with Knowledge, the symptom of Derangement, we must even do our best to restore a little Order. Life is, in few instances, and at rare intervals, the diapason of a heavenly melody; oftenest the fierce jar of disruption and convulsions, which, do what we will, there is no disregarding.'5 Cultural disintegration is, perhaps, the leading motif of Romantic and modern literature. Sartor Resartus, with its encyclopedic plethora of

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

13

allusion, its fragmented narrative, the work of a Scottish author who invents a pedestrian English editor to sort out the random and posthumous papers of a mystical German Professor of Things in General, its transcendentalism jostling with decendentalism, its frequent calling attention to its own fragmentation and lack of structure, is perhaps the ultimate paradigm for the age it depicts. In its own age and after, critics such as Hippolyte Taine, innocently taking that narrator at his word, classed it as incompetent, 'a vast mass of shapeless ruins'.6 Thackeray too has come in for more than his share of criticism hostile to his shifting narrative stances and perspectives, since, as Juliet McMaster observes: 'None of the various names we use for this presence - Thackeray, the narrator, the persona, the implied author, the omniscient author - fully defines its nature, though they have their local applications.'7 Thackeray's emblematic poses as preacher in cap and bells, or as old-clothes vendor, point to the problematic relationships his narrators bear to their discourse. Their problem is both temporal and cultural. The preacher is serious but he is also a fool, he purveys the old clothes but his buyers are either children, without a past, or the critic who, being 'just and wise, modest, learned and religious' (p. 4), rejects these garments as old stuff. Allusion frequently heightens disjunction. The flood of allusion and quotation not only attaches the work to three thousand years of cultural tradition and community but also, through irony and discord, and the rubbing of dignified lore against pedestrian and popular allusion, suggests a sense of separation, even a touch of learned Menippean craziness (in the cover design displaying the seven Aesop fables, the owl, symbol of learning and wisdom, sits in her nest at the top). ENGLISH POETRY - KEATS, TENNYSON, SHAKESPEARE A fine and characteristic example of allusions (this time from Keats) embedded in allusions, like various layers of fossils, occurs in chapter 47, 'Contains Two or Three Acts of a Little Comedy'. Indeed Thackeray begins the chapter with an analogy between the novelist's and the geologist's powers of construction: 'As Professor Owen or Professor Agassiz takes a fragment of a bone, and builds an enormous forgotten monster out of it, wallowing in primaeval quagmires ... - so the novelist puts this and that together: from the

14

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

footprint finds the foot; from the foot, the brute who trod on it; from the brute, the plant he browsed on, the marsh in which he swam... / The resultant narrative, says Thackeray, striking a familiar deconstructive note, is 'not less authentic than the details we have of other histories' (p. 616). The title of the chapter suggests a change of mode from narrative to drama. The setting is Paris. The head-letter shows an elegant shepherd piping to his shepherdess, their costumes reminiscent of Watteau, with a Cupid perched between them. The discussions between Clive and Ethel in the chapter are full of sentiment but also of stylish artifice - I expect Thackeray has Marivaux in mind. The second paragraph sets the scene: Suppose then, in the quaint old garden of the Hotel de Florae, two young people are walking up and down in an avenue of lime-trees, which are still permitted to grow in that ancient place. In the centre of that avenue is a fountain, surmounted by a Triton so grey and moss-eaten, that though he holds his conch to his swelling lips, curling his tail in the arid basin, his instrument has had a sinecure for at least fifty years; and did not think fit even to play when the Bourbons, in whose time he was erected, came back from their exile. At the end of the lime-tree avenue is a broken-nosed damp Faun, with a marble panpipe, who pipes to the spirit ditties which I believe never had any tune. The perron of the hotel is at the other end of the avenue; a couple of Caesars on either side of the door-window, from which the inhabitants of the hotel issue into the garden - Caracalla frowning over his mouldy shoulder at Nerva, on to whose clipped hair the roofs of the grey chateau have been dribbling for ever so many long years. There are more statues gracing this noble place. There is Cupid, who has been at the point ot kissing Psyche this half-century at least, though the delicious event has never come off, through all those blazing summers and dreary winters: there is Venus and her Boy under the damp little dome of a cracked old temple. Through the alley of this old garden, in which their ancestors have disported in hoops and powder, Monsieur de Florae's chair is wheeled by St. Jean, his attendant; Madame de Preville's children trot about, and skip, and play at cache-cache, (pp. 616-17) The primeval swamp, the pastoral scene of the golden age, ancient

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

15

Rome with the bloodthirsty Caracalla frowning down mild Nerva, who preceded him by a couple of centuries, eighteenth-century neo-classicism, and romanticism, all jumble together in the garden. The golden world goes through many variations in The Newcomes, the Colonel establishing it briefly in the Cave of Harmony and the narrator moving quickly to the 'serious paradise' of Clapham in chapter 2, 'that stifling garden of Eden' (pp. 21-2). Here we have a garden of love, with 'Venus and her Boy under the damp little dome of a cracked old temple', faintly reminiscent of amour courtois and the Romance of the Rose, but decidedly down-at-heel. The basin is arid, the Faun broken-nosed, the statues mouldy, the temple cracked, and Monsieur de Florae, successful in love where the Colonel failed, is himself now wheeled about in a chair - the signs of passion are now each a memento mori. The strongest notes however come from Keats. The Faun with marble panpipe who, in a parody of Keats's words in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 'pipes to the spirit ditties which I believe never had any tune', is a figure similar to Keats's figures in his frozen and suspended passion, but pompous and incongruent, the T believe' adding a note of personal scepticism. And Thackeray's lovers, Cupid at the point of kissing Psyche (calling upon the 'Ode to Psyche' as well) seem a lowmimetic version of Keats's image of eternal separation: 'Bold lover, never, never cans't thou kiss'. Somehow 'this half century at least' is not quite the same as 'never, never'. And Keats's consolation, yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! is hardly born out in this time-decayed garden of cultural rubble. Keats's vision of a Romantic absolute, a timeless state of beauty and ardour, is given an ironic reading.8 The romantic pastoral tradition is deconstructed; but the children are obliviously playing hide-and-seek, and the artificialities of the amorous tradition are about to be reconstructed in the only half-conscious sentimental stylisations of Ethel and Clive. Although the Keatsian allusion is a parody, Keats's structure of a Platonic perfection mocking a world of hearts high-sorrowful and cloyed parallels Thackeray's world of romantic design opposed to ordinary human inconsequence. The same point is reiterated in

16

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Lord Kew's tirade against romantic love: 'Love in a cottage! Who is to pay the landlord for the cottage?' (p. 392), this time echoing Keats's own sceptical lines from Lamia: Love in a hut, with water and a crust, Is - Love, forgive us! - cinders, ashes, dust (II, 1-2) themselves an echo of George Colman's 'Love and a cottage! Eh, Fanny! Ah give me indifference and a coach and six' (The Clandestine Marriage, 1766). In this instance, Kew is mocking dive's romantic attachment to Ethel, around which a whole series of intertextual oppositions of romance and realism proliferates, as in the elaborate eighteenth-century dramatic artifice of chapter 47, 'Contains Two or Three Acts of a Little Comedy'. Tennyson is one of the English poets whose works appear often in The Newcomes. He had been at Cambridge at the same time as young Thackeray (1829-30). When the Colonel, eager to share Clive's interests, tries to appreciate the literary tastes of Clive's young friends at dinner, he is surprised to find 'that a young gentleman of Cambridge who had lately published two volumes of verses, might take rank with the greatest poets of a l l . . . . Sir Walter a poet of the second order! Mr. Pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination; Mr. Keats and this young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge, the chiefs of modern poetic literature! What were these new dicta, which Mr. Warrington delivered with a puff of tobacco smoke . . . . Such opinions were not of the colonel's time. He tried in vain to construe Oenone; and to make sense of Lamia. Ulysses he could understand; but what were these prodigious laudations bestowed on it?' (pp. 260-1). The two volumes were, of course, Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832), which contained 'Oenone'. (But the reference to 'Ulysses' is a failure of Thackeray's memory, since 'Ulysses' was published in 1842 and Clive's letter in the next chapter is dated 183-). Here Thackeray is marking the transitions between artistic movements as also being markers between larger eras of manners and values, and he is also playing upon the associations of that part of his readership old enough to remember the tastes of a quarter of a century ago. To most of them in 1854, it must have been amusing to see the Poet Laureate and author of In Memoriam sceptically regarded as 'young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge'.

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

17

Thackeray also alludes to or quotes 'Locksley Hall', 'Mariana', The Princess, 'Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue', and The Lord of Burleigh', sharing an easy assumption of their familiarity with his readership - too easy, since he is not only occasionally anachronistic but conflates poems, referring to poor Clara at Chanticlere, sighing over Jack Belsize, as 'lonely and heart-sick as Oriana in her moated grange' (p. 367), a conflation of 'Mariana' and The Ballad of Oriana'. Nevertheless he is generally right and the poetic allusions give a sense of evolving intellectual culture within which the characters move. Occasionally the intertextual overlap is neatly fitted, as when Clive (responding to an imputation by Warrington, quoting Montrose, of feebleness in not declaring his love) recalls quoting The Lord of Burleigh' ('Maiden, I have watched thee daily, and I think thou lovest me well') to Ethel and drawing an illustration of the ballad for her. Tennyson's poem is about a country girl who marries 'but a landscape painter' only to find he is the wealthy Lord Burleigh. She pines under her consciousness of low birth and dies. Ethel frequently affects the pastoral and Clive is but a painter, but here it is Ethel who is wealthy and has status and Clive is the one who pines feebly. Moreover Ethel punctures the romance of the poem and Clive's wistful allusion by riposting 'that after all the Lord and Lady of Burleigh did not seem to have made a very good marriage, and that the lady would have been much happier marrying one of her own degree' (p. 568). Before the chapter ends, Warrington, impatient with Clive's doting on such a scornful woman, declares: 'Rather than have such a creature I would take a savage woman, who should nurse my dusky brood' (p. 573), a quotation from 'Locksley Hall', another poem about love thwarted by class difference. Apart from the local matching of situations in poem and novel, what Thackeray and Tennyson share is an early Victorian concern about inherited strictures of class in a period where their appropriateness was evermore in question. The fact that Amy of 'Locksley Hall', in the disaffected lover's view, accepts being bartered by her father for gold is consonant with the marriage-market theme of The Newcomes. 'Locksley Hall' was a great success with Victorians both for its melodrama and for its positing of the class problem. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a fairly straightforward reworking of 'Locksley Hall' called 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship', using a similar metre and having a low-born poet taken up by an earl's daughter,

18

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

rings a feminist change on the theme by having Lady Geraldine stoutly accept the lowly artist: It shall be as I have sworn. Very rich he is in virtues, very noble noble, certes; And I shall not blush in knowing that men call him lowly born. The motif was sentimentally popular, but coming from the sardonic Warrington, the quotation from 'Locksley Hall' no doubt also expresses a degree of exasperation with the lovers' self-pity characteristic of these poems. In the Tennysonian echoes in Thackeray's narration, then, several things are happening at once. A popular theme is related to his own. Tennyson's text provides a commentary on his, and his implies a reading of Tennyson's.9 Readers are assumed to need no attributions to be able to catch the relevance of similarities and enjoy the irony of differences. They are thus part of a privileged group, alert not only to the text but to the symphonic play of literary and social intertexts that surrounds them. With the notable exception of Shakespeare, other English poets enter the text sparingly and in passing. Byron, Congreve, Cowper, Dryden, Goldsmith, Hood, Johnson, Milton, Moore, Pope, Scott and Wordsworth figure aptly, often ironically, but not frequently. As with the many allusions in the text to French literature, they combine to communicate a sense of historical place, mood and culture, what is in fashion, and when and how fashions change. The Colonel, educated in the eighteenth century, is puzzled by the admiration of dive's friends for avant garde writers like Tennyson and Keats: that reverence for Mr. Wordsworth, what did it mean? Had he not written Peter Bell, and been turned into deserved ridicule by all the reviews? Was that dreary Excursion to be compared to Goldsmith's Traveller, or Dr. Johnson's Imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal? If the young men told the truth, where had been the truth in his own young days; and in what ignorance had our forefathers been brought up? - Mr. Addison was only an elegant essayist, and shallow trifler! All these opinions were openly uttered over the colonel's claret: as he and Mr. Binnie sat

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

19

wondering at the speakers, who were knocking the gods of their youth about their ears. (p. 261) In such passages, writers and their works are part of the evolving cultural milieu, identified and discussed. But often allusions or quotations are unsignalled, echoes of a shared culture, indicating a degree of polite learning in the speakers and assuming a general culture in the reader, who may be expected to catch the phrase and weigh it in its context. Chapter 58 has the title 'One more Unfortunate', from Hood's popular poem of 1844, The Bridge of Sighs', One more unfortunate, Weary of breath Rashly importunate, Gone to her death! The headletter shows a knight carrying off a damsel on his horse, and the whole set of figures alludes to Jack Belsize's elopement with Barnes's wife, Clara. The melodramatic touch from Hood's " ONK MORK UNFORTUNATE."

poem and the extravagantly romantic note of the knight and damsel are no doubt intentional, leading to the cliches and exaggerations of the subsequent Newcome divorce trial, contested by the lawyers Serjeant Rowland and Oliver QC, 'So Lady Clara flies from the custody of her tyrant, but to what a rescue' (p. 775).

20

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

The mixture of tones, a shimmer of overlapping associations, is characteristic. When the Colonel sings 'Wapping Old Stairs' at the Cave of Harmony near the beginning of the novel, Hoskins, the proprietor and musical arbiter of the assembled glee-singers, approves: 'Great Hoskins, placed on high, amidst the tuneful choir, was pleased to signify his approbation' (p. 12). The narrative rises to a note of grandiose comedy suitable to the rakish but welleducated company, and the majesty of the tuneful choir comes from Dryden's 'Alexander's Feast': Timotheus plac'd on high Amid the tuneful choir - dignified verse in low mimetic company. Moreover the passage is bracketed by reference to the prison scene from The Vicar of Wakefield (where the Vicar, another artless senior, distinguishes himself in shady surroundings), comparisons with the singing style of Incledon and, apropos of Incledon, a gloss from Hamlet, again with no quotation marks: take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again (p. 12). Pendennis, recalling the scene, is transported back to his youth, where, in the words of Moore's song, the roses bloom again, and the nightingales sing by the calm Bendemeer (p. 7). But the moment is delicately balanced between extremes, of Costigan's licentiousness and the Colonel's eventual moral indignation. Many quotations, marked and unmarked, provide the reader with the sense of a shared cultural ambiance. While praising Ridley's romantic vision of a world of art, the narrator invokes Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode', lamenting that others 'turn away thence to the vulgar life-track, and the light of common day' (p. 160). Warrington, more eighteenth-century in his tastes and satirical wit, says of Barnes This man goes about his life's business with a natural propensity to darkness and evil - as a bug crawls, and stings and stinks' (p. 716), echoing Pope's fierce lines from the 'Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot': Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings, This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings. Characters frequently speak in unmarked passages of English verse, no doubt reflecting the nineteenth-century schoolroom habit

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

21

of learning famous poems and passages by rote so that, if one were a lawyer, say, or a clergyman, one could demonstrate one's culture and professional style by introducing suitable verses into one's argument or sermon. The Colonel's quotation of Cowper's 'Boadicea' (p. 220) recalls that schoolroom context, and Warrington, when the Colonel has entered Grey Friars as a poor brother, trolls out ten 'noble lines of the old poet' (from Peele's 'The Aged Man-at-Arms') suited to the occasion (p. 966): A man at arms must now serve on his knees, And feed on prayers, which are old age's alms. As such quotations are apt intertexts, they are also social signifiers, indications of class, culture and status, gratifyingly so understood by the characters and in a sense so received by middle-class readers. Recognition is part of a social game or ritual. Registering unmarked poetic phrases and their contexts as muted to the formulas of common speech, the reader may also conversely be amused by ostentatious quotation. Grandiloquent Fred Bayham is a walking dictionary of quotations. The clouds which gathered o'er the sun of Newcome were in the bosom of the ocean buried, Bayham said, by James Binnie's brilliant behaviour' (p. 844) in leaving Rosey a fortune. Fred thus appropriates and welds together Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode', 168, and the beginning of Richard III. Within the space of a page (p. 278) he speaks of Goldsmith 'who touched nothing which he did not adorn' (Johnson), of Cervantes Don Quixote 'which laughed Spain's chivalry away' (Byron's Don Juan), and of a Scot in one of M'Collop's paintings 'his foot upon his native heath' (Scott's Rob Roy), all combined with references to Moses and the glasses from The Victor of Wakefield, Gil Bias, a flurry of genre-talk (Contadina, Traversterino, Locanda, Pifferaro), Reynolds, Van Dyck, Claude, an anecdote about King Charles and Titian, and Oberon and Titania. In fact Fred Bayham's saturated cultural lingo for the Pall Mall Gazette is a sort of parody of Thackeray's much more extensive and various allusive style for the whole novel. Hamlet is a favourite of Bayham, who enjoys declaiming in blank verse. Scrounging a shirt from Honeyman: 'Adieu, Charles! Amend! Remember me!' (p. 163). On suddenly noticing Clive (Honeyman's nephew) as Bayham reports Honeyman's imprisonment for debt: 'O my prophetic soul, my uncle!' (p. 319). Along

22

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

with Hamlet the Shakespearean plays most frequently alluded to (five or six times each) are 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Othello, though Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night also occur. Many quotations and allusions are common though apt; a reference, for example, to Othello and Desdemona in a lengthy passage on skeletons in closets (p. 151). The instances that have most force are those that gloss the plot. Chapter 10 begins with a complicated headletter showing, among other scenes of dissipation, Prince Hal and his friends perpetrating their robbery at Gad's Hill, and Hal and Falstaff drinking at Mistress Quickly's tavern.

The text picks up the allusion with a commentary on the futility of trying to shut in princes, and proceeds to describe the youthful excesses of Lord Kew, a wild youth who will mature and earn our respect in the course of the novel. But analogously the headletter also includes sketches of an eighteenth-century Mohock (in nineteenth-century dress) ripping out a doorknocker, a tipsy Lord Warwick, Addison's step-son, being lighted to bed, and the Prince Regent gaming. Though Prince Henry's evolution is a repeated allusive motif in the novel, the whole headletter is an emblem not

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

23

only of the chapter, but of Thackeray's general argument from the beginning that though fashions change human behaviour repeats itself, and the present is a newly decked-out expression of the past. The Prince Regent, successor of Prince Henry, evokes Kew's Regency youth, and this period, though something Thackeray was old enough to experience, is realised textually in allusions to boxers, coaches, taverns, horse-races - very much the world of Pierce Egan's Boxiana, Anecdotes of the Turf and Life in London (which Thackeray fondly memorialises in 'De Juventute', Roundabout Papers). Every fable is shot through with a host of other fables. The headletter of chapter 21 picks up Prince Henry again, putting on the crown of his dead father, in reference to dive's becoming an adult. And later, when Clive is married to bland little Rosey, she frowns on his friends: 'We are Poins, and Nym, and Pistol', growls Warrington, '... his princess is ashamed of his brigand associates of former days' (p. 826-7). The triangular reference to Prince Henry, Kew and Clive is clearly intended, since the point of the illustration is to introduce the gossip of dive's reckless youth, a much less vivid one than Kew's, and Thackeray uses Doyle's headletters to comment back and forth one on another. Both young men are part of Thackeray's foregrounding of the evolution and tensions of generations. But Prince Henry's story adds a layer of implication that lets Thackeray at least suggest what he felt he was restrained from exploring directly. There are several comments in the novel about the hopelessness of Lady Walham's attempts to keep her son, Lord Kew, without blemish. In the preface to Pendennis, Thackeray complained: 'Even the gentlemen of our age ... even these we cannot show as they are, with the notorious foibles and selfishness of their lives and their education. Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a M A N . . . . You will not hear ... what is the life and talk of your sons.' Any character is an artifice, and Thackeray's characters are woven of intertextual association. In this case, Shakespeare, Fielding (an anology with Tom Jones immediately precedes Lord Kew's entrance), and Pierce Egan help Thackeray to weave Lord Kew together and say what he feels a good part of his audience will not confront directly. Another Shakespearian allusion that comes over with force is also the subject of a headletter sketch (chapter 52) showing Barnes as Macbeth coming upon Lady Kew as a witch making incantations

24

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

over her teapot. It introduces the chapter in which the two of them consult about the future and scheme to keep Clive and Ethel apart after Barnes, conferring with the Colonel in the previous chapter, has falsely intimated that he will further Clive's suit with Ethel. The intertext is Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I, 'A dark cave. In the middle, a boiling cauldron'. After the incantations of the witches, 'like elves and fairies in a ring', Macbeth enters: 'How now, you secret black and midnight hags!' Lady Kew's presence is also secret: 'You see Lady Kew was in town, and not in town ... the proprietor of the house cowered over a bed-candle and a furtive teapot in the back drawing room' (p. 680). She and Ethel are just passing through from Scotland, where Farintosh has been courted, to similar visits elsewhere. This Act IV introduction, with its series of apparitions (an armed head, a bloody child, a child crowned, and eight kings) was a favourite for impressively ghostly Victorian staging. Ethel seems to fit the tone as well when she enters the dark room in a shawl, replying to Barnes's compliments, 'By the light of one bedroom candle! What should I be if the whole room were lighted? You would see my face then was covered all over with wrinkles, and quite pale and woebegone, with the dreariness of the Scotch journey' (p. 684). While the echoes of Macbeth are consonant with Barnes's furtive malice and his machinations with Lady Kew to determine the future of the family, the tone is partly sinister, partly parodic. Though Barnes smells of smoke and is told by Lady Kew, 'Don't beat that devil's tattoo; you agacez my poor old nerves', he is

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

25

a rather foppish demon as usual. His protest, 'Upon my word, ma'am, I propose to manage my own affairs without your ladyship's assistance ...' (p. 682), is not as vigorous as Macbeth's, Infected be the air whereon they ride; And damn'd all those that trust them! Nevertheless Barnes's venom is real enough. From beginning to end the multi-layered narrative assumes to a greater or lesser degree the archetypal forms of childhood reading, fable, and fairytale, with Clive and Ethel as Prince and Princess and Lady Kew as the witch. And the associations with Macbeth reinforce repeated reference to Lady Kew's haggish, witch-like personality. Mrs. Mackenzie, one of the fiercest viragos in literature, is neatly typified in a phrase one could easily miss: putting on airs for fashionable Dr. Quackenboss, she was 'attired in considerable splendour, and with the precious jewel on her head, which I remembered at Boulogne' (p. 975). Pendennis's comment echoes As You Like It (Act II, Scene I): Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.' HORACE AND THE CLASSICS The classical authors to whose works Thackeray alludes in The Newcomes are Aesop, Caesar, Cicero, Euclid, Homer, Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Petronius, Plato, Pliny, Seneca, and Virgil. One can see what sort of bond with the readership of his time exists here, and which part of his readership is principally in question. For the most part, these references are to the works conned in school by generations of grammar-school boys, and the quotations are often the famous ones. In fact, James Binnie, talking over Clive's education with the Colonel, jokes about such attainment, an attainment as much social as scholastic: 'at the cost of - how much? two hundred pounds annually - for five years - he has acquired about five-and-twenty guineas worth of classical leeterature enough I dare say to enable him to quote Horace respectably through life' (p. 111). Thus, though somewhat erudite, such quotations and allusions are available to the educated middle or

26

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

upper-class reader fairly easily from memory and schoolroom drill. This region of culture is plainly evident in Honey man's letters from England to the Colonel in India (both of them public-school boys) about Clive's schooling. Honey man says Clive 'has laid in a store of honesty and good humour, which are not less likely to advance him in life than mere science and language, than the as in praesentii, or the pons asinorum' (p. 38). The as in praesenti ([verbs] with as in the present) would be notorious to schoolboys as the beginning of an aid to memory in the conjugation of Latin verbs in the Eton Latin Grammar used in English schools for four centuries. And the pons asinorum ('the asses' bridge') is the fifth proposition of the First Book of Euclid, troublesome to beginning geometricians; hence the rudiments of geometry. The Colonel has kept' "some of my Latin from Grey Friars" and he quoted sentences from the Latin Grammar, a propos of a hundred events of common life, and with perfect simplicity and satisfaction to himself (p. 49). T know', he says, 'there is nothing like a knowledge of the classics to give a man good breeding "Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes emollunt mores, nee sinuisse feros'" (p. 69). Appropriate enough - but we find 'ingenuas didicisse' (from Ovid's Epistulae ex Ponto II, 9, 47) is the Colonel's favourite quotation, and when the painter Gandish is trotting out his own Cockneyfied classical erudition 'studied from the hantique, sir, the glorious hantique' (p. 219), Clive trembles lest the Colonel should introduce 'ingenuas didicisse' yet again. In the piece on Athens in The Fat Contributor Papers, Thackeray made it clear that brutal schoolroom forcing had given him doubts about the classics: 'When then I came to Athens, and saw that it was a humbug, I hailed the fact with a sort of gloomy joy. I stood in the Royal Square and cursed the country which has made thousands of little boys miserable' (Works 8:36). And in From Cornhill to Cairo, while acknowledging that a skilled antiquarian or enthusiastic Greek scholar may feel differently, he concludes that, for the most part, 'Men only say they are enthusiastic about the Greek and Roman authors and history because it is considered proper and respectable' (Works 9:127). But they constitute a semiology of power. Binnie has a clear sense of the social value of a limited classical training. Moreover it distinguished not only the socially superior from the vulgar mob but, racially, the governing from the governed. In Race, Sex and Class under the Raj, Kenneth Ballhatchet notes how, when competitive examinations for the civil

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

27

service had come in, Sir Charles Wood, Secretary of State, ostensibly to ensure Indian civil servants were gentlemen, but really to make it hard for native Indians, arranged that competitive examinations for the ICS 'be adjusted to favour "University men who are gentlemen'" (which meant extra marks for Greek and Latin).10 Though Thackeray gives his account of classical learning a satirical edge, he also appeals to the comfortable sense in his middle-class readers of participating in elevated learning (without too much erudition) and a community of shared values. The satire may well be in part sour grapes: his Latin teacher, Russell at Charterhouse, says M. L. Clarke, 'was a stern, unsympathetic teacher, and his regime left a lazy and sensitive boy like Thackeray with little knowledge or love of the classics'.11 He has a particular affinity for Horace but, says Ray, 'Thackeray's "scholastic knowledge of Latin" in general and Horace in particular was a later acquirement'.12 Nevertheless James Hannay, in A Brief Memoir of the Late Mr. Thackeray, says 'A quotation from Horace was one of the favourite forms in which he used to embody his jokes. If you bored him with genealogy, he would begin - "Quantum distet ab Inacho," which was quite a sufficient hint; and when a low fellow in London hanged himself, he observed that it was a "dignus vindice NODUS" '.13 The tone of Hannay's comment suggests one sort of middle-class, in-group, feeling of solidarity to which such quotation might appeal. Thackeray was a patron to Hannay, who wrote novels and was entrusted with the annotation of Thackeray's The English Humourists, but wished to temper Hannay's bent for harshness and satire, saying of his Satire and Satirists, 'I hate Juvenal, I mean I think him a truculent brute, and I love Horace better than you do.'14 Recording Thackeray's love of 'that most delightful and accomplished master',15 Gordon Ray calls a chapter of his Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom 'Horace in London' (dealing in particular with the period 1847-50). As Ray says, there are several parallels between Horace and Thackeray: each enjoyed a city that was 'the centre of a vast imperial system', that summed up a prosperous civilisation; each experienced 'a golden age in literature'; each took pleasure in the society of his day; and The ideal of both men was the worldly sage, or "old fogy" in Thackeray's whimsical terminology'.16 The imperial consciousness Thackeray shared with Horace was naturally congenial to Thackeray's readers, who took it as a matter of course that they were the Romans of the modern world. Lady Eastlake

28

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

remarks typically of her visit to the Colosseum in 1858, 'I felt proud that my nation was more truly the descendent of that matchless race than any other in the world/17 The standard classical education enhanced the sense of affinity with Rome. The language of empire conned in Latin classes ('when you read such words as QUE ROMANUS on a battered Roman stone, your profound antiquarian knowledge enables you to assert that SENATUS POPULUS was also inscribed there at some time or other') (p. 297) was comfortably appropriated, and Latin catchphrases like Pax Britannica and Imperium Brittanicum, underscoring the analogy between England and Rome, were commonplaces of Victorian political rhetoric.18 Like Honey man's quotations from standard Eton texts, the fifteen or so allusions to Horace in The Newcomes, mostly to the Odes, are in the main to the familiar and memorised, almost proverbial, ones. (Though I don't quarrel with the classicist who claimed that 'every other line [of Horace] was as familiar as a proverb' to Thackeray.)19 Thus, to the Colonel, Honeyman excuses his reading of trashy novels: 'after hours devoted to parish duty a clergyman is sometimes allowed, you know, desipere in loco' ('to be foolish in season', Odes, IV, xii, 28), confident the Colonel will get the allusion as Thackeray is confident his public-school-educated readers will (p. 106). Fred Bayham, just as he likes resounding Shakespearian exclamations, has a taste for Latin commonplaces, particularly as applied to his favourite butt, Honeyman. He helps himself to Honeyman's sherry with the toast, 'Salve, spes fidei, lumen ecclesiae,... here's towards you my buck!' (p. 161), nor will he drop it, using it again at the Colonel's dinner: 'in this present Anno Domini, we hail Charles Honeyman as a precept and an example, as a decus fidei and a lumen ecclesiae' (p. 177).20 Of his own financial involvements with the wine-merchant Sherrick and the taste of Sherrick's wine, he protests: T.B., sir, fears the Greeks and all the gifts they bring' (p. 900), thus appropriating one of the most famous lines in Virgil's Aeneid (II, 50). But to introduce quotations that readers wouldn't get would be gratuitous pedantry. E. F. Kellet in his Literary Quotation and Allusion lays it down as a principle, in fact, that 'You must not go beyond your public. If you allude, you must allude to what it knows. This is a main law of Literary Reminiscence: do not, except with due precautions, remind your readers of what they do not remember'.21 Thackeray must stretch that rule pretty far, but even when his allusions are

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

29

fairly familiar he usually employs them wittily. When Clive enters the Cave of Harmony with his father, Jones's warning, 'Maxima debetur pueris' ('the greatest reverence is due to a child', Juvenal, Satires, XIV, 47) (p. 9) is sufficiently apt but, given the Bacchanalian tone of the place later demonstrated by Captain Costigan, who launches into a song of leering ribaldry, the reader who knows the tag's context will appreciate it even more: 'Away whores! Away with the songs of night-revelling parasites. The greatest reverence is due to a child.' Recalling the scene later (p. 168), Bay ham recalls the Latin tag with it, and he ingratiates himself as a man of probity and learning with the Colonel by describing Clive with more Juvenal: 'He is an ingenui vultus puer ingenuique pudoris' (a youth of open countenance and simple modesty, Satires, XI, 154). The cockney painting instructor, Gandish, who considers 'Igh art won't do in this country' because he can't sell his picture of Boadicea, reinforces his claim to culture by quoting Latin (with a cockney accent): 'Hars est celare Hartem!' (the art is to conceal the art).22 His assertion, 'You reckonize Boadishea, colonel', sets the Colonel off reciting Cowper's 'Boadicea: An Ode', When the British warrior queen, Bleeding from the Roman rods and though the quotation is left in suspension its double appropriateness (to the Colonel's patriotism and the general sense of England as the supplanter of Rome) is evident in its unmentioned final couplet, Empire is on us bestowed [the British] Shame and ruin wait for you [the Romans]. The poem itself is a subject for schoolboy recitation, and the privileged background is underscored by Clive's further exclamation, 'Jolly verses! Haven't I translated them into Alcaics?' Deflation of Gandish as not belonging to the privileged group is evident not only in his pronunciation but in his daughter's gush: 'Oh, I must have those verses in my a l b u m . . . . Did you compose them, Colonel Newcome?' (pp. 219-20). Of all Horatian quotations, the one referring to black care sitting behind the horseman ('Post equitem sedet atra Cura', Odes, III, i, 40) is perhaps the most familiar, as it was Thackeray's favourite. In

30

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

allusion to Jack Belsize's debts and forlorn love-longing over Clara, the reference to 'atra cura on the crupper behind him' is apt enough, but all the more so for Jack's being in fact a cavalryman, 'all in a blaze of scarlet, and bullion, and steel', exhorted by the narrator to carry off Clara 'behind you on the black charger' (p. 367). The unfortunate marriage will bring enough care with it. Later, the allusion is applied to Lady Kew when Kew tells her he won't marry Ethel, and in the same place the narrator wonders whether her horses are the same used by Clive and Belsize leaving Baden in despair, because 'Black Care sits behind all sorts of horses, and gives a trinkgelt to postilions all over the map' (p. 502). Eventually married to fatuous Rosey, Clive 'went to fine dinners, and sat silent over them; rode fine horses, and black Care jumped up behind the moody horseman' (p. 827). Indirectly linking the marriages of Jack Belsize and Clive, the allusion to inescapable care reinforces the novel's deflation of romance and quiet suggestion of fate. To describe the Brighton tourist getting seasick in a boat, Thackeray calls on 'otium et oppidi laudans rura sui' (Odes, I, i, 15-17), which tells of the trader fearing the wind of Africa wrestling with Icarian waves, and praising the quiet fields around his native town - Richmond or Hampstead in this case (p. 114). When the Colonel and Clive take their first tour to France, Binnie tips Clive a twentypound note 'with a quotation out of Horace you know, about Neque tu choreas sperne puer' (p. 275), an adaptation of 'nee dulces amores/ sperne puer neque tu choreas' (While you are young, neglect neither sweet love nor dances - Odes, I, ix, 15-16). When the selfimportant M. de Castillones provokes Kew into a duel, Kew 'thought of the past, and its levities, and punishment coming after him pede claudo' (p. 458). Again the allusion is well-known and apposite: 'raro antecedentem scelestum/deseruit pede Poene claudo' (rarely does vengeance, albeit with halting foot, fail to overtake the guilty, though he gain the start - Odes, III, ii, 31-2). Clive, comparing Ethel and Rosey as subjects for painting, says Rosey 'is like a little songbird, sir, - a tremulous, fluttering little linnet that you would take in your hand, pavidam quaerentem matrem, and smooth its little plumes' (p. 315); true enough for Rosey, but Horace actually says: Vitas inuleo me similis, Chloe, quaerenti pavidam montibus aviis matrem non sine vano aurarem et silvae metu.

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

31

(You shun me, Chloe, like a fawn seeking its timid mother over pathless hills with vain terror of the breezes and woods - Odes, I, xxiii, 1-4). It is the timid mother, as applied to Mrs. Mackenzie, the Campaigner, a fierce virago, that adds an ironic touch to the otherwise straightforward allusion. The title for chapter 56, in which Clive seeks consolation in Europe after Ethel decides to marry Farintosh, is 'Rosa Quo Locorum Sera Moratur', from the famous short ode (I, xxxviii) which begins: T hate Persian elegance, boy, and take no pleasure in garlands woven in linden bark. Quit searching out places where the late rose lingers', an allusion presumably to Clive's brooding absorption in Ethel. And when Pendennis praises Laura's attention to Clive and the Colonel in their distress, he comments at length on his own neglect, as parcus suorum cultor et infrequens (an infrequent and remiss worshipper of theirs). The original ode reads deorum, of the gods, rather than the peculiar suorum (Odes, I, xxxiv, I),23 the shift from deorum to suorum perhaps emphasising Laura's 'sacred office of kindness' in a secular setting (p. 942). All these quotations are clearly signalled. On a number of occasions, however, the only signal of an allusion is oddity of phrasing, and on others there is none familiarity and likeness of education are assumed. Pendennis, oppressed by the prison-like atmosphere of Barnes's country estate, agrees with Laura 'that the little angle of earth called Fairoaks was dearer to us than the clumsy Newcome pile of Tudor Masonry' (p. 751), and the reader must catch the echo unaided: 'ille terrarum mihi praeter omnis angulus ridet' (this corner of the world pleases me beyond all others - Odes, II, vi, 13-14). So when Binnie dies: 'He passed into the Campaigner's keeping, from which alone he was rescued by the summons of pallid death' (p. 842), 'pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperam tabernas regumque turns' (pale death with impartial foot knocks at the pauper's cottage and the palaces of kings - Odes, I, iv, 13-14). Even more submerged is the allusion to an allusion in Horace's 'Art of Poetry' (pp. 141-2) when the Colonel and Clive are post-chaising around England: 'It was good for Clive to see men and cities; to visit mills, manufactories, country seats, cathedrals' (p. 195). 'Men and cities' is a translated quotation of Horace's translation (Ars Poetica, pp. 141-2) of the opening of Homer's Odyssey, die mihi, Musa, virum, captae post tempora Troiae qui mores hominum multorum videt et urbes

32

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

(Sing, Muse, for me the man who, after Troy's fall, saw the manners and cities of many men) - appropriate enough to the Colonel and Clive, who are themselves engaged in a little Odyssey, but unobtrusive. Perhaps the wittiest Horation allusion, in terms of complex word play, relationship and etymology, comes in a lengthy digression on coquetry, stemming from Ethel's contrived meetings with Clive at Madam de Florae's: Miss Hopkins, you have been a coquette since you were a year old; you worked on your papa's friends in the nurse's arms by the fascination of your lace frock and pretty new sash and shoes; when you could just toddle, you practised your arts upon other children in the square, poor little lambkins sporting among the daisies; and nunc in ovilia, mox in reluctantes dracones, proceeding from the lambs to reluctant dragoons, you tried your arts upon Captain Paget Tomkins, who behaved so ill, and went to India without - without making those proposals which of course you never expected, (p. 615) At first sight this looks like a comically humbug translation, reluctantes dracones becoming reluctant dragoons, but in fact the word-play has etymological logic behind it and the two contexts are nicely matched. Horace says: mox in ovilia demisit hostem vividus impetus, nunc in reluctantes dracones egit amor dapis atque pugnae (Soon with eager onset he swoops down as foe upon the sheepfolds; then love of plunder and the fight drives him against struggling snakes - Odes, IV, iv, 9-12). The ferocity of Augustus's stepsons in achieving Roman victories in 15 BC is transferred to little Miss Hopkins in the nursery then, as she grows, to her amatory attempts upon cavalrymen, reluctant dragoons, the hapless Captain Tomkins in particular. He is presumably reluctant as a victim of her arts. The word 'reluctant' comes from reluctari, to struggle against. And the word 'dragoon' comes from 'dragon', which in turn comes from Latin, draco, draconis, and eventually from Greek 'drakon', meaning serpent. It happened this way: one

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

33

kind of Renaissance musket was called a dragon (or alternatively a dragoon) because it breathed fire. Infantrymen who carried the weapon were therefore called dragoons. Eventually, mounted soldiers who carried it became dragoons. And finally, dragoons were just a type of cavalry. All this verbal erudition, as well as the intertextual relationships, plays around 'reluctant dragoon' and raises it from pleasant absurdity to the level of complex wit, of intellectual fun. A favourite recurrent figure in Thackeray's fiction is that of the siren, half woman, half fish, luring innocents to destruction. The most famous of these seducers is Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (see the head-letter for chapter 44). The figure is reiterated in the title page of Pendennis. Here in The Newcomes it is used both comically, as in the headletter of chapter 50, showing hopeful young ladies

singing to the stand-offish Clive, and sombrely, apropos of the Duchesse d'lvry, who inspires the reflection, 'Faugh! there is more than one woman we see in society smiling about from house to house, pleasant and sentimental andformosa superne enough; but I fancy a fish's tail is flapping under her fine flounces, and a forked fin at the end of it!' (p. 473). The image is vivid but also generalising, relating particulars to recurrent mythical design. The quotation, formosa superne, is from Horace's Ars Poetica: 'ut turpiter atrum desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne' ('so that what is a beautiful woman above ends in a black and ugly fish' - Ars Poetica, pp. 3-4), and in fact Horace is merely giving an example of an

34

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

absurd image. But behind Horace is Homer and the sirens of the Odyssey, whose associations Thackeray has attached to the isolated Horatian figure. Here is a minor example of allusion involving an imposed interpretation of the text alluded to. In one case Horation quotation and crib come together in a situation evoking once again the pervasive public-school culture. After the misery and distance from his father that Clive has endured while his father was prosperous, Clive welcomes a return of their camaraderie when news arrives that the Bundelcund Bank has crashed: 'Here's a good end to it/ says Clive with flashing eyes and a flushed face, 'and here's a good health till tomorrow, father!' and he filled into two glasses the wine still remaining in the flask. 'Good-bye to our fortune, and bad luck go with her - I puff the prostitute away - Si celeres quatit pennas, you remember what we used to say at Grey Friars - resignoquae dedit, et mea virtute me involve, probamque pauperiem sine dote quaero.' And he pledged his father, who drank his wine, his hand shaking as he raised the glass to his lips, and his kind voice trembling as he uttered the well-known old school words, with an emotion that was as sacred as a prayer, (pp. 911-12) Clive is not only quoting Odes, III, xxix, Horace's invitation to his patron Maecenas to visit him in rural frugality, leave Rome's wealth and fate to themselves for the moment, Jand accept but not be troubled by Fortune; he is also quoting Dryden's translation of the Ode: But when she [Fortune] dances in the wind, And shakes her wings and will not stay, I puff the prostitute away: The little or the much she gave is quietly resigned. Content with poverty, my soul I arm; And virtue, tho' in rags, will keep me warm. Multiple quotation and the school association provide a characteristic Thackerayan overlapping and fusion of disparate periods and experiences: Augustan Rome, Victorian London, the Colonel's memory of school Latin, Clive's later experience of it including the distinguished crib, and the communal sharing of that experience

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

35

over generations so that the accumulated and overlaid wisdom reaches the sanctity of prayer. Dryden helps the schoolboy interpret Horace, and present devastation helps the grown men to interpret afresh, savour, and draw comfort from remembered schoolboy lore. Though Thackeray appropriates Horace frequently and affectionately, he alludes to Virgil less than one might expect. When Ethel first introduces herself to the Colonel, he kisses her hand in his courtly manner: 'No doubt... the little talisman led him back to Hades, and he saw Leonora' (p. 201). The repeating cycle of generations and narrative surfaces fuses with the recollection of Aeneas's descent into the underworld, protected by the golden bough consecrated to Proserpina, to see the shade of his dead father (Aeneid, VI, 140-55). But the Frenchman Florae likes to,quote Virgil. When he first meets Clive at Baden, the Vicomte refers to his own relative poverty, a result in part of his gambling, 'with a duris urgens in rebus egestass! ['the pressure of need in a life of hardship' Georgics, 1,146] pronounced in the true French manner' (p. 353). The fun here is that Virgil is describing the origin of hard toil, to which Florae and the other denizens of Baden are little given. Florae resorts to Virgil again when the vain firebrand, M. de Castillones, challenges Lord Kew to a duel: '"Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas immolat, mon pauvre Kiou", said his French friend. ['It is Pallas, Pallas, who sacrifices you with this stroke' - Aeneid, XII, 48.] And Lord Rooster, whose classical education had been much neglected, turned round, and said, "Hullo, mate, what ship's that?"' (p. 458). Aeneas says these words, 'Pallas te hoc vulnere', as he kills Turnus, who had killed Pallas the son of Aeneas's ally Evander, and Florae is in effect saying that it is not Castillones, the mere instrument, who attacks Kew but the Duchesse d'lvry. Nevertheless Castillones hates Tinfame Angleterre', and in allusion to it, 'Delenda est Carthago ['Carthage must be destroyed', the conclusion of all Cato the Elder's speeches in 157B.C. after seeing Carthage's ominous prosperity] was tatooed beneath his shirt-sleeve' (p. 445). Allusions to Ovid, like those to Horace and Virgil, are also familiar though often wittily introduced. The account of the company at Baden - 'It was the Marquise Ariane to whom the Prince Thesee had behaved so shamefully, and who had taken to Bacchus as a consolation' (pp. 355-6) - is an updated low-mimetic transformation of Metamorphoses, VIII, with a new dipsomaniac meaning attached to taking to Bacchus. And the story of Baucis

36

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

and Philemon, the aged couple whose humble devotion and hospitality win the admiration of Jupiter and Mercury in disguise (Metamorphoses, VIII), a story which I recall from my grade-school English primer long before we ever got to Latin, occurs in the midst of Lord Kew's pooh-poohing of sentimental romance, 'the lot which the gods only grant to Baucis and Philemon, and a very, very few besides. As for the rest, they must compromise; make themselves as comfortable as they can, and take the good and the bad together' (p. 392). Gordon Ray, as we have seen, draws parallels between Horace and Thackeray both in attitude and historical situation. Not only the Horatian but many of the other Latin allusions in The Newcomes suggest analogies between Thackeray's London and imperial Rome. The changes in Lady Ann's Park Lane house after Sir Brian's death lead the narrator to reflections on Trimalchio's feasts in Petronius's Satyricon, for example (p. 640). Though Victorians saw themselves as imperial Romans, they also, as Richard Jenkyns shows in The Victorians and Ancient Greece,24 liked to pattern themselves on the ancient Greeks, but allusion to Greek literature, and certainly quotation from it, is much less common in The Newcomes. Clive's encounter with classical sculpture in the Louvre makes him regret his want of Greek: T wish I had read Greek a little more at school: it's too late at my age; I shall be nineteen soon, and have got my own business; but when we return I think I shall try and read it with cribs'. Such a choice, he sees, involves a possible change of artistic outlook. In this Grecian mood, he is for 'placid contemplation' and 'stately rhythmic ceremony' rather than 'the battle of gladiators' or 'bony Life Guardsmen delivering cut one' in his painting (p. 273). There are two or three quotations in Greek in The Newcomes, one of them a descriptive formula from Homer (p. 308): Tn Miss Ethel's black hair there was a slight natural ripple, as when a fresh breeze blows over the melan hudor' ('dark water', Iliad, II, 825). But except for reference to the Odyssey, allusions to Greek literature and culture are fewer and less elaborate than those to Roman. This paucity may in part reflect Thackeray's experience of Charterhouse School, of which M. L. Clarke says in Classical Education in Britain, 1500-1900: 'Greek Prose in particular was "almost untrodden ground", and Herodotus and Thucydides in particular were known only by name' despite the 'shift of interest from the Latin to the Greek authors' in early nineteenth-century schools.25 Chapter

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

37

59 of The Newcomes is ironically titled, 'In Which Achilles Loses Briseis', referring to the collapse of Lord Farintosh's engagement to Ethel when her brother Barnes's wife, Clara, causes a scandal in the family by running off with Jack Belsize. The Colonel undertaking his election campaign against Barnes feels bitterness at Clive's lack of enthusiasm for the cause: "Tf Paris will not fight, sir," the colonel said, with a sad look following his son, "Priam must."' But the analogy quickly switches back to Latin as the narrator remarks of the Colonel's self-righteousness, 'that there was a wrongdoer, and that Atticus was he' (p. 873). Atticus was Cicero's wealthy friend, who, from what he considered the best motives, affected a shift of power that eventually led to Cicero's execution; and what the Colonel takes to be righteous conduct is going to have ruinous consequences for his family and friends. The Baden chapters contain two sorts of Greek allusion. The denizens of the casinos are universalised by being given names from the Odyssey and Greek mythology, and the Duchesse d'lvry, in her histrionic extravagance affects the passions of classical tragedy: 'She was Phedre . . . . She was Medea....' (p. 445). Such associations underscore her inordinate destructiveness. As Florae says, she is 'a Medee, a monstre, a femme d'Eugene Sue' (p. 472). But even here, as the French spellings and context indicate, allusion is as much to French literature (Racine's Phedre and Corneille's Medee) as to Greek. Greek allusions, as Clive's wistful comment on not knowing Greek might suggest, frequently have to do with painting or sculpture, especially as representing Greek mythology. Early in the novel, Ethel becomes identified with the goddess Diana, the virgin huntress, and with a particular sculptured version of her, 'that glorious Diana at Paris' (p. 314), the Louvre's Greek Diane de Gabies. The analogy becomes a recurrent motif in the novel, satirically expressive of Ethel's pursuit of rich and aristocratic young men in the marriage market: T was not present', says Pendennis, 'when Diana and Diana's grandmother [Lady Kew] hunted the noble Scottish stag ... Lord Farintosh' (p. 700). More subtly, identification with Diana expresses Ethel's divided spirit and complex psychology. While Ethel is engaged in the pursuit of marriage and very attractive to men, she is also, like Diana, haughty and virginal, scornful of lovers, and especially discouraging to Clive. Their relationship of course is complicated further by Clive's lack of resolution, whether as son, lover, or artist: 'A lively

38

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

woman', he says, 'would be the death of me . . . . To be beautiful is enough' (p. 315). For that matter, Clive is a characteristic Thackerayan lover, caught like Pendennis between the attractions of opposing female types, Blanche Amory and Laura Bell in Pendennis's case, Ethel and Rosey in Clive's. The Diana motif points more generally to an unresolved anxiety in the text, or in Thackeray, or in much of Victorian society, about desirability in women. Laura, who gets the narrator's approval as the paragon of womanhood for her Christian humility and domestic virtue, is rather tiresome, and Thackeray seems to know it; Rosey, whom Clive marries, is a bauble, vacuous and pathetic. Clara Pulleyn too, as Lady Kew says, is 'a little vacant and silly, but you men like dolls for your wives' (p. 682). Ethel, unlike them, has a mind and a volatile, resolute spirit, exceedingly prickly to the Victorian male consciousness, but also troublingly attractive. As Diana, she is anything but submissive, and her independence is significant in the novel's exploration of women's roles and issues. Madame de Florae asks, Ts it written eternally that men are to make slaves of us?' (p. 629). Ethel says, 'almost all women are made slaves one way or other' (p. 636). And though Thackeray tends to espouse the domestic idea of woman, he presents Ethel not only as Diana the virginal, daunting, huntress, but as having the admirable virtues of that figure - energy, courage, initiative, intelligence. Part of Ethel's restiveness perhaps comes of being limited to the matrimonial sphere, and the choice, which is described as a class choice, between being sold to an aristocrat or married to a humble artist, is from this point of view less of a choice than it is sentimentally made to appear, in that both alternatives involve limitation to the domestic. Clive gives us an idea of how tiresome the conventional domestic pattern can be when he marries the mindless Rosey. Thomas Newcome, Colonel Newcome, and Clive, all three show a family propensity for marrying sweet, feckless women, and both Clive and the Colonel nourish a wistful extramarital love: 'It's fatal, it runs in the family, father', says Clive (p. 879). The attenuated spirit of the wives they settle for is indirectly suggested by how easily they succumb to early death (like David Copperfield's Dora). Representations of marriage in the novel are for the most part dismal, Leonore's arranged marriage which she likens to forty years of death, Barnes's tyranny over Clara who yields to Belsize not just from long attachment but from stupidity, Clive's wilting marriage to infantile Rosey, the mutual

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

39

animosity of the Due and Duchesse d'lvry. Some accommodations allow the partners to jog along largely on a degree of mutual indifference or agreed seclusion from each other, like those of Hobson and Maria, Brian and Lady Ann, or Florae and his British wife (nee Higg). Intelligence and spirit are, if often negatively, a principal issue among the women of the book. Ethel's are daunting, Maria Newcome's, desperately worked at and paraded, a mere posture. What is wrong with Rosey - touchingly so - is that she is stupid - 'a simpleton of twenty', as Warrington calls her (p. 848); 'She thought the prints very sweet and pretty: she thought the poetry very pretty and sweet' (p. 311); she 'replied chiefly by smiles to the conversation of the gentlemen at her side' (p. 816). And Laura Pendennis, with her sentimental Christian virtue, is tiresome. 'One sees well', says Florae, 'that your wife has made you the sermon. My poor Pendennis! you are henpecked, my pauvre bon! You become the husband model' (760). Florae, with his foreign values, at least draws attention to the English tendency to make marriage explosive by sentimental pressure and stiflement: 'You are a droll nation!' says Florae. To make love well, you must absolutely have a chaise-de-poste, and a scandal afterwards. If our affairs of this kind made themselves on the grand route, what armies of postilions we should need!' (p. 754) [and] 'II est vrai,' said Florae, with a shrug, 'I comprehend neither the suicide nor the chaise-de-poste. What will you? I am not yet enough English, my friend.' (p.766) The identification of Ethel with Diana - and even more so with Judith and Herodias (p. 314) - then is not just a figure for her role in the marriage market, it is also a reflex of the masculine sexual anxiety she produces by being attractive for reasons that males don't wish to countenance. T'd rather dance with her than marry her - by a doosid long score', exclaims Lord Viscount Rooster (p. 433). Though a goddess, she has appropriated what they consider to be the male qualities of aggression and intelligence. It is of course not easy for Ethel either, as she veers from affectations of sordid calculation to affectations of pastoral primitivism, fierce and tender by fits. And the hauteur of Diana combines in Ethel with another thread of allusion to fairy princesses this time the frozen princess who would come alive for the right

40

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

prince: 'if I loved a man ... I would give up all to follow him' (p. 425). Or so she says. Representation of Ethel as Diana, though an idea that occurs naturally to Clive as artist, is recurrent and rich in implication. The other aesthetic references on Greek themes are made in passing. Marsyas, the flautist who foolishly challenged Apollo to a fluteplaying contest and was, according to the bet, flayed alive when he lost, is a significant figure in western art for the representation of the nude male body in a motif picked up in depictions of Saint Bartholomew (and in a variation, Saint Sebastian). He occurs in appropriately artistic surroundings in The Neivcomes at Gandish's Academy where we find Clive's Jewish friend, Moss, who likes to sell things like theatre tickets to his fellow students and lend them money, is discovered 'seated there (making a copy of the Marsyas)' (p. 228). The allusion, ostensibly to Greek legend, is of course also to Moss's 'skinning' of his fellows. As we might expect, allusion to Roman history - Sallust, Livy, Pliny the Younger - comes more frequently than allusion to Greek history in The Neivcomes. Two Roman emperors, bloodthirsty Caracalla and mild-mannered Nerva, figure as inimical types in the sculptures of Madame de Florae's garden (p. 617). In a cluster of gratuitiously playful Thackerayan allusion, association, and parody we learn that she rents her first floor to an 'American general, who has returned to his original pigs at Cincinnati. Had not Cincinnatus himself pigs on his farm, and was he not a general and member of Congress too?' (p. 603). The word Cincinnati has set Thackeray off on this word-play. It reminds him of the 5thcentury BC Roman consul and twice dictator, Cincinnatus, who according to legend left his farm to become dictator and defeat the Aequians and, having saved his country, laid down his office to return to his farm. But of course Cincinnati does have a curious connection with Cincinnatus. Originally called Lossantiville, the city was renamed Cincinnati after the Society of the Cincinnatti, formed by a group of Continental Army officers before disbanding after the War of Independence. They clearly thought of themselves as patriots returning to their farms after the model of Cincinnatus. For Thackeray and his English readers, on the other hand, 'MajorGeneral the Honourable ZenoF. Pokey' (p. 274) is satisfyingly categorised as a hick from a country amusing for its presumptuous pomposity. Any school history of Rome would necessarily include the Punic

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

41

Wars and oppress schoolboys with the need to distinguish among groups of odd and similar sounding names. Thackeray's memory fails again. When Clive's interlude with Ethel on the European tour ends with the arrival of her family at Baden, and conflict breaks out between Barnes and Jack Belsize, Clive, in a chapter entitled 'Retreat', decides to leave for Rome: 'We have dallied at Capua long enough/ says Clive; 'and the legions have the route for Rome. So wills Hannibal, the son of Hasdrubal.' The son of Hasdrubal is quite right/ his companion answered; 'the sooner we march the better.... Hannibal has been living like a voluptuous Carthaginian prince. One, two, three champagne bottles! There will be a deuce of a bill to pay', (p. 385) Having won devastating victories at Lake Trasimene and Cannae, Hannibal wintered at Capua where his seasoned army was, says Livy, 'an easy prey to luxury and pleasure, both of which lay superabundantly to hand' (History of Rome, Book XXIII, 18). It was a major turning point in the war. Rome recovered, took Capua, and Hannibal lost the initiative. Clive adopts the mock heroic manner to cover his own feelings of defeat. But he gets the names wrong: Hannibal was the son of Hamilcar Barca. Hasdrubal was the brother-in-law he succeeded as general in Spain before crossing the Alps. Continuing their trip south to Naples, Clive and Ridley visit Pompeii armed with Bulwer Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii, a Guide Book, and Pliny (Pliny - from Epistolae, 6:16 and 6:20 - in fact is apud or in the Guide Book), and as a send-up of Bulwer Lytton Clive proposes 'that they should take the same place, names, people, and make a burlesque story: '"What would be a better figure", says he, "than Pliny's mother, whom the historian describes as exceedingly corpulent, and walking away from the catastrophe with slaves holding cushions behind her, to shield her plump person from the cinders! Yes, old Mrs. Pliny shall be my heroine!" says Clive. A picture of her on a dark grey paper, and touched up with red at the extremities, exists in Clive's album to the present day' (p. 521). Thus, the erudite historical allusion is both anecdotal and encompassed by other allusions, like the Bulwer Lytton, generally familiar to any reasonably cultured member of the

42

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

middle class, and appealling to middle-class taste in travel literature, popular novels, and Roman history. Apart from allusion to specific authors and passages of classical literature, the text of The Newcomes is strewn with Latin phrases: cruore nostro (our blood), Acce segnum! (behold the sign [says Binnie, with a Scottish accent, of the Colonel's coat tail]), salva est res (all's well), beati illi (happy they, a Horatian phrase but divorced from its context), in loco parentis (in the parent's place), toga virilis (the toga of manhood), verbum sapienti (a word to the wise), lustres (five year spans), vidi tantum (I saw so little), sic volo, sicjubeo (so I wish, so I command), cum grano (with a grain [of salt]), lusus naturae (a sport of nature), in extenso (in full), omnium gatherum (a miscellaneous gathering), absit omen (may the omen not be fulfilled), solvuntur rupees (the rupees dissolve), Fundatoris Nostri (our founder), adsum (I am present), I, curre (go, run). Several have a Christian religious source: Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa (by my fault, by my most grievous fault [from the Catholic confessional]), vade retro, Satanas (get thee behind me, Satan [Luke 4:8]), D.V. ([Deo volente] God willing), quia multum amavit (because she loved much [Luke 4:17]), O vanitaws vanitawtum (O vanity of vanities [from Ecclesiastes], in Binnie's Scottish accent). In sum, classical allusion in The Newcomes operates in many ways. Allusion entertains with witty or unexpected couplings of meaning or turns of phrase. It signals the range of a character's erudition or class status. It provides an implicit parallel text that comments variously on the surface text. Allusive emphasis on repetition or reiteration of incident, theme or judgement over centuries enhances Thackeray's general vision of endless and vain repetition. The frequency, kind and extent of classical allusion and quotation both expresses a community of educational experience within the novel and reaches out to an inferred readership that, having had the standard public-school education, might be expected to feel an in-group's satisfaction at the recognition of its assumed or ingrained lore and the class and value judgements connected with it. Such satisfaction can be assumed whether the lore is presented reverently or parodied. And although the range of reference would put no great strain on a reader reasonably educated under such a system, the reader is paid the compliment for the most part of being left to detect reference, wit, and degree of displacement for himself. As I have suggested elsewhere, the density and sometimes obliqueness of such allusion in Thackeray

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

43

may account in some measure for the Victorian sense that he was among the most learned, most intellectual, of authors. Moreover the characteristic combination of ironic wit, savouring of life, ripeness, self mockery, and sadness with equanimity that are marks of Thackeray's overall tone derive in part from his texture of allusion, especially of Horatian allusion. The two authors share the richness of an imperial vision, but the imperial vision of someone both well-connected and slightly out of the action, a fogy, more than a touch nostalgic and sensitive to the relentless flow of time: 'Eheufugaces ....' THE BIBLE One among Thackeray's complex of narrative stances is that of preacher. In Vanity Fair, alluding to the frontispiece sketch, he is 'the moralist, who is holding forth on the cover (an accurate portrait of your humble servant), [who] professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation is arrayed' (p. 95). As preacher he focuses our attention and evaluates; as Tom Fool he is also one of the congregation, equally foolish, equally in need of charity. The multifaceted narrator suits a multifaceted narrative method. The opening of The Newcomes reiterates the complexity of the moralist's stance. The bundle of fables and fairy tales, besides putting the proposition that any story is the local form of any number of similar stories, implies a set of illuminating morals of which the fables are exempla. But the implied edification collapses in farrago as the critic is imagined, 'a Solomon that sits in judgement26 over us authors and chops up our children', declaring, 'As sure as I am just and wise, modest, learned, and religious, so surely I have read something like this stuff and nonsense about jackasses and foxes before' (p. 4). The note of authorial self-mockery puts us in an awkward position: if the preacher has become a mere struggling member of the congregation, he has also become one of us pointedly. As Chesterton observed, The one supreme and even sacred quality in Thackeray's works is that he felt the weakness of all flesh. Whenever he sneers it is at his own potential self.... He stood for the remains of Christian humility, as Dickens stood for the remains of Christian charity.'27 Such a set of relationships and attitudes naturally calls for frequent and pointed biblical allusion.

44

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

There are about thirty-five allusions to the Bible in The Newcomes. The most encompassing is the portmanteau or triple allusion to Ecclesiastes, the Vanity Fair section of The Pilgrim's Progress, and his own Vanity Fair. As Bunyan's Vanity Fair invokes Ecclesiastes as its intertext, Vanity Fair invokes both Ecclesiastes and Bunyan's fair, wherein are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not. And, moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be seen juggling cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.28 The success of Vanity Fair, its consequent imprinting on the public mind, and its status as a Thackerayan signature, make it (and nested within it, as it were, Bunyan and Ecclesiastes) an intertext for Thackeray's The Newcomes, its world of commerce and its marriage market. Ecclesiastes emphasises the emptiness of human actions; Bunyan particularises them in a capitalist social vision; and Vanity Fair localises the vision in a critical period of English history. In The Newcomes, what emerges with new emphasis from Ecclesiastes is its emphasis on recapitulation, that all stories are inter-textual recapitulations of other stories, that 'There may be nothing new under and including the sun [Ecclesiastes, 1:9]; but it looks fresh every morning, and we rise with it to toil, hope, scheme, laugh, struggle, love, suffer, until the night comes and quiet. And then will wake Morrow and the eyes that look on it; and so da capo' (p. 5). The musical direction da capo (from the top) itself suggests another performance, interpretation, or reading, of the same piece. When Mrs. Honeyman says of the comforts, the clothes, jewels and lace Major Newcome gave his wife, 'Of what avail are they when this scene of vanity is closed?' we have ordinary pietistical comment; when a few sentences later she remarks on a returning East Indiaman's 'three days at St. Helena, where they visited Bonaparte's tomb (another instance of the vanity of all things!), and their voyage was enlivened off Ascension by the taking of some delicious turtle!' (p. 35), we come closer to the ironic

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

45

matter and manner of Vanity Fair (especially in that telling conjunction of piety and turtle soup); but when in chapter 30 we arrive at 'Baden, the prettiest booth of all Vanity Fair' (p. 401), we have full Thackerayan reflexivity, intertext within intertext, his own included. As one might expect from an author so interested in art, several biblical allusions are to subjects common in painting. Susannah and the elders (Apocrypha, Daniel 13) comes in twice, once when both Gandish and Smee are vying to paint Lord Kew's portrait (p. 240), once when both Binnie and the Colonel turn up with bouquets for Rosey (p. 738). Clive sees Ethel as a perfect model for the man-slayer Salome (Matthew 14) and Judith from the Apocrypha (p. 314). And in Italy his servant's aged mother 'having been a Versus, is now a Witch of Endor' (1 Samuel 28) as the rest of her family have supplied models for patriarchs, cherubs, shepherds etc.I (p. 469). Among the emblematic headletters drawn by Doyle, Thackeray includes one of his favourite biblical motifs, the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-7), for chapter 77, The Shortest and Happiest in the Whole History'. It recounts how Ethel finds Sophia

Alethea Newcome's letter of intent to bequeath a sizeable sum to Clive and acts upon it to save Clive and the Colonel from their penury. The Colonel is good Samaritan to Charles Honey man (p. 325), rescuing him from the sponging house where he is locked up for debt, and commenting, 'We have read of other prodigals who were kindly treated; and we may have debts of our own to

46

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

forgive, boys' (p.328).29 On the other hand, on the tendency of relatives to be hard on their kin, the narrator remarks: If he falls among thieves, the respectable Pharisees of his race turn their heads aside and leave him penniless and bleeding.... How naturally Joseph's brothers made salaams to him ... when they found the poor outcast a prime minister and worth ever so much money! [Genesis 45] Surely human nature is not much altered since the days of those primeval Jews. We would not thrust brother Joseph down a well and sell him bodily [Genesis 37:28-36], but - but if he has scrambled out of a well of his own digging, and got out of his early bondage into renown and credit, at least we applaud and respect him, and are proud of Joseph as a member of the family, (p. 62) The headletter of chapter 53, 'In Which Kinsmen Fall Out', picks another painterly subject, showing Rebecca at the well approached by Abraham's servant seeking her as a wife for Isaac (Genesis 24) a reference to the Colonel's attempt to promote the marriage of Clive and Ethel with Barnes's assistance. As both Juliet McMaster and Jack P. Rawlins observe, Thackeray's narrative line characteristically oscillates between concrete action and moral reflection in the manner of an apologue; it has a 'tendency to slide away from the substance of the vision to the evaluation of it, and a consideration of its effect on the viewer'.30 For a parabolic author, the famous parables are obviously serviceable. Thus, beginning with his by now familiar dictum about all narratives, and at the general moral and preacherly level, the narrator discusses the jeux de societe surrounding Baden's gambling, particularly the sale of virgins: Ah! yes; all stories are old. You proud matrons in your May Fair markets, have you never seen a virgin sold, or sold one? Have you never heard of a poor wayfarer fallen among robbers, and not a Pharisee to help him? Of a poor woman fallen more sadly yet, abject in repentence and tears, and a crowd to stone her? [John, 8:1-11] I pace this broad Baden walk as the sunset is gilding the hills round about... and wonder sometimes, is it the sinners who are the most sinful? Is it poor prodigal [Luke 15:1132] yonder amongst the bad company, calling black and red and tossing the champagne; or brother Straitlace that grudges his

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

47

repentence? Is it downcast Hagar that slinks away with poor little Ishmael in her hand; or bitter old virtuous Sarah, who scowls at her from my demure Lord Abraham's arm? [Genesis 16:3 and 21:14] (p. 360) The latter story is of course that of Abraham's barren wife Sara, who persuades Abraham to beget a child, Ishmael, with her maidservant Hagar. When Sara later does bear Isaac, she gets Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away. As he does with classical figures like Ulysses and Ariadne, by putting the ancient tale into modern dress, Thackeray causes a complicated reaction in which the ancient is a gloss on the modern but the modernisation also moves us towards a reassessment or reinterpretation of the ancient text, in this case domesticating and secularising it. The biblical motif most frequently alluded to in The Newcomes is that of the prodigal son, just mentioned. It seems an appropriate motif to invoke in a novel that cyclically dwells on the tensions and affections of father and son. For if The Newcomes has a subtle and complex love interest, its most moving relationship is still that of the Colonel and Clive. Curiously, however, in nearly all allusions to the prodigal son in the novel, the father's place is filled by a woman. As a boy, Clive runs away from home to his nurse, 'who housed the prodigal, and killed her calf for him' (p. 29). Florae, when he has lost 'everything but my honour' gambling at Baden, says 'Sometimes I have had a mind to go home; my mother, who is an angel all forgiveness, would receive her prodigal, and kill the fatted veal for me. But what will you? He annoys me - the domestic veal' (p. 351). The domestic veal seems to have stuck in Thackeray's mind. Lady Kew provokes the Duchesse d'lvry by asserting that Lord Kew, whom the Duchesse has been trying to entrap would attend to his duties as an English peer and a country gentleman. We shall go home ... and kill the veau gras, and you shall see our dear prodigal will become a very quiet gentleman. The duchesse said, 'my Lady Kew's plan was most edifying. She was charmed to hear that Lord Kew loved veal; there were some who thought that meat rather insipid', (p. 447) Affectedly pious Maria Newcome welcomes the Colonel to dinner with an implicit application of the parable that undermines the ways of piety.

48

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference 'Why, why/ her fine eyes seemed to say, 'have you so long neglected us? Do you think because I am wise, and gifted, and good, and you are, it must be confessed, a poor creature with no education, I am not also affable? Come, let the prodigal be welcomed by his virtuous relatives: come and lunch with us, colonel!' (p. 703)

In biblical allusion and quotation as in other sorts, Thackeray seldom places the target and receiving texts in simple parallel; there is nearly always some skewing, some touch of wit, some irreverence to enliven the intellectual play. Since the veal is so prominent in allusions to the prodigal son, it may not be surprising that another of Thackeray's favourite allusions is to Proverbs 15:17, 'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith'. Announcing the eternally recurrent (and opposed) motifs he will employ in the novel, he includes 'dinners of herbs with contentment and without, and banquets of stalled oxen where there is care and hatred aye, and kindness and friendship too, along with the feast. It does not follow that all men are honest because they are poor; and I have known some who were friendly and generous, although they had plenty of money' (p. 6). In chapter 28, where Ethel appears at dinner with the 'Sold' ticket pinned to her frock (and embedded in a couple of paragraphs that blend together the sale of virgins, Thomson's Tancred and Sigismunda, an address by British Women to Mrs. Stowe, the drugging and burning of wives in Suttee, The Arabian Nights, and British marriage), the narrator reflects that when parents are preparing their daughters for marriage he prefers 'not to call at their mansion, No. 1000 in Grosvenor Square, but to partake of a dinner of herbs rather than of that stalled ox which their cook is roasting whole' (p. 364). In a similarly dark set of moral reflections on the death of Lady Kew, who has lived fourscore years only to be 'found dancing among the idle virgins' [Matthew 25:1-3], he concludes that she now 'reposes after a long feast where no love has been' (p. 725). As Phillipps observes, slight references are sometimes more effective than elaborate ones, and he cites as an example of Thackeray's 'mastery of tone'31 an account of Jack Belsize's early poverty: 'As for Jack Belsize, how he lived; how he laughed; how he dressed himself so well, and looked so fat and handsome; how he got a shilling to pay for a cab or a cigar; what ravens fed him;

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

49

was a wonder to all' (p. 366). Though a scapegrace, he is a sympathetic one as suggested by the narrator's connection of him with the prophet Elijah in the time of drought, whom the Lord commands to 'hide thyself by the brook, Cherith . . . . And it shall be, that thou shalt drink of the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there' (I Kings 17:3-4). Again, though in an incident we might now consider melodramatic, Thackeray, by a play of biblical implication, makes more subtle the disturbance of Barnes's fashionable wedding at St. George's, Hanover Street, attended by 'dukes, marquises, and earls', and reported at length in the 'Morning Herald, and Court Journal, as well as in the Newcome Chronicle and Independent, and the Dorking Intelligencer and Chanticlere Weekly Gazette' (p. 474). Before the service begins, the working-class woman 'of vulgar appearance' and her children, whom Barnes has cast off, are escorted from the church by smirking policemen. She slunk through the throng of emblazoned carriages, and the press of footmen arrayed as splendidly as Solomon in his glory. John jeered at Thomas, William turned his powdered head, and signalled Jeames, who answered with a corresponding grin, as the woman with sobs, and wild imprecations, and frantic appeals, made her way through the splendid crowd, escorted by her aides de camp in blue. (p. 475) The splendour of Solomon in his glory is ironically appropriate to the costumed footmen, but the full significance of the allusion, extending not just to St. George's, the wedding, and the footmen but to the 'common' woman and her children, comes from its context in Christ's sermon on religious ostentation and the lilies of the field (Matthew 6, the Sermon on the Mount): Therefore, when thou doest thine alms [religious observances], do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men.... And why are ye anxious for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field ... even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these. Charles Honeyman, as a self-indulgent clergyman, is the focus for some minor comic and irreverent biblical allusion, especially

50

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

concerning his finances. 'A voice within me cries, "Go forth, Charles Honeyman, fight the good fight [1 Timothy 6:12]; wipe the tears of the repentant sinner; sing of hope to the agonized criminal; whisper courage, brother, courage, at the ghastly death-bed, and strike down the infidel with the lance of evidence and the shield of reason!"' (p. 38). Honeyman probably thinks this sounds well in a letter explaining that he has drawn a draft on the Colonel for two hundred and fifty pounds without permission. Bayham characteristically calls Honeyman a 'hoary old Ananias' (p. 162), in Acts 5:111, Ananias having sold a possession and lied about holding back part of the price when he gave the money to Peter. One of Honeyman's most successful sermons at Lady Whittlesea's, occasioned by the death of a young prince, is on Absolom, the son of David (2 Samuel: 18-19): 'It was, indeed, a stirring discourse, and caused thrills through the crowd to whom Charles imparted it. "Famous, ain't it?" says Sherrick' (p. 583). The theatrical sermon is a sign of Honeyman's restored fortunes, consequent on the revamping of Lady Whittlesea's with Sherrick's cash and assistance. Biblical allusion approaches the level of common sayings when Lord Kew, wondering how Clara Pulleyn can have accepted Barnes, draws on David's prayer (Psalm 138:14) for his observation: 'We are fearfully and wonderfully made, especially women' (p. 390). But there is wit in the narrator's observation, after Lord Farintosh has proposed to Ethel: 'Miss Blackcap may retire, like Jephtha's daughter, for all Farintosh will relieve her' (p. 536), Jephtha's daughter being allowed two months to 'bewail her virginity' before being put to death by her father in fulfillment of a vow (Judges 11:29-40). On a more sombre note, the Colonel tells Pendennis 'he would sing "Nunc dimittis", could he but see the two children [Rosey and Clive] happy; and that he would lie easier in purgatory if that could be brought about' (p. 742). His attempts to make them happy result in an earthly purgatory for them and him, and his sufferings will make the words from the Song of Simeon, 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace' (Luke 2:29), an expression of satisfaction at departing from mortal life, seem ironically apt. The ending of the novel is a kind of meditation on the thirtyseventh Psalm: 23. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and he delighteth in his way.

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

51

24. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down, for the Lord upholdeth him with His hand. 25. I have been young, and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread. Pendennis hears these words at the Grey Friars' Founder's Day service just before discovering Colonel Newcome among the poor pensioners (pp. 952-3). The conjunction of age and youth reflected in the psalm underscores the novel's cyclic pattern once again. Later in the Colonel's room, Pendennis turns up the text in the Colonel's open Bible and the two commune over it, Pendennis struck with humility and the "Divine Will, which ordains these trials, these triumphs, these humiliations, these blest griefs, this crowning Love' (p. 956). The Colonel accepts his lot peacefully and with gratitude. Pendennis on the other hand is somewhat indignant at the clergyman for choosing a passage which reminds the pensioners of their destitution. Laura, to whom he makes his complaint, 'rather declines to argue the point raised, and with dictatorial piety pronounces "All the psalms are good, sir," ... and thus the discussion closed' (p. 957). The note of restiveness, evident in Pendennis and provoked in the reader, is perhaps appropriate to the novel's whole structure and the resonance of its principle intertext, for in spite of the spectacle of wearisome repetition and vanity that Ecclesiastes presents we are reminded at the end that the Divine will prevails: Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgement, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. Even in the justifiably admired ending of The Newcomes there is characteristic Thackerayan doubleness. For while some readers will be moved by the genuine note of Christian charity and humility that Pendennis stresses, others will not take as kindly to Laura's note of piety and resignation and may feel that the Colonel's other note of fatalism is more appropriate: The colonel was a fatalist: he had often advanced this oriental creed in his simple discourses with his son and Clive's friends' (pp. 879-80). Nor is the conventional plot twist, of the discovered letter of intent to leave Clive money, allowed to end things in unalloyed good

52

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

fortune - the Colonel never understands it and, though Clive may be presumed to be reasonably affluent, the marriage of Clive and Ethel is left in the air.32 Biblical allusion in The Newcomes addresses a religiously knowledgeable, middle-class, Victorian readership. Taking from Ecclesiastes an archetypal view of literature as recurrence, and recognising the Bible as an encyclopedic form storing within it the motifs and basic stories of our civilisation, Thackeray first produces the theory of layered fable in the opening pages of the novel, and then calls upon the Bible's store of motifs to supplement and to some extent contain all the other modes of fable in his richly allusive and intertextual construction. As Bunyan's Vanity Fair is Christian allegory given a graphic and concrete social texture, Thackeray's is a social panorama shading off into a religious vision. At their best, as in his whole range of allusion, his biblical allusions work as a kind of shorthand, saying briefly what for a thoughtful and knowledgeable reader can expand into a wealth of implication. In large, the manner is serious though a little bleak, as is Ecclesiastes; in small, it is often irreverent, comic, ironic. Consistently with his whole vision in the book, his biblical allusions are hardly there to reassure and comfort us - they too go askew, contradict, and deconstruct. Things disintegrate in his world, especially easy moral stereotypes: 'there are actually bishops who are not hypocrites; there are liberal men even among the Whigs, and the Radicals themselves are not all aristocrats at heart' (p. 6). But if things fall apart, he nevertheless, as Chesterton said, stands 'for the remains of Christian humility', and the twists of his allusive technique deflate self satisfaction, Christian included. NOVELS Alongside the ranks of allusion to Horace, Juvenal, Shakespeare, the Bible and high culture in general, go multitudes of allusions to novels, fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, nursery rhymes, saint's lives, histories of boxing and popular lore, all the probable delectations of the 'Lazy, Idle Boy' of The Roundabout Papers. Since he is writing a romance, for readers with a taste for romance (the lazy, idle boy 'will know most plots by the time he is twenty', RP p. 355), and since he has advised his readers that all stories and characters are recurrent, Thackeray naturally alludes to a spectrum of novels

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

53

ranging from the classic Don Quixote to those thrillers that Wordsworth castigated as catering to 'a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation'.33 Thackeray had been reading Don Quixote while writing the first four numbers of The Newcomes in the summer of 1853: 'There are sweet pastoralities through the book', he said, 'and that piping of shepherds and pretty sylvan ballet which dances always round the principal figures is delightfully pleasant to m e . . . ./34 Cervantes functions both as influence and intertext. The influence is evident in the ironic pastoralities of the first number with its jumble of pastoral fables, the Colonel's sentimental triumph in the Cave of Harmony, and the description of Mrs. Newcome's 'stifling garden of Eden' in fundamentalist Clapham. They continue throughout the book, particularly in the representation of Clive and Ethel as swain and shepherdess (especially in chapter 47), and in Ethel's counterpoint of sordid social climbing and affected primitivism.35 The Colonel is identified with Don Quixote several times in the novel: 'I tell you what', General de Boots growls at the foppish Barnes, 'if you were more like him it wouldn't hurt you. He's an odd man; they call him Don Quixote in India; I suppose you have read Don Quixote?' (p. 85). Sancho Panza, the man of down-toearth opinions, is charmingly transformed in The Newcomes into a sceptical Scot, Mr. Binnie, admirer of Hume and Gibbon. Binnie confirms the Colonel's avatar; seeing Clive looking sombre he says, 'Egad, Tom, they used to call you the knight of the woful countenance, and Clive has just inherited the paternal mug' (p. 741). The headletter to chapter 66 shows Don Quixote on Rosinante, in allusion to the beginning of the Colonel's campaign against Barnes, which culminates in the Newcome election. Like Don Quixote, the Colonel is in many ways a man out of his time, with an affecting courtliness and simplicity that shows up strongly against the cynical and worldly Barnes. Robert A. Colby, in Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity, observes that Thackeray meant for this old soldier to exemplify the aristocratic ideal of chivalry in a modern bourgeois setting', and he quotes J. H. Stocqueler's The British Officer: His Positions, Duties, Emoluments and Privileges (1851), who says 'the British uniform should represent the generous and lofty sentiments of which the golden spurs of knighthood were once emblematical'.36 However the Colonel also shares with the Don vehement convictions about virtue that create havoc around him: The wicked are wicked no doubt', says Thackeray, 'and they

54

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts: but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?' (p. 246). The notion echoes significantly in other parts of the book too, as when the narrator pursues the unhappy effect Lord Kew's virtuous mother has had on him. The Colonel's benign object in life is to make Clive happy, to make him the prince of a fairy-tale with a happy ending, but that consuming passion connects him with Thackeray's vision of Vanity, 'Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this World?' (Vanity Fair, p. 878). If Don Quixote is an influence it is also an intertext. 'Tout texte', says Julia Kristeva, 'se construit comme mosai'que de citations, tout texte est absorption et transformation d'un autre texte'.37 In this case the mosaic is constructed from several other texts, since the Colonel, for example, is compounded not only from Don Quixote but from Dr Primrose, Sir Charles Grandison, Sir Roger de Coverley etc. In a sense, he compounds himself from them; they are not only alluded to in helping us understand the Colonel but they form 'a part of his travelling library. "T read these, sir," he used to say, "because I like to be in the company of gentlemen; and Sir Roger de Coverley, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Don Quixote are the finest gentlemen in the world'" (p. 49). (Another intertext here would be the whole Victorian literature of what constitutes a gentleman.) The pastoralism surrounding Clive and Ethel may have significance in relation to the pastoralisms of Don Quixote, but there are many pieces to the pastoral intertext here as well like the Garden of Eden (at the Cave of Harmony, Mrs. Newcome's Clapham villa, and down-at-heel in Madame de Florae's garden). Elegant eighteenth-century pastoralism informs the Watteau-like picture of Clive and Ethel as swain and shepherdess for the headletter of chapter 47, and the Marivaux-like artificiality of their conversation, turned into dramatic dialogue, in 'Contains Two or Three Acts of a Little Comedy'. 'L'intertext est I'ensemble des textes que Von retrouve dans sa memoire a la lecture d'un passage donne', says Riffaterre, and the allusive texture here is a good example of ensemble.38 The object in discerning an intertext, however, is not merely to identify a source or sources but to understand or appreciate the absorption or transformation.39 Here as elsewhere in Thackeray, the incorporation of images, motifs, characters, and styles serves to create a sense of simultaneous identity and dislocation, romance and destruction of romance, the unique moment and the eternally repeated moment. Colby notes how

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

55

Thackeray's contemporaries 'In trying to pin down his protean nature, ... used such phrases as "crystal of many facets" and "a strange effervescence of ... widely differing elements"'.40. Allusion to classic eighteenth-century English novels, Sir Charles Grandison, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, serves primarily to establish Colonel Newcome's character by making it expressive of the eighteenth century in which the Colonel was educated, with a colouring from Mrs. Newcome's fundamentalist religion. ' "Tom Jones, sir; Joseph Andrews*, sir", he cried, twirling his mustachios. "I read them when I was a boy, when I kept other bad company, and did other low and disgraceful things, of which I'm ashamed now."' Recounting how Mrs. Newcome picks up his Joseph Andrews to read, 'thinking it might be by Mrs. Hannah More, or some of that sort', and is scandalised, he concludes: she was in the right, sir, and I was in the wrong. A book, sir, that tells the story of a parcel of servants, of a pack of footmen and ladies' maids fuddling in ale-houses! Do you suppose I want to know what my kirmutgars and cousomahs are doing? I am as little proud as any man in the world: but there must be distinction, sir; and as it is my lot and Clive's lot to be a gentleman, I won't sit in the kitchen and booze in the servants' hall. As for that Tom Jones - that fellow that sells himself, sir - by heavens my blood boils when I think of him! (pp. 49-50) And the Colonel does in fact lose his self-possession and start berating Tom Jones directly as though he were present in the flesh. Resuming his evaluation, he cites authority: The great and good Dr. Johnson has settled that question. You remember what he said to Mr. Boswell about Fielding?' 'And yet Gibbon praises him, colonel,' said the colonel's interlocutor,... 'He says that Mr. Fielding was of a family that drew its origin from the Counts of Hapsburg; but -' 'Gibbon! Gibbon was an infidel; and I would not give the end of this cigar for such a man's opinion.' (p. 51) The passage is excellent for evoking a historical period and the complexities of its temper allusively. The reference to Hannah More in connection with Mrs. Newcome shows Thackeray's social astuteness. Hannah More was not only the writer of pious works.

56

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Her Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1790) anticipates A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity (1797) by William Wilberforce, pre-eminent in the Clapham Sect of which Mrs. Newcome is a fictional member. Moreover More's zeal brought clerical abuse down on her, charging her with 'Methodism'. (Thackeray makes the Clapham Evangelicals Methodists.) The allusion to Boswell is to one of Dr. Johnson's most vivid literary judgements: 'Fielding being mentioned, Johnson exclaimed, "he was a blockhead;" and upon my expressing astonishment at so strange an assertion, he said, "What I mean by his being a blockhead is that he was a barren rascal.'"41 Gibbon was notorious for his anti-Christian bias in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), especially in chapters 15 and 16 of the first volume, which the sceptical Binnie uses to devastate Honeyman (p. 529), but Gibbon praises Fielding in the opening chapters of his Autobiography (referred to later apropos of Gibbon's and Binnie's awkwardness in riding [p. 529]). The Colonel here invokes eighteenth-century quarrels, judgements and pieties, but in the context of a later England (the date is about 1827) and in the amused company of young sophisticates, Warrington and Pendennis, who respect him but who will often pull his leg for his fossilised opinions. Thackeray's own opinion of Fielding is more evident in the preface to Pendennis, where he asserts that 'Since the Author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN'. Thackera achieves several things at once in this comic passage depicting the Colonel's opinions: he deftly and economically enriches the novel's social, religious, and historical density; he introduces the Colonel as a kind of time-traveller who will increasingly feel the weight of his isolation among his son's friends; and he touches on that major Victorian concern, the question of what a gentleman is. The allusions again, though to memorable passages, imply a readership more than usually well-read, capable not only of identifying them but of feeling their weight, context and relative significance. Thackeray had more than a passing affection for Sir Charles Grandison. Of Henry Esmond he told his mother, 'the hero is as stately as Sir Charles Grandison - something like Warrington - a handsome likeness of an ugly son of yours'.42 In The Newcomes he takes a single image from Grandison to express the Colonel's courtliness on two occasions. When he bows to Madame de Florae,

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

57

'It was like an elderly Sir Charles Grandison saluting a middle-aged Miss Byron' (p. 274). Later he bows to Laura Pendennis, like Sir Charles Grandison making 'his very beautifullest bow to Miss Byron' (p. 670). These occasions are analogues to the Colonel's meeting with Ethel in chapter 15 (accompanied by an illustration in the text), where 'No doubt, as the old soldier held the girl's hand in his, the little talisman led him back to Hades, and he saw Leonora' (p. 201). The memory of Leonore (now Madame de Florae) superimposes itself on Ethel, and the novel's cyclical pattern of human experience asserts itself, the story of Clive and Ethel about to reiterate that of the Colonel and Leonore. The moment and image reflect themselves backwards through time like images in mirrors set face to face and invoking again the ur-text of Ecclesiastes. A minor novel of the eighteenth century that receives repeated mention is Haywood's History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), a story in which Jenny and Jessamy, affianced by their parents, are orphaned, suffer instructive adventures, watch the shortcomings in the lives and affections of their friends, and having drawn rationally edifying conclusions from their experiences, marry and live happily. Lord Kew, wishing to dissuade Jack Belsize from his infatuation with Clara, deplores 'this fine picture of Jenny and Jessamy falling in love at first sight, billing and cooing in an arbour, and retiring to a cottage afterwards to go on cooing and billing Pshaw! what folly is this!. .. Who is to pay for Jenny's tea and cream, and Jessamy's mutton chops?' (p. 392). The allusion is consistent with Thackeray's ironic turning inside out of fictions that stylise life according to the sentimental and idealised patterns of romance. So, when Barnes and Clara are married and the narrator turns to Barnes's cruelty to her, he asks: Now, how will you have the story? Worthy mammas of families - if you do not like to have your daughters told that bad husbands will make bad wives . . . . Banish the newspaper out of your houses, and shut your eyes to the truth, the awful truth, of life and sin. Is the world made of Jennies and Jessamies; and passion the play of schoolboys and schoolgirls, scribbling valentines and interchanging lollipops? Is life all over when Jenny and Jessamy are married; and are there no subsequent trials, griefs, wars, bitter heart-pangs, dreadful temptations, defeats, remorses, sufferings to bear, and dangers to overcome? (pp. 729-30)

58

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Though Hay wood's novel might be rather unfamiliar, the term Jenny and Jessamy had become a byword for sentimental romance, and the allusion works like Thackeray's other comments playing off artifice and reality. Among the major novelists, as we might expect, allusion to Scott in The Neivcomes considerably outstrips that to any other novelist. Scott is fundamental to Thackeray's thinking about the novel. The evidence is everywhere in his works, in his parodic continuation of Ivanhoe, in Rebecca and Rowena, most notoriously in his adaptation of Ivanhoe's paired heroines for his own Rebecca and Amelia in Vanity Fair, and in his competition with Scott as historical novelist in Henry Esmond. He was particularly preoccupied by the tensions within Scott as both romancer and historian. As Judith Wilt observes in a brief but pithy commentary on Thackeray and Scott, Thackeray's reaction to Ivanhoe is double, as things usually are in Thackeray.43 First comes disappointment with Scott's original outcome: must Ivanhoe 'whose heart has been warmed in the company of the tender and beautiful Rebecca, sit down contented for life by the side of such a frigid piece of propriety as that icy, faultless, prim, niminy-piminy Rowena?' (Rebecca and Rowena, p. 501). Rejecting that proposition, Thackeray provides a continuation of the story in which Rowena dies and Ivanhoe marries Rebecca. But all through the continuation we enjoy Thackeray's characteristic parodic instinct - Rowena is a shrew, jealously suspicious of what went on with Rebecca, so that Ivanhoe lights out for more adventure to get away from home. And having invoked this anti-romantic vein, Thackeray's own conclusion fails to satisfy the original romantic impulse that he has had, as he says, 'ever since I grew to love Rebecca'. He concludes: 'Married I am sure they were ... but I don't think they ... were subsequently very boisterously happy. Of some sort of happiness melancholy is a characteristic, and I think these were a solemn pair, and died rather early' (Rebecca and Rowena, p. 572). As Wilt says, 'It is as though Scott deceived Thackeray twice, once by denying the schoolboy-reader his romantic Rebecca, and again by anticipating the mature melancholy author's rejection of romance'. All is 'selfreflexive circle', 'artifice disclaiming artifice', 'self-consuming'.44 Scott mingles with much smaller fry in JJ. Ridley's inspiration. JJ. devouring Miss Flinders's stock of popular novels is a Newcomes version of Thackeray's lazy, idle boy,

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

59

He has made illustrations to every one of those books, and been frightened at his own pictures of Manfroni or the One-Handed Monk, Abellino the Terrific Bravo of Venice, and Rinaldo Rinaldino Captain of Robbers. How he has blistered Thaddeus of Warsaw with his tears, and drawn him in his Polish cap, and tights, and Hessians! William Wallace, the Hero of Scotland, how nobly he has depicted him! With what whiskers and bushy ostrich plumes! - in a tight kilt, and with what magnificient calves to his legs, laying about him with his battlea x e . . . ,'45 (pp. 158-9) (Thackeray drew just such a figure of Sir Aymer de Valence of Scottish Chiefs on the title page of his Latin grammar.) When Honeyman moves in with a set of Scott, JJ. 'reads them with such a delight and passion of pleasure as all the delights of future days will scarce equal'. 'An idle feller', thinks his father (p. 159), waking him from a dream of Rebecca with thoughts of apprenticing him to a tailor. Ridley is surrounded with the imagery of romance and chivalry to the end: 'The palette on his arm was a great shield painted of many colours: he carried his maul-stick and a sheaf of brushes along with it, the weapons of his glorious but harmless war' (p. 851). But this romantic passage ends with the Colonel's and Clive's frustrations with the mundane: Tn place of Art the colonel brings him a ledger; and in lieu of first love, shows him Rosey' (p. 851). The patterns of romance, of artifice, in Thackeray are not simply a matter of self-indulgence and escapism, as with the lazy, idle boy. For all his emphasis on realism Thackeray doesn't merely oppose the neat designs of romance to the chaos of low-mimetic realism. He characteristically shows people modelling their lives on the patterns of romance so that those patterns themselves become part of the texture of realism.46 The Newcomes is full of characters aspiring to the shape and completion of artifice. The Colonel tries to force his notion of a fairy tale on Clive. Ethel oscillates between projections of herself as sordid schemer and pastoral innocent. Scott serves as a convenient storehouse for artifice as in Sandy M'Collop's painting of his kinsman, The M'Collop of M'Collop', the description of which is even further heightened by Fred Bay ham's inflated rhetoric as reviewer. But in addition to providing models for romantic representation, Scott

60

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

provides intertexts by which a character can understand or project his own cares. When the Colonel applies to Barnes for assistance in matching the love-sick Clive with Ethel, Clive (whom Lady Kew scornfully refers to as Dick Tinto, the sign-painter in Scott's Bride of Lammermoor) has a moment of artistic success when a dealer buys his 'Sir Brian the Templar carrying off Rebecca' (p. 696). (The passage comes right after the Colonel's rejection of the notion of Clive's running off to Gretna with Ethel.) Similarly, when the whole scheme falls through, Warrington and Pendennis, looking at Clive's sketch of a scene from Scott's Rokeby (III, xxviii), troll out the refrain: He turned his charger as he spake, Beside the River shore; He gave his bridle-rein a shake, With adieu for evermore, My dear! Adieu for evermore! (p.714) In his elegant prosperity Clive 'was always greatly delighted with that Scotch man-at-arms in Quentin Durward [ch. 5], who twists off an inch or two of his gold chain to treat a friend and pay for a bottle. He would give a comrade a ring or a fine jewelled pin, if he had no money' (p. 303).47 And when Clive and J.J. Ridley travel to Antwerp they mix associations of Velasquez and Rubens with Scott, their inn seeming 'such a hostelry as that where Quentin Durward first saw his sweetheart' (pp. 341-2). Even the Frenchman Florae, who nevertheless is an industrious student of the British, sees himself playing Scott. When Clive first encounters Florae, his fortunes depleted by gambling, Florae's servant tries to maintain dignity by referring to a superfluity of shirts that his master in fact doesn't have. Florae says: 'He is Caleb Balderstone and I am Ravens wood. Yes, I am Edgard. Let us have coffee and a cigar, Balderstoun.' Tlait-il Monsieur le Victomte?' says the French Caleb. Thou comprehendest not English. Thou readest not Valtare Scott, thou!' cries the master, (p. 353) The ostensible point is that Caleb, the old butler in Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, like Florae's servant, tries to maintain family

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

61

appearances in misfortune. (Florae's present condition is reinforced within three sentences by allusion to Virgil's Georgics ['duris urgens in rebus egestass! pronounced in the true French manner'] and Napoleon's misfortunes at Moscow.) But the interest is also in Florae's zest for English. In a more sinister vein, young Jones, a schoolfriend of Clive's, becomes fascinated by the venomous and theatrical Duchesse d'lvry: '"Do you know the princess calls herself the Queen of Scots, and she calls me Julian Avenel" [a character from Scott's The Abbot and The Monastery in which Mary Queen of Scots figures], says Jones' (p. 415). The Duchesse is probably the most consciously artificial character in the book. In all these instances, not only is the author allusive, but also the characters live in a world of texts that they use to define and interpret experience.48 We have already looked briefly at the gothic and popular novels mentioned as inspiration for J.J. Ridley. They are all part of an anatomy or archetypal catalogue of the novel form's capabilities and perennial structures, the schemata that the lazy, idle boy (the ultimate, specialist, and comprehensive model of novel readers) will know by the time he is twenty, and that a considerable portion of Thackeray's similarly informed readership will also recognise. This is not to say that Thackeray's readership is quite the same as that for Abellino the Terrific Bravo of Venice, since he introduces such popular works not just as works to be savoured but as works to be laughed at too. A sophisticated reaction is called for. One can enjoy them because one can also appreciate Virgil, Shakespeare, Don Quixote and Scott, just as Northrop Frye elucidating the archetypal patterns inherent in the Bible, Homer, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare et al can also happily notice similar patterns in comic strips. What the general novel-reading public would know as well as or better than gothic romances, Thaddeus of Warsaw, or Scottish Chiefs, would be the popular novelists of his own youth that Thackeray had parodied with skill in the Punch series, 'Novels by Eminent Hands' (1847) - G. P. R. James, Mrs. Gore, Bulwer-Lytton, Cooper, Disraeli and Lever. In allusion to any of these authors we get reflexivity squared, inasmuch as the relationships between text, parody, and subsequent reactions by both victim and parodist become both notorious and intricate. One catches the reverberation but not knowing quite which wall of the canyon it is coming from. Nor did Thackeray's victims. He skewered G. P. R. James's favourite habit of beginning a book with one or two characters on

62

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

horseback, and subsequently James dropped them, rather pathetically commenting, 'to say the truth, I do not know why I should wish to get rid of my two horsemen, especially the one on the white horse', but he had not, in fact, used any notable white horses - the author himself is remembering not his own texts but Thackeray's pictorial representation of the white charger.49 By the time of The Newcomes (1853-54), a Thackerayan allusion to the equestrian opening is an allusion as much to Thackeray's text as to James's. Chapter 51 begins: I might open the present chapter as a contemporary writer of romance is occasionally in the habit of commencing his tales of chivalry, by a description of a November afternoon, with falling leaves, tawny forests, gathering storms, and other autumnal phenomena; and two horsemen winding up the romantic road which leads from Richmond Bridge to the 'Star and Garter'. (p. 669) And the headletter illustration shows two cavaliers approaching an impressive castle-like structure beside which is a sign reading 'Star and Garter'. The reflexivity is so thorough-going that one might

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

63

suppose the chapter title, 'Old Friends' referred not only to Clive and the Colonel, the two horsemen, but to the equestrian trope and the Thackeray-James relationship. Although the chivalric figures would at first seem to be set off against the more pedestrian Star and Garter, in a typically Thackerayan opposition of romance to reality, the rest of the book's allusive texture reminds us that the Colonel is indeed a chivalric, Quixotic figure. And on the other hand, as Londoners might know, the Star and Garter was not an ordinary tavern but an unusually pretty, rural inn with a lime walk and pastoral sweep of lawn. The text as an artifice involving choices of inclusion, exclusion, and style, is kept before the reader for some time here as the narrator, mentioning his new son's presentation to Clive and the Colonel, claims he, Pendennis, 'is not so rapturous; but, let us trust, behaves in a way becoming a man and a father', and resorting to occupatio continues, 'We forgo the description of his feelings as not pertaining to the history at present under consideration'. (His humorous claim for indulgence is itself couched in an allusion - the double-barrelled phrase, 'a man and ...', is a favourite of Thackeray's in various permutations coming from Wedge wood's famous anti-slavery medallion showing a slave and the motto, 'Am I not a man and a brother'). Having tossed off one occupatio, Pendennis proceeds to another: 'And here I am sorely tempted to a third description, which has nothing to do with the story to be sure, but which, if properly hit off, might fill a page very prettily. For is not a young mother one of the sweetest sights which life shows us?' (p. 670). What we are getting here is a Sternean discussion of the various possibilities for what as novelist he might write, all of them both raised and dropped, even in the process of writing. The artifice draws attention to its artificiality, for which the Jamesian opening, which at once recalls its parody, is an appropriate introduction. The other allusion to G. P. R. James in The Newcomes is on the old score of the essential similarity of novels and history: 'You tell your tales as you can, and state the facts as you think they must have been. In this manner, Mr. James, Titus Livius, Professor Alison, Robinson Crusoe, and all historians proceeded' (p. 297). The point is in the mixture: Livy and Alison actual historians, Robinson Crusoe a fictional one, G. P. R. James both a famous romance writer and historiographer to Her Majesty, the Queen. Thackeray's other antagonists from 'Novels by Eminent Hands' receive only light acknowledgement. Discovering Fred Bayham's

64

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

modest lodging house, Pendennis cries, 'And does the Red Rover live here ... and have we earthed him at last?' (p. 167), thus identifying the flamboyant Bayham with Fenimore Cooper's pirate hero in The Red Rover (1827), who is pursued in disguise by Lieutenant Henry Ark. And we have seen that Clive is struck with the parodic impulse, in visiting Pompeii, to take Bulwer Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii, 'the same place, names, people, and make a burlesque story' (p. 521). Mrs. Gore, our final 'Eminent Hand', has only a ghostly presence in The Newcomes for having exploited the name-dropping of London shops, another trick that Thackeray parodied but also adopted. As for the other contemporary novelists, Dickens and perhaps William Harrison Ainsworth enter The Newcomes. The Colonel's nurse, when he is a boy, gets in trouble with the sober inhabitants of his step-mother's house 'for telling Tommy stories of Lancashire witches and believing the same' (p. 25). Although the Lancashire witches of Pendle Forest were no doubt folklore with nurses, Thackeray's public would have read about them recently in Ainsworth's novel, The Lancashire Witches (1849). And when Lord Kew is recovering from his duel with Castillones, his brother, George Barnes, reads Oliver Twist to him (p. 502), another instance of establishing the historical ambience by allusion to its literature.50 I have left out of account here the French novelists that Thackeray frequently alludes to, but they are best dealt with in the section on France, since he uses them in part to produce a sense of French history, literary movements and sensibility. Along with other fairly recent and topical allusions, Thackeray's allusions to novelists classic and contemporary, major and very minor, foreign and domestic, collectively provide readers with a sense of culture shared, or at least of a slice of culture shared. His characteristic notes of deflation, inversion, and parody, however, might equally arouse a sense of culture problematised. THEATRE, BALLET, SONGS At the end of chapter 70, the usually ebullient Fred Bayham is 'sombre and downcast' as he contemplates the guests at the last of Colonel Newcome's dinners 'under the shadow of the picklebearing coco-nut-tree' (p. 898). Instead of the usual generals, judges, fogies and their respectable ladies, he sees a raffish

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

65

gathering of sinister looking managers, 'Mr. Ratray, who had returned, filled with rupees from the Indian bank', a 'little chattering attorney ... with a wife of dubious gentility' (pp. 898-9). Amid them sits Clive's wife Rosey. To a man of the world looking on, who has seen the men and morals of many cities, it was curious, almost pathetic, to watch that poor little innocent creature, fresh and smiling, attired in bright colours and a thousand gewgaws, simpering in the midst of these darkling people - practising her little arts, and coquetries, with such a Court round about her. An unconscious little maid, with rich and rare gems sparkling on all her fingers, and bright gold rings as many as belonged to the late Old Woman of Banbury Cross - still she smiled and prattled innocently before these banditti - I thought of Zerlina and the Brigands, in Fra Diavolo. (p. 899) The technique of presentation here is largely a play on light and dark, innocence and menace, 'bright colours ... in the midst of these darkling people'. The nursery rhyme of the Old Woman of Banbury Cross, with its white horse and lady with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, reinforces Rosey's bright and expensively arrayed innocence. The reference to Auber's Fra Diavolo, mentioned as though off-hand, is more elaborate, a clever use of an intertext as both analogue and omen. The plot of Fra Diavolo is about a gang of robbers trying to rob Lord Cockbourg and Lady Pamela of their jewels and cash as they travel. Fra Diavolo, disguised as an opera singer, has been following and romancing Lady Pamela. The setting is an inn, where the innkeeper insists on marrying his daughter, Zerlina, to a rich man on the morrow, though she pines for her penurious lover. As the innocent Zerlina (in Act II) takes off her necklace and earrings and undresses for bed, Fra Diavolo and two of his gang, intending to rob Milord and Lady Pamela, enter furtively, ogle Zerlina from the darkness, and are about to molest and murder her when her lover and some dragoons arrive. We are invited to see Rosey, in the predatory company surrounding the Colonel now, as Zerlina surrounded by thieves and murderers in the shadows. The suggestion is in tune with the general portrayal of bland little Rosey, who even Clive thinks ought to be painted in milk, and with the air of gathering menace in the chapter. And the analogy is ominous,

66

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

anticipating the conclusion of the chapter, where the Bundelcund Bank fails, and the household furnishings, including Rosey's 'jewels and gewgaws', are put on display for auction, while the prospective buyers, 'gentlemen with their hats on are walking about the drawing-rooms, peering into the bed-rooms, weighing and poising the poor old silver coconut-tree, eyeing the plate and crystal, thumbing the damask of the curtains, and inspecting ottomans, mirrors, and a hundred articles of splendid trumpery . . . . I had not the heart to examine their plunder, and go amongst those wreckers' (p. 903). Fra Diavolo was first performed in 1830 and is therefore part of the multitude of references to art, music, theatre, books, and politics that recreate a sense of the culture surrounding and temporally tuned to the novel's action. Opera, burletta, ballet, plays (classical, Shakespearian, and melodramas), vaudeville, pantomime, charades, puppetry, equestrian theatre, glee singing provide a constant frame of allusion for Thackeray. His pleasure in theatre of all types saturates his works. As Robert Colby says, 'Thackeray conveys an omnivorous relish for the art of performance'.51 Both Colby and John Carey document his fascination with theatre extensively, and Joe K. Law, in a germane article, Thackeray and the Uses of Opera', surveys Thackeray's long-standing interest in opera and singers.52 Given the way we have seen Thackeray's allusiveness emphasising the reflexiveness of his work, its tendency to draw attention to its own fictional status, its humming oscillation between irony and romance, Carey's comments on Thackeray's preoccupation with theatre are particularly relevant. 'He saw the stage as a lighted box, with himself on the outside. In the box magic happened; the world was transfigured. But the watching satirist had (and wanted to have) always at hand the complicated, melancholy pleasure of knowing that the magic was just gas and greasepaint, and fairyland a fake'. 53 As we have seen, Thackeray likes to exploit the perennial appeals of romance then explode them on us, asking us in effect why we ever thought life was like that. But then he will answer that question by showing life's irresistible drive to assume the significance of poetic shape - nearly everyone in The Newcomes not only acts a part but tries to take the part for reality. Carey's remark that 'Opera and ballet provided, then, one of the great germinating-grounds for Thackeray's imagination'54 is not so much a comment on sources as on the peculiar and distinguishing

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

67

way Thackeray's imagination works. As both Colby and Carey note, he tended to see things, in his travels for instance, as theatrical scenes. Clive in Rome sees 'my lord the cardinal, in his ramshackle coach and his two, nay three footmen behind him; flunkies that look as if they had been dressed by the costumier of a British pantomime' (p. 463). But it is part of Thackeray's allusive method that imaginative metamorphosis occurs all the time. Clive, with his artist's eye, sees a statue of St. Michael: 'Milton wrote in bronze; I am sure Virgil polished off his Georgics in marble - sweet calm shapes! exquisite harmonies of line! As for the Aeneid; that, sir, I consider to be so many bas-reliefs, mural ornaments which affect me not much' (p. 465). But opera and theatre because of the attendant greasepaint and lights, which can be removed and turned off, are a useful reminder of doubleness. Clive and J.J. in their travels 'stopped to roost at Terracina (which was not at all like Fra Diavolo's Terracina at Covent Garden, as J.J. was distressed to remark)' (p. 514). Clive's first love is bestowed on Miss Saltarelli, dancing at Drury Lane, until he goes with a throbbing heart to her house to buy a ticket for her benefit night. Her mother entertained him in the French language in a dark parlour smelling of onions. And oh! issuing from the adjoining diningroom (where was a dingy vision of a feast and pewter pots upon a darkling tablecloth) - could that lean, scraggy, old, beetlebrowed, yellow face, who cried 'ou es tu done, maman?' with such a shrill nasal voice - could that elderly vixen be the blooming and divine Saltarelli? (pp. 247-8) Thackeray drops the curtain over this phase of Clive's maturation, asking 'can there be any more dreary object than those whitened and raddled old women who shudder at the slips?' (p. 248). There is a good deal of reminiscence on Thackeray's part in Clive's disillusionment. He too had mooned over dancers and actresses, especially the great Taglioni who introduced the formula for ballet-blanc first used in Robert le Diable in 1831, and for whom he developed an enduring admiration. Seeing her in 1829, Thackeray informed his mother, They have a certain dancing damsel yclept Taglioni who hath the most superb pair of pins, & maketh the most superb use of them that I ever saw a dancer do before'.55 The tutu costume was invented for her in La Sylphide in 1832. Describing Ethel's triumphant dancing, Pendennis/Thackeray says, 'Not till

68

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

the music stopped did she sink down on a seat, panting, and smiling radiant - as many, many hundred of years ago I remember to have seen Taglioni, after a conquering pas seul' (p. 541). From another of her successes, La Fille du Danube (1836), with a second act that takes place under water, Carey speculates that Thackeray may have contracted his 'strange feelings about sirens and waterproof women'.56 At one point Laura compares Ethel to a Bayadere, an Indian dancing girl, as in 'that poem of Goethe of which you are so fond' (p. 787). The poem is 'Der Gott und die Bajadere' (1797) about a bayadere who falls in love with a god and goes to heaven because of her amatory suffering - the sort of thing sentimental Laura would approve. But it is probable that what Pendennis, and Thackeray, like, as well perhaps as some of his readers, is Taglioni's version, another of her successes, Dieu et la Bayadere (1830), with music by Auber. Meyerbeer's opera, Robert le Diable,57 where Taglioni had shone in 1831, provides an analogy for the resurrection of the past in reminiscences between Lady Kew and the Due d'lvry: Old scandals woke up, old naughtinesses rose out of their graves, and danced, and smirked, and gibbered again, like those wicked nuns whom Bertram and Robert le Diable evoke from their sepulchres whilst the bassoon performs a diabolical incantation. The Brighton Pavilion was tenanted; Ranelagh and the Pantheon swarmed with dancers and masks; Perdita was found again, and walked a minuet with the Prince of Wales. Mrs. Clarke and the Duke of York danced together - a pretty dance, (pp. 413-14) Temporal adjustment here is twofold, Robert le Diable forming an appropriate association for the time in which Lady Kew and the Duke are talking, but their talk itself recalling the late eighteenth century and the peccadilloes of royalty, Prince George's (Florizel's) adultery with the actress, Mrs. Robinson, and the Duke of York's with Mrs. Clarke, who was eventually imprisoned for using her influence to obtain army promotions for bribery. The technique is no doubt apt in that plays and performances do tend to mark the years for us, becoming pegs on which to hang memories. The reference to Auber quoted above locates the action in time and culture, as does the first allusion to Auber in a decidedly nostalgic passage in chapter 1 setting up Pendennis's recollection

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

69

of the Cave of Harmony, 'when the acme of pleasure seemed to be to meet Jones of Trinity at the "Bedford", and to make an arrangement with him, and with King of Corpus (who was staying at the "Colonnade"), and Martin of Trinity Hall (who was with his family in Bloomsbury Square) to dine at the "Piazza", go to the play and see Braham [John Braham, 1774-1856, a famous tenor] in Fra Diavolo, and end the frolic evening by partaking of supper and a song at the "Cave of Harmony"' (p. 7). How thick the sedimentation of allusion becomes in such passages - academic, topographical, cultural, social. Several of the operatic allusions in The Newcomes consist of glossing one plot with another, enhancing the novel's effect of multiple fabulation, or as Law says: 'References to specific pieces of music often function as poetic allusion, providing momentary local illumination by bringing the whole of the operatic "text" to bear on Thackeray's own text'.58 Chapter 67, 'Newcome and Liberty', opens with an extended comic analogy between Colonel Newcome's contesting of the Newcome election against Barnes and William Tell's revolutionary activities in Switzerland: The senate of the 'King's Arms' was hostile to Sir Barnes Newcome.... As these patriots met over their cups, and over the bumper of friendship uttered the sentiments of freedom, they had often asked of one another, where should a man be found to rid Newcome of its dictator? Generous hearts writhed under the oppression; patriotic eyes scowled when Barnes Newcome went by: with fine satire, Tom Potts at Brown the hatter's shop, who made the hats for Sir Barnes Newcome's domestics, proposed to take one of the beavers - a gold-laced one with a cockade and a cord - and set it up in the market-place and bid all Newcome come bow to it, as to the hat of Gessler. 'Don't you think, Potts,' says F. Bayham,... 'Don't you think the colonel would make a good William Tell to combat against that Gessler?' (p. 865) The operatic allusion is to a decree by the Austrian bailiff, Gessler, during a celebration of one hundred years of Austrian rule, that Swiss citizens must bow to his hat, which he has placed on a pole. William Tell refuses and is forced to shoot an arrow at an apple on his son's head. Eventually Tell shoots Gessler, setting off the Swiss revolt of 1308. The legend was dramatised by Schiller in his play

70

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

William Tell, which was turned into an opera by Rossini in 1829. Celebrating revolution and freedom, both were major works and highly popular with Romantics. The broad strokes of opera provide room for parody, and the comically extravagant note of Thackeray's allusion is appropriate to the extravagance of the Colonel's action in taking up the election more for spite than for his politics, which are an eccentric mess, 'he surprised you as much by the latitudinarian reforms, which he was eager to press forward, as by the most singular old Tory opinions which he advocated on other occasions' (p. 874). Allusion is not simply to Rossini but to Schiller and popular illustration, 'the plays and pictures of William Tell', in which 'Arnold, Melchthal, and Werner' figure, the latter from the play rather than the opera (p. 866). Here they are transformed, in low mimetic key, into Tom Potts, a radical reporter, Fred Bayham, an enthusiast for oratory, and Charles Tucker, an attorney hoping for income as an election agent. Operatic allusion provided Thackeray with another convenient code for communicating an aura of illicit sexuality to a straitlaced readership. Of the Duchesse d'lvry's company we hear that: Poets had interviews with her. Musicians came and twanged guitars to her. Her husband, entering her room, would fall over the sabre and spurs of Count Almaviva from the boulevard, or Don Basilio with his great sombrero and shoe buckles, (p.409) Almaviva and Don Basilio are the lecherous Count and music master of Beaumarchais' Le Barbier de Seville (1775) and Le Manage de Figaro (1784). Mozart used the latter for his opera, Le Nozze di Figaro (1786) and Rossini the former for his Barbiere di Siviglia (1816). All four works, of course, were hugely popular and a convenient target for allusion. Count Alma viva's efforts at seduction are recalled again apropos of Lord Farintosh's exploits with dancehall girls at Mabille (where the Can Can is supposed to have been invented in the thirties) and opera dancers at Trois Freres, abetted by elderly toadies: Tf his lordship Count Almaviva wants a friend to carry the lantern or to hold the ladder, do you suppose there are not many most respectable men in society who will act Figaro?' (p. 777). The impression of raffishness surrounding the Duchesse is further reinforced by allusive name-play:

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

71

Oh, how she railed against ces Anglaises and their prudery! Can you fancy her and her circle, the tea-table set in the twilight that evening, the court assembled; Madame de la Cruchecassee, and Madame de Schlangenbad, and their whiskered humble servants, Baron Punter, and Count Spada, and Marquis lago, and Prince lachimo [two of Shakespeare's nastier villains scheming to destroy the heroine's reputation in Othello and Cymbeline], and worthy Captain Blackball? Can you fancy a moonlight conclave, and ghouls feasting on the fresh corpse of a reputation.... (p. 417) Lady Kew scolds her daughter, Lady Ann, colourfully for receiving the Duchesse's advances: 'if a highwayman stopped you, you would say, "Thank you, sir", as you gave him your purse; yes, and if Mrs. Macheath called on you afterwards you would return the visit!' (p. 429) neatly associating the Duchesse with the low life of the Beggar's Opera. The Duchesse gets some revenge by anonymously traducing Lord Kew to Ethel with 'such a catalogue as we laugh at [in one of the most comic songs of Mozart's Don Giovanni} when Leporello trolls it, and sings his master's victories in France, Italy, and Spain' (p. 440). As for the Due d'lvry, he summons to mind a different type of theatre: at sixty he still rides in the Bois 'with a grace worthy of old Franconi himself (p. 407); Antoine Franconi (1738-1836), that is, the most outstanding horseman in Europe, who performed with the Astleys when they opened their Amphitheatre in Paris in 1782. When the Astleys left to open their London establishment (where the Colonel takes the Newcome children, to Maria Newcome's distress), Franconi's sons opened the Cirque Olympique des Freres Franconi for equestrian shows. Professional operatic singing enters The Newcomes with the Sherricks. 'Mrs. Sherrick is no other than the famous artiste, who, after three years of brilliant triumphs at the Scala, the Pergola, the San Carlo, the Opera in England, forsook her profession, rejected a hundred suitors, and married Sherrick, who was Mr. Cox's lawyer, who failed, as everybody knows, as manager of Drury Lane' (p. 293). Joe K. Law notes that 'the portrait of Mrs Sherrick seems to be based upon Adelaide Kemble Sartoris (18147-79), whom Thackeray had known since his days at Cambridge'.59 Her drawing room displays a picture of her in Handel's Artaxerxes. She and her daughter are introduced at a luncheon given by Honeyman in

72

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

chapter 23, 'In Which We Hear a Soprano and a Contralto'. They are to be Honey man's salvation after his enterprise at fashionable preaching in May Fair begins to fail. Fred Bayham has the bright and correct intuition that the services at Lady Whittlesea's are more a fashionable entertainment than a religious exercise, and he suggests to Sherrick that they be turned into musical theatre: 'Why, I asked of Sherrick, should those ladies who sing Mozart to a piano, not sing Handel to an organ?' 'Dash it, you don't mean a hurdy-gurdy?' 'Sherrick/ says I, 'you are no better than a heathen ignoramus. I mean, why shouldn't they sing Handel's Church Music, and Church Music in general, in Lady Whittlesea's Chapel?.. / He caught at the idea. You never heard the chants more finely given - and they would be better still if the congregation would but hold their confounded tongues. It was an excellent though a harmless dodge, sir: and drew immensely, to speak profanely. They dress the part, sir, to admiration - a sort of nun-like costume they come in: Mrs. Sherrick has the soul of an artist still - by Jove, sir, when they have once smelt the lamps, the love of the trade never leaves 'em. The ladies actually practised by moonlight in the chapel, and came over to Honeyman's to an oyster afterwards. The thing took, sir. People began to take box seats I mean, again: - and Charles Honeyman ... has been preaching more eloquently than ever. He took some lessons of Husler, of the Hay market, sir. His sermons are old, I believe; but so to speak, he has got them up with new scenery, dresses, and effects, sir. They have flowers, sir, about the buildin' - pious ladies are supposed to provide 'em, but, entre nous, Sherrick contracts for them with Nathan, or some one in Covent Garden, (pp. 580-1) Bayham is an excellent advertising manager. Exploiting Anglican distrust aroused by the Oxford Movement's tendency towards Roman Catholic ritual and doctrine, he gets up 'A persecution' against Honeyman 'for Popish practises', arranges protest meetings, publishes a controversial biography, gets the press excited, 'and the thing was done, sir. That property is a paying one to the incumbent, and to Sherrick over him' (pp. 581-2). After his theatrical and elocutionary coaching, Honeyman's voice and gestures are

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

73

perfection, 'as composed as a statue in a mediaeval niche', enough to inspire Chaucer's Pardoner. Sherrick improves the set with a touch of popular Victorian gothicism, a 'Flemish painted window', so that 'Labels of faint green and gold, with long gothic letters painted thereon, meandered over the organ-loft and galleries, and strove to give as mediaeval a look to Lady Whittlesea's as the place was capable of assuming'. 'Famous, ain't it?' says Sherrick.... Sherrick seemed to have become of late impressed with the splendour of Charles's talents, and spoke of him - was it not disrespectful? - as a manager would of a successful tragedian. Let us pardon Sherrick: he had been in the theatrical way. (pp. 581-3) The whole thing is a success for Honeyman; he marries Miss Sherrick and, through the Colonel's influence, goes off to India to become the chaplain of Boggleywallah, known to the readers of Vanity Fair as the station where Jos Sedley had held the office of Collector (p. 817). The Sherrick ladies arouse some envy from Mrs. Mackenzie, who likes to display Rosey's charms and her own by having her sing for the gentlemen. 'For her own part Rosey is pleased with everything in nature. Does she love music? Oh, yes. Bellini and Donizetti? Oh, yes' (p. 311). Mrs. Mackenzie when unobserved slaps Rosey, stamps on her feet to squeeze them into tiny shoes, and laces her breathless, but affects artless innocence and affection - it's perhaps appropriate that Rosey, as one of her songs, warbles 'Batti, Batti', (beat me, beat me) from Don Giovanni (p. 287). When dive's friend J.J. Ridley is first introduced, Thackeray provides a fantasy passage suggestive of J.J.'s dreamlife, the sort of thing that is to nourish his painting. The fantasy mixes music and painting but particularly opera as he listens to Miss Cann on the piano. The young fellow who hears her has been often and often to the Opera and the theatres. As she plays Don Juan, Zerlina comes tripping over the meadows, and Masetto after her . . . ; on his cream-coloured charger Masaniello [the revolutionary from Auber's La Muette de Portici, 1828] prances in; and Fra Diavolo leaps down the balcony ... and Sir Huon of Bordeaux sails up to the quay, with the Sultan's daughter of Babylon, (pp. 153-4)

74

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Huon of Bordeaux comes from Carl Maria von Weber's English opera Oberon (1826), based on a thirteenth-century chanson and the German poet Wieland's epic Oberon. Having unwittingly killed Charlemagne's son, Sir Huon is required to bring back some hair and teeth of the amir of Babylon, kill his sturdiest knight, and kiss his daughter, Esclarmonde. The fairy Oberon helps him to success in his quest. The fairy allusion here would support the notion that Thackeray was using his illustrator, Richard Doyle, (perhaps among others) as a model for Ridley. Doyle was noted for his fairy paintings. As Joe K. Law points out, one of the pleasures Thackeray's readers could experience was identification not only of works popular in their time but of veiled reference to operatic stars as well. Discussing with Ethel the lack of status in mere artists such as Clive, Lady Kew makes a discrimination: 'M. de C , my dear, is of a noble family...; when he has given up singing and made his fortune, no doubt he can go back into the world again' (p. 425), and contemporaries could hardly fail to recognise the allusion to Mario (1810-83), ne Don Giovanni de Candia, a 'leading tenor in London and Paris for some thirty years'. While, earlier in the novel, 'the gossip that Lord Kew had been seen driving quite openly with a famous member of the Italian Opera [Madame Pozzoprofondo, the famous contralto, p. 141]..., apparently alludes to an 1838 scandal involving Grisi and Lord Castlereagh', a scandal Thackeray also refers to in his letters.60 As theatre in The Newcomes ranges from Shakespeare to Astley's so songs range from operatic arias to popular tavern songs and sentimental ballads. The circumstances of their performance are well described in the opening chapter at the Cave of Harmony. The painter, William Frith, describes such an occasion with Thackeray and Francis Mahony (Father Prout) in attendance at The Deanery' in Dean Street, Soho. After Mahony and Thackeray had sung, Thackeray turned to the bashful Frith and said: 'Now then, Frith, you d....d saturnine young Academician, sing us a song!' Frith was paralysed, and Thackeray later concluded: Til tell you what it is, Frith, you had better go home; your aunt is sitting up for you with a big muffin'. Frith harboured a grudge thereafter.61 Thackeray himself sang his own 'Little Billee', song about 'guzzling Jack and gorging Jimmy' who threaten to resort to cannibalism at sea.62 The company at the Cave of Harmony and the offerings of leering, drunken Captain Costigan suggest one popular vein of amusement

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

75

among these amateur singers, but the Colonel shames them and offers the sentimental 'Wapping Old Stairs'. Even here a sense of time and era is suggested, Great Hoskins declaring, 'I have not heard that song ... better performed since Mr. Incledon sung it', recalling Charles Incledon (1763-1826), a famous tenor of the Colonel's youth, and his high falsetto manner (pp. 12, 179). The twenty or so popular songs in The Newcomes cover several main varieties. Many such songs, Bishop's 'Home Sweet Home' (p. 373) and 'When the Bloom is on the Rye' (p. 7), Dibdin's Tom Bowling' (p. 171), and Parker's The Chough and The Crow' (p. 7) were first introduced as theatre pieces. Thomas Moore's 'Bendemeer Stream' (p. 7) is from his poem, Lallan Rookh, he, Burns and Scott being popular with English composers for their Celtic nationalism.63 The Scotsman, James Binnie, excels in Scott's 'Jock O'Hazeldean' (p. 171) and Carolina Nairne's 'Laird of Cockpen' (p. 178), and his niece, Rosey, sings 'Jock O'Hazeldean' and Scott's 'Bonnets of Bonny Dundee' (p. 277). Several songs are very English, The Derby Ram', a Derbyshire county song that makes the Colonel laugh (p. 10), the 'Old English Gentleman' that makes him weep (p. 10), and 'Wapping Old Stairs' with which he touches even the Cave of Harmony rakes (p. 11). At the Haunt, Pendennis recalls Mark Brent singing the Irish drinking song 'Garryowen', Michael Percy singing 'What's that to Anyone', and Jack Brent The Deserter' (p. 317). Two songs, evidently popular, but which I have not found, are The Red Cross Knight', sung at the Cave of Harmony (p. 7), and The Wolf, sung at one of the Colonel's soirees (p. 236). Both are mentioned as among his repertoire by a street-ballad singer in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor.64 Clive, talking about occupations with Ethel, mentions that a soldier 'may be valiant in arms, and wanting a leg, like the lover in the song', clearly alluding to the Irish folk song, 'Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye' (p. 634). The singing of these tavern songs and ballads, as the sentiment of 'We Won't Go Home till Morning' (p. 11) suggests, is an act of bonhomie reflecting the novel's repeated and usually frustrated striving for harmony. In the Cave of Harmony, one of a series of pastoral scenes in the novel (fable-land and Alethea Hobson's 'serious paradise' at Clapham are others), the Colonel achieves an Arcadian spell with his songs - 'It was like Dr. Primrose preaching his sermon in the prison . .. we could see he was thinking about his youth - the golden time - the happy, the bright, the unforgotten' (p. 12) - only to have the mood broken b

76

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Costigan's bawdy howls. At the Colonel's dinner party in chapter 13, the Colonel is singing a maritime song when 'that unlucky Barnes first gave a sort of crowing imitation of the song, and then burst into a yell of laughter. Clive dashed a glass of wine in his face at the next minute, glass and all' (p. 179). The songs, like other sorts of artifice and performance in the novel, suggest a longed-for idyllic world of romance, which characteristically dissolves into irony and frustration. In their number and specificity, and their styles associated with noted performers and eras, songs in The Newcomes are all part of the dense specificity of detail in Thackeray's social canvas.65 That specificity is evident in reference to theatre as well. Apart from allusions to Shakespeare, and the sinister figures from ancient Greek and classical French drama that the Duchesse d'lvry is associated with (Phedre, Medea), we find a stream of minor allusions to popular plays, some famous, some now little known. At the beginning, with its rush of allusions to Perrault and La Fontaine, we encounter Moliere too: Tartuffes wearing virtuous clothing' (p. 5) are a reminder of the stereotypes that march through all literature. Often these allusions are a deflation of surface narrative, as when, conjecturing that Clive must be in love, Pendennis 'taxed him with the soft impeachment' (p. 534), thus recalling Mrs. Malaprop's words to Sir Lucius in Sheridan's The Rivals (V, iii): 'I own the soft impeachment - pardon my blushes, I am Delia.' Similarly, commenting on Ethel's alternation of rejection and coquetry with Clive, the narrator seeks authority from Morton's epitome of prudery, Mrs. Grundy (from Speed the Plough, 1789): 'I allow, with Mrs. Grundy and most moralists, that Miss Newcome's conduct in this matter was highly reprehensible' (pp. 693-4). As he does here with Ethel, Thackeray often invokes familiar plays and novels to both present and refine on a line of moral reflection: T know very well that Charles Surface [the generously imprudent character from Sheridan's School for Scandal, 1777] is a sad dog, and Tom Jones no better than he should be; but....' (p. 137). Colonel Newcome is introduced with such a reflection at the Cave of Harmony: 'I dare say I blushed, for I had been comparing him to the admirable Harley in [Sheridan's 1779 play] The Critic, and had christened him Don Ferolo Whiskerandos' (p. 9). In short the eighteenth-century stage is a ready source of parable: 'If you were acquainted with the history of every family in your street, don't you know that in two or three of the houses there

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

77

such tragedies have been playing.... The kind master of number 30 racking his fevered brains and toiling through sleepless nights to pay for the jewels on his wife's neck, and the carriage out of which she ogles Lothario [the libertine, one of Garrick's successful roles, from Nicholas Rowe's The Fair Penitent, 1703] in the park' (p. 473). By giving Clara Pulleyn's parents the names, Tancred Pulleyn, Earl of Dorking, and Sigismunda', Thackeray associates them with James Thompson's play, Tancred and Sigismunda, wherein tragedy results (as it will for Clara) from parental manipulation of marriages, and thus with the novel's major theme of the marriage market. Perhaps one reason an understanding of allusion to these plays could be taken for granted is seen in chapter 53, where Ethel writes to the Colonel from the country: They had been performing private theatricals at the country house where she and Lady Kew were staying. 'Captain Crackthorpe made an admirable Jeremy Diddler in Raising the Wind [a farce, 1803, by James Kenney, well-enough known to contribute the term 'diddle', to cheat, to the language, from Diddler's propensity to borrow without paying back]. Lord Farintosh broke down lamentably as Fusbos in Bombastes Furioso [a burlesque tragic opera, 1810, by William Barnes Rhodes]. Miss Ethel had distinguished herself in both of these facetious little comedies. I should like Clive to paint me as Miss Plainways [with whom Diddler elopes]', she wrote, (p. 696) Thackeray himself had played Fusbos in private theatricals at the Boyes house where he boarded while attending Charterhouse.66 Though erudite now, allusion to such plays could be the Victorian equivalent of reference to the movies, and amateur theatricals might enhance familiarity. In any case, here as with other types of allusion, the central fiction of The Newcomes swims in an intertextual school of other fictions providing analogy, commentary, and irony. As the mountebank and puppetry imagery of Vanity Fair, Pendennis's infatuation with the Fotheringay in Pendennis, and the many histrionic allusions in The Newcomes show, Thackeray enjoys not only the invasion of life by theatrical patterns but the breakdown of histrionic illusion. Although on occasion he liked to think of himself as a realist - when comparing himself with Dickens for example - no one is less a champion of the willing suspension of disbelief. His fictions constantly undercut themselves for the sake

78

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

of reflection on both life and literature. What Dr. Johnson had to say about the dramatic unities seems also to apply to novels: The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.... It will be asked how the drama moves, if it is not credited. It is credited with all the credit due to a d r a m a . . . . The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more.67 So with novels, and especially Thackeray's novels. They provide occasion for reflection and judgement, and Thackeray's reflexive technique of both resorting to the patterns of art and disintegrating them makes us question our assumptions about both. Theatre and opera, and especially opera, because of their focused and stage-lit artificiality, serve his unsettling purpose well. CHILDHOOD READING AND LORE The headletter for chapter 1 of The Newcomes shows a child in the guise of an old-clothes peddler, with hats and bonnets stacked on his head, displaying his wares to a group of other children. The figure of old clothes relates to the mixture of fables, morals, cliches and platitudes with which Thackeray dresses the beginning of the novel, suggesting that all tales have been told before, though they may still be made fashionable by giving them an ironic furbelow or two. The children are there, as are the fables, to suggest that all narration is a more or less elaborated expression of the childhood impulse to play and imagination. Thackeray might have agreed with Freud, but with less condescension, that creative writers are somewhat childish. When writing for children, as in Rebecca and Rowena or The Rose and the Ring . . . A Fireside Pantomime for Great and Small Children, he also addresses an adult readership, and when writing for adults he addresses them as children at a show, as at the end of Vanity Fair: 'Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.' Like Dickens, Thackeray took a keen interest in children's literature - fables, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, The Arabian Nights.

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

79

The opening chapter of The Newcomes, a melange of Aesop's fables, is called The Overture - After Which the Curtain Rises Upon a Drinking Chorus', recalling perhaps the prefatory, 'Before the Curtain', of Vanity Fair, which introduces us to a set of puppets, The famous little Becky Puppet... the Amelia Doll... the Dobbin Figure ... the Little Boys' Dance ... the Wicked Nobleman'. These figures suggest a way of seeing things, a perspective. They draw attention to the narrative's fictiveness and prepare for the tensions the narrator will set up between design and frustration. The introductions of both novels tell us how to read them, what attitudes the narrator takes towards his material, how we are to conceive of characters, action, and narration. Except that the words themselves have not been compounded and reconstituted, the introduction of The Newcomes is a virtual Finnegans Wake of multiple or many-layered fabulation. Aesop's wolf in sheep's clothing here 'is the same old rogue who gobbled up little Red Riding Hood's grandmother for lunch, and swallowed little Red Riding Hood for supper. Tirez la bobinette et la chevilette cherra'. In six pages we have a concentration and mixing together of Perrault (Little Red Riding Hood-quoted several times), Pallas Minerva's owl, Solomon, La Fontaine, and a 'farrago of old fables' (Aesop's or La Fontaine's The Crow and the Fox', The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing', The Frog that would be Big as an Ox', The Ass in the Lion's Skin', The Fox without a Tail', The Jackdaw with Borrowed Plumage', The Lion in Love with the Shepherdess'). All to show that 'all types of all characters march through all fables' (p. 5), including novels. All demonstrating the proposition that there is nothing new under the sun, that the novel will be a tissue of recessive intertexts, archetypes, and cycles reaching back to Ecclesiastes. In its fairy-tale mode, the novel presents its characters as traditional figures, Clive as prince, Ethel as princess, and Lady Kew as witch. Colonel Newcome, upon meeting Ethel, forms 'a fine castle in [the air], whereof Clive was lord, and that pretty Ethel, lady' (p. 204). As that scheme sours, the Colonel and Binnie fall to match-making Clive and Rosey: 'their young ones should marry and be happy ever after, like the prince and the princess of the fairy-tale' (p. 332). Clive, as mournful lover, says of Ethel's house, T am like the Peri who looks into Paradise and sees angels within it' (p. 618), a Peri in Persian mythology being a fallen angel denied paradise until penance is performed. And he elaborates: T

80

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

remember one of the days, when I first saw you, I had been reading the Arabian Nights at school - and you came in in a bright dress of shot silk, amber and blue - and I thought you were like that fairy-princess who came out of the crystal box -' (p. 621). Thus the Arabian Nights blends with the Germanic story of Snow White, whom the dwarves place in 'a transparent coffin of glass' which she opens after dislodging the piece of poisoned apple from her throat. Lady Kew, in her cynical manipulation of Ethel's life, is the witch figure of the novel: That old woman, who began to look more and more like the wicked fairy of the stories, who is not invited to the princess's christening feast, had this advantage over her likeness, that she was invited everywhere' (p. 538). She is pictured in the headletter of chapter 52, on her return from Scotland, as a witch whom Barnes in the guise of Macbeth is coming to consult about the Colonel's advocacy of a match between Clive and Ethel. Fairy tales as well as nursery rhymes and other infant reading cluster around the Reverend Charles Honeyman, no doubt to suggest his general hypocrisy, affecting a childlike virtue and sentiment with ladies while indulging himself to the degree that he winds up in debtors' prison. A fairy tale that functions as an intertext throughout the novel as throughout Thackeray's works,68 that of Bluebeard and his secretly murdered brides, also attaches to Honeyman. In chapter 11, after an elaborate opening comparison of Honeyman with Saint Peter of Alcantara,69 and an account of Honeyman's success with 'females of all ages;. .. deaf old dowagers . . . mature spinsters, young beauties dancing through the season, even rosy little slips out of the nursery' (p. 148), the narrator, addressing the reader directly, launches into two pages of reverie on Bluebeard and skeletons in closets: When you in your turn are slumbering, up gets Mrs. Brown from your side, steals downstairs like Amina to her ghoul, clicks open the secret door, and looks into her dark depository.... I think of some honest Othello pausing over this very sentence in a railroad carriage, and stealthily gazing at Desdemona opposite to him, innocently administering sandwiches to their little boy I am trying to turn off the sentence with a joke, you see -1 feel it is growing too dreadful, too serious.' (p. 151) The lives of Saints Theresa and Peter of Alcantara, Aladdin, portraits by Lawrence and Reynolds, the Marquis of Carabas from

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

81

Perrault, who appears wealthy but isn't, Amina from the Arabian Nights, who dines meagrely on rice and steals away to devour a dead body,70 and Othello - all of this sinister suggestion, leads up to the announcement that 'Charles Honeyman, ... the elegant divine to whom Miss Blanche writes sonnets, and whom Miss Beatrice invites to tea; ... who charms over the tea-urn and the bland bread-and-butter: Charles Honeyman has one or two skeleton closets in his lodgings, Walpole Street, May Fair; and many a wakeful night ... he wakes up, and looks at the ghastly occupant of that receptacle'. There seems to be more here than Honey man's imprisonment for debt accounts for, but Thackeray, after the elaborate build-up, chooses to keep that closet locked: 'One of the Reverend Charles Honey man's grizzly night-haunters is - but stop ....' (p. 151). More sinister, but again sexual, is Barnes's relationship with Clara, developed in a chapter entitled, 'Barnes's Skeleton Closet'. Since Barnes is a Bluebeard figure, there is an ironic appropriateness in children's literature and the poetry of womanhood forming the subject matter of Barnes's lectures to the Newcome Athenaeum for the benefit of the Orphan Children's Home and the Newcome Soup Association: 'No. 1, The Poetry of Childhood; Dr. Watts, Mrs. Barbauld, Jane Taylor. No. 2, The Poetry of Womanhood, and the Affections; Mrs. Hemans, "L.E.L."' (p. 847). The basic irony is that Barnes has seduced a factory girl and deserted her and their children, and beats his wife, Clara. As the Newcome Independent, reviewing his performance, remarks heavily, Sir Barnes has 'a genius for making women cry' (p. 871). The essence of cynical selfishness, Barnes chooses to speak about children's authors of particular piety: Isaac Watts, Ann Barbauld, and Jane Taylor.71 In his prosperity, Honeyman takes to writing and introducing religious tracts, which Clive finds strewn about Mrs. Sherrick's table, There were the Lives of St. Botibol of Islington, and St. Willibald of Bareacres; with pictures of those confessors. Then there was the Legend of Margery Dawe, Virgin and Martyr, with a sweet double frontispiece, representing (1) the sainted woman selling her feather-bed for the benefit of the poor; and (2) reclining upon straw, the leanest of invalids. There was Old Daddy Longlegs, and how he was brought to say his Prayers; a Tale for Children, by a Lady, with a preface dated St. Chad's Eve, and signed C.H. The Rev.

82

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference Charles Honeyman's Sermons, delivered at Lady Whittlesea's Chapel. Poems of Early Days, by Charles Honey man, A.M. The Life of good Dame Whittlesea, by do. do. Yes, Charles had come out in the literary line . . . . (p. 591)

Clearly Honeyman appropriates children's literature for religious indoctrination and is the sort of do-gooder that Dickens attacked in 'Frauds on the Fairies', a review of George Cruikshank's retelling of fairy tales to promote teetotalism.72 No children are in question - the books are examples of religious pap for ladies. The fun for an appropriately educated reader is in the tension between Honeyman's milksop religiosity and the resistant matter of the nursery rhymes he has tried to steal. Compare Honeyman's saintly Margery Dawe, selling her bed for the poor, with the child's version: Seesaw, Margery Daw, Sold her bed and lay upon straw; Was she not a dirty slut To sell her bed and lie in dirt. Old Daddy Longlegs, and how he was brought to say his Prayers; a Tale for Children, by a Lady, sounds a good deal more earnest and reverential than the brisk nursery rhyme version of religious persuasion: Goosey Goosey Gander where shall we wander Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber. Old father long legs will not say his Prayers, Take him by the left leg and throw him downstairs. Making fun of contemporary habits of emasculating children's literature, Thackeray's invented titles suggest Honeyman's babyish religiosity, and play sly allusive games. Saints Willibald and Botibol are favourites with Thackeray, used in his other works, presumably because of their silly-sounding names.73 During the first of Maria Newcome's soirees, a voluble Mr. Giles, enlivened by claret, buttonholes Pendennis to describe the company, and lets us know that Hobson and his brother Brian, though now 'as mum as Quakers at a meeting ... sowed their wild oats like any other young men', and that he has seen 'Mr. Hobson

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

83

coming out of the Opera, in tights and an opera-hat, sir, like "Froggy would a-wooing go", of a Saturday night, too, when his ma thought him safe in bed in the City!' (p. 60). The description recalls the nursery rhyme in detail: A frog he would a-wooing go, Heigh ho! says Rowley, A frog he would a-wooing go, Whether his mother would let him or no. With a rowley, powley, gammon and spinach, Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley. So off he set with his opera hat, Heigh ho! says Rowley, So off he set with his opera hat, And on the road he met with a rat, With a rowley, powley, etc. The accompanying sketch shows him complete with opera hat. In a more ominous key, towards the end of the novel as the shadows close in around the Colonel's affairs, Rosey sits at the last of his Bundelcund Bank dinners, 'An unconscious little maid, with rich and rare gems sparkling on her fingers, and bright gold rings as many as belonged to the late Old Woman of Banbury Cross' (p. 899), recalling the nursery rhyme lines. Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross, To see an old woman upon a white horse; Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, And she shall have music wherever she goes.74 The impression of childish innocence, enhanced by nursery rhyme, is reinforced by an immediate further allusion to Zerlina threatened by the brigands of Fra Diavolo. Another staple of Victorian children's literature frequently mentioned in The Newcomes as in Thackeray's other works is the Arabian Nights.75 Geoffrey Tillotson cites it as one of a set of recurring symbols (like the mermaid, the theatre, Aesop's animals, and the idea of Vanity Fair) which partly express Thackeray's general philosophy.76 Relying on easy recognition among his contemporaries, he frequently allies the Arabian Nights with the Bluebeard

84

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

story in its oriental version. Similarly, the tales connect with his frequent allusion in The Newcomes to the Turkish marriage market. Scheherazade's position as entertainer of a homicidal autocrat hovers as a parallel for that of women in Victorian marriage and society. Considered as fairy-tale the tales gloss the main narrative as an alternative mode of telling it, just as Aesop's fables do at beginning and end. The major scene in which Ethel parodies the marriage market by pinning a 'Sold' ticket to her dress modulates through references to the narrator's previous diatribes against the selling of virgins, a recent (November 1852) petition to Mrs. Stowe for the abolition of slavery and, in an extended paragraph, to the analogy between the Indian practice of Suttee and the English sacrifice of daughters. The narrator pretends reluctance to comment further on any contemporary personalities involved, 'For though I would like to go into an Indian brahmin's house ... and have the mystery of Eastern existence revealed to me (as who would not who has read the Arabian Nights in his youth?) yet I would not choose the moment when the brahmin of the house was dead, his women howling, his priests doctoring his child of a widow, now frightening her with sermons, now drugging her with bhang, so as to push her on his funeral pile at last, and into the arms of that carcass, stupefied, but obedient and decorous' (p. 363). This vivid incident and commentary then become the target of oriental allusion later in the text. 'We are sold ...', says Ethel, again to Lady Kew, 'we are as much sold as Turkish women; the only difference being that our masters may have but one Circassian at a time. No, there is no freedom for us. I wear my green ticket, and wait till my master comes' (p. 425). The headletter for chapter 54 shows a modern auction with Lady Kew as auctioneer and in which men in top hats bid for a young woman with 'Lot V marked on her dress, a modern version of the Turkish slave auction. As we have seen, one mode in which Clive views Ethel is as a princess from the Arabian Nights, and the cyclical element of their story (repeating the Colonel's with Leonore) is allusively suggested, in the touching scene where the Colonel kisses Ethel's hand. 'As for Colonel Thomas Newcome and his niece, they fell in love with each other instantaneously, like Prince Camaralzaman and the Princess of China' (p. 200). The story of Prince Camaralzaman and the Princess Badoura itself incorporates the patterns of bringing together and separation that mark both the Colonel's and

Literary Allusion in The Newcomes

85

dive's ill-fated love lives. Part of the reason for their disappointments in love is a lack of energy, evident also in Clive's weakness as an artist. I knew I was but a poor little creature; and in contemplating his [Raphael's] genius, shrunk up till I felt myself as small as a man looks under the dome of St. Peter's. Why should I wish to have a great genius? - Yes, there is one reason why I should like to have it. Ethel: And that is? Clive: To give it you, if it pleased you Ethel. But I might wish for the roc's egg: there is no way of robbing the bird. (p. 635) Romance as a genre, epitomised in fairy tale and fantasy, seems a necessary concomitant of romance in the sense of sexual involvement - the implicit suggestion is that both are at odds with reality. Children's lore is a useful and resonant vein of allusion as being open and recognisable to anyone. But just as Latin ('Hullo, mate, what ship's that?' p. 458) is lost on Lord Rooster, even fairy tales and nursery rhymes are lost on Lord Farintosh, whose titles and class go along with a certain mental vacuousness. Visiting Ethel at Miss Honeyman's lodging house in Brighton, and now knowing Miss Honeyman is Clive's aunt, Farintosh observes 'that the cook of the lodgings was really a stunner for tarts', thus starting a tense little contretemps of class. The cook, dear me, it's not the cookl' cries Miss Ethel. 'Don't you remember the princess in the Arabian Nights, who was such a stunner for tarts, Lord Farintosh?' Lord Farintosh couldn't say that he did. 'Well, I thought not; but there was a princess in Arabia, or China, or somewhere, who made such delicious tarts and custards that nobody's could compare with them; and there is an old lady in Brighton who has the same wonderful talent. She is the mistress of this house.' 'And she is my aunt, at your lordship's service,' said Clive, with great dignity. 'Upon my honour! did you make 'em, Lady Ann?' asked my lord. The Queen of Hearts made tarts!'77 cried out Miss Newcome, rather eagerly, and blushing somewhat....

86

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference An air of deep bewilderment and perplexity had spread over Lord Farintosh's fine countenance whilst this talk about pastry had been going on. The Arabian Princess, the Queen of Hearts making tarts, Miss Honeyman? Who the deuce were all these?

Embarrassed, Ethel rattles away, but: 'Her talk only served the more to bewilder Lord Farintosh, who did not understand a tithe of her allusions: for Heaven, which had endowed the young marquis with personal charms, a large estate, an ancient title and the pride belonging to it, had not supplied his lordship with a great quantity of brains, or a very feeling heart' (pp. 563-4). Allusion here becomes a social game by which flexibility and quickness of wit are tested and, in Farintosh, found wanting. Incidental allusion to the Arabian Nights is frequently rather gruesome or threatening, as are fairy tales themselves, or may be associated with the gruesome, as in the reference to Suttee above or the connection of Bluebeard and Arabian lore. Clive notices Ridley's drawings from the Arabian Nights: There is Scheherazade telling the stories, and - what do you call her? - Dinarzade and th sultan sitting in bed and listening. Such a grim old cove! You see he has cut off ever so many of his wives' heads (p. 165). Sinbad's ghastly Old Man of the Sea, the intolerable, unshakeable burden, is a 'daily guest at the board' of husbands of sixty-six married to wives of twenty-one like the Due and Duchesse d'lvry (p. 408). Elsewhere the narrator, conveying aristocratic gossip, implicitly resembles the Arabian Nights prince who feasts a beggar on empty plates: 'My dear Barmecide friend: isn't it pleasant to be in such fine company?' (p. 646). And fairy-tale lore is not only inherently sinister and tricky, it recalls the skeleton's closet or Bluebeard's room of the subconscious, the more unsettling for its infantile sources. Thackeray's allusion to childhood reading, as informed as his other literary allusions, is also as wittily, sometimes sardonically, pointed. And as well as the local intertextual play it creates, it reinforces the book's general proposition about literature and experience: that they recur in varying reformulations expressive of basic human desires and fears, conscious and unconscious. Coming first temporally, the literature of childhood provides many of the formulations, literary or experiential, in which people subsequently understand both life and texts.

3 The Art World Art is a central subject of The Newcomes, no doubt calling upon Thackeray's own experience and training as an artist and art reviewer. The Newcomes follows the career of a young man from a commercial family who decides to become an artist, and through his reflections we encounter art schools, museums, studios, and many works and artists. Perhaps more important still, the novel dwells constantly on the artistic impulse, not only in artists but in everyone; that is, its central activity, observed in all the major characters, is the fashioning of imaginative constructs that make life harmonious, unified, patterned, and that frequently adopt conventional motifs in doing so. Reality and romantic artifice are constantly played off against, and fused with, each other. Ethel at one moment affects the style of worldly cynicism - 'I belong to the world like all the rest of my family' (p. 425) - and enrages Lady Kew, her mentor in worldliness, by flourishing a 'Sold' sign on her dress. At another she affects the pastoral shepherdess: 'you would have fancied her an artless young country lass, only longing to trip back to her village, milk her cows at sunrise, and sit spinning of winter evenings by the fire' (p. 690). A wealth of artifice surrounds her affectations and her romance with Clive, artifice evident in all those headletter sketches of nymphs and swains got up in elegant eighteenth-century pastoral garb and concentrated in the chapter, 'Contains Two or Three Acts of A Little Comedy', where the narrative turns into highly stylised stage script. Clive repeatedly imagines and sketches Ethel after the statue of Diana in the Louvre. The Colonel imposes a plot design on the lives of Clive and Ethel, wishing to turn their lives into a fairy tale to correct the flawed pattern of his own romance. The Duchesse d'lvry affects a number of roles, Mary Queen of Scots, Medea, and Phaedra. Eve Barnes makes attempts at various stylised roles, the detached man of business when he is at his most malicious, the hot-headed duellist, though terrified his antagonists may respond, the sensitive parent and feminist when he lectures on The Poetry of Childhood and the Poetry of Womanhood. We see the motif of imposed 87

88

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

artifice at its starkest in Doyle's headletter for chapter 44, where Sherrick is sketched pulling the string of a puppet representing Charles Honeyman, a chapter in which Lady Whittlesea achieves success through theatrical artifice. The subject of art, then, merges throughout the novel, in Thackeray's characteristic self-reflexive way, with the overall oscillations of life and artifice that were introduced in the first pages.

If we turn from these more containing and general motifs to specific works and artists, the sheer number is impressive and implies a readership more knowledgeable in the history of art, past and contemporary than, except for a few readers, the book is likely to have received. The painters referred to include Boucher, Caracci, Cattermole, Caravaggio, Claude, Cuyp, Delaroche, Dubufe, Eastlake, Fuseli, Gerard, Giulio Romano, Harlow, Haydon, Hogarth, William Henry Hunt, Lancret, Landseer, Lawrence, Michelangelo, Morghen, Perugino, Raphael, Guido Reni, Reynolds, Rubens, Sassoferato, Scheffer, Sebastian del Piombo, Snyders, Spagnoletto, Titian, Turner, Van Dyck, Velasquez, Veronese and Vernet. Some are referred to several times and apropos of several of their works. And the allusions are frequently detailed, assuming a fairly close and extensive knowledge of content, style, artistic movements, anecdotes and biographies of the painters, and the social bearings of their works.

The Art World

89

Given that range of knowledge, Thackeray's treatment of art, his portrait of the artist, or The Newcomes as kunstlerroman, may be disappointing in significant ways depending on what one looks for. Margaret Diane Stetz, who has written a useful study of Thackeray's The Newcomes and the Artist's World',1 shows the mixed response Thackeray got from contemporary artists. When Holman Hunt and a number of Pre-Raphaelites drew up a list of immortals, rated 0 to 4, Christ rated 4 and Thackeray 2 along with Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Keats and Shelley. And young BurneJones wrote glowingly of The Newcomes in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine for 1856. Ford Madox Brown, on the other hand, said of The Newcomes that he considered Thackeray's 'artists all asses, and his knowledge on that head about at zero'. And Stetz argues that 'professional artists continued to look upon Thackeray purely as a litterateur', an outsider. Performers and creators, however, are not notably charitable towards critics. Her further dismissal of Thackeray as an art critic, someone who dismissed Turner as 'quite incomprehensible'2 and whose tastes were rather Philistine,3 needs to be qualified by a more thorough realisation of the training, styles and quarrels of early Victorian art, such as Robert A. Colby provides in Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity.4 It is true that much of Clive's talk about art in the novel is rather gushing: 'Wasn't Reynolds a clipper, that's all! and wasn't Rubens a brick? He was an ambassador and Knight of the Bath; so was Vandyck. And Titian, and Raphael, and Velasquez? - I'll trouble you to show me better gentlemen than them, Uncle Charles' (p. 166). But then, Clive is a youth and his ebullience is more important than his aesthetic theories here. Much of the reference to painters and painting in the book is akin to travelogue - in fact it is travelogue in those chapters where Clive does the grand tour with J.J. Ridley, or visits Paris or travels in Europe with the Colonel: They travelled Rhineland and Switzerland together - they crossed into Italy - went from Milan to Venice (where Clive saluted the greatest painting in the world - the glorious "Assumption" of Titian) - they went to Trieste, and over the beautiful Styrian Alps to Vienna...' (p. 735). The Italian chapters, 35, 'Across the Alps', and 39, 'Amongst the Painters', are very much in this vein and like the other tour chapters draw very much on Thackeray's experience as a writer of travel books - a genre with a considerable readership in early Victorian England. The treatment of artists is largely conventional Bohemianism:

90

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference Every man has a beard and a sombrero: and you would fancy we were a band of brigands.... There is a French table still more hairy than ours, a German Table, an American table ... we drink our coffee and strong waters, and abuse Guido, or Rubens, or Bernini, selon les gouts, and blow such a cloud of smoke as would make Warrington's lungs dilate with pleasure, (pp. 468-9) What a gallant, starving, generous, kindly life, many of them led! What fun in their grotesque airs, what friendship and gentleness in their poverty! (p. 509)

Even the Bohemian manner is deceptive: And as Dick, under yonder terrific appearance of waving cloak, bristling beard, and shadowy sombrero, is a good kindly simple creature, got up at a very cheap rate, so his life is consistent with his dress; he gives his genius a darkling swagger, and a romantic envelope, which, being removed, you find, not a bravo, but a kind chirping soul ... a gentle creature loving his friends, his cups, feasts, merrymakings, and all good things, (p. 215) As Stetz concludes, to judge from The Newcomes one might assume Thackeray finds artists' lives essentially cozy and their Bohemianism merely a show. As she says, Thackeray succumbs here more than in any other of his works, to the "romance of poverty" in connection with the artists' lives'.5 No doubt much of this polishing of the artist's image is designed to counter the snobbery towards artists that is one of the book's themes, as in Hobson Newcome's tirade: Dirty chaps in velvet coats and beards? They looked like a set of mountebanks. And this young Clive is going to turn painter.... I mean I don't care what a fellow is if he is a good fellow. But a painter! hang it - a painter's no trade at all -1 don't fancy seeing one of our family sticking up pictures for sale.... Damn all literary fellows - all artists - the whole lot of them! (p. 245) Major Pendennis, a more attractive if not less snobbish character, takes a like attitude on hearing of the Colonel's agreeing to Clive's career as an artist: 'I don't know what the dooce the world is coming to. An artist! By gad, in my time a fellow would as soon

The Art World

91

have thought of making his son a hair-dresser, or a pastry-cook, by gad!'(p. 301). Having acknowledged the force of Stetz's strictures, however, one may note that art still plays a significant part in the novel in ways that she chooses not to address, but which a tolerably informed Victorian readership would appreciate. Like other kinds of allusion in the novel, allusions to art and artists play upon a fairly extensive cultural and historical context in the first half of the nineteenth century. Though his best work is of an intimate and personal kind, realised in portraits of his father and of Ethel, Clive aspires to become a historical painter. And if one looks at the novel in terms of the development of historical painting, a cultural frame of contemporary hierarchies and animosities is there to be recognised and savoured. We may not recognise it easily because, as Roy Strong observes in Restoring the Past: British History and the Victorian Painter, the genre itself has suffered a twentieth-century depreciation: 'art historians have come to regard these creations as dreadful aberrations which ought never to have happened, and in public museums and galleries most surviving examples have been consigned to the stores, rolled up or even, in some instances, deliberately destroyed as worthless rubbish. An intensely creative part of British nineteenth-century painting has been dismissed as a dead end/ 6 Not only was the Victorian interest different, it presupposed an audience with certain bonds and training, a community similar to the other communities we have been exploring in Thackeray's readership. The images the Victorian history painter produced, says Strong presupposed an audience far differently educated and read from that of the previous century. They implied a literate public with a common set of facts, if not uniform attitudes to the past, which enabled them to read these images in a way totally lost to us a century later.... History served as a collective genealogy of the new literate middle classes. Moving into the heyday of Victorian England, the public became saturated with history.7 The Newcomes reflects this phenomenon in several ways. Clive's early training in art is at Gandish's Drawing Academy in Soho, a loose fictional rendering of Henry Sass's academy, the first of its kind in England, at the corner of Streatham Street and Charlotte Street Bloomsbury, where Thackeray had been a

92

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

student. Like Gandish, Sass had exhibited classical and historical subjects with no great success. He taught a number of successful artists however, among them Frith, Millais, Cope and Frost, and numbered among his friends Constable, Etty, Landseer, Martin, Turner and Wilkie. There is some account of his school in Frith's My Autobiography (ch. 4) and it matches Thackeray's depiction in several details.8 Gandish emphasises 'the hantique, sir, the glorious hantique', and Frith recalls that Sass 'had prepared with his own hand a great number of outlines from the antique, beginning with Juno's eye and ending with the Apollo - hands, feet, mouths, faces, in various positions, all in severely correct outline', which students were expected to copy repeatedly; indeed, 'Sass's veneration for the antique amounted almost to worship'.9 On being introduced to the Colonel, Gandish takes him on a tour of the house: 'Apollo, you see', says Gandish. The Venus Hanadyomene, the glorious Venus of the Louvre, which I saw in 1814, colonel, in its glory - the Laocoon' (p. 221). Frith's account of Sass's gallery of statues is similar: 'statues, the size of the originals, of the Laocoon, the Apollo, the Venus de Medici, and other antique works'.10 Gandish asks the Colonel to observe my great pictures also from English istry. An English istorical painter, sir, should be employed chiefly in English istry. That's what I would have done. Why ain't there temples for us, where the people might read their istory at a glance, and without knowing how to read? Why is my Alfred 'anging up in this 'all? Because there is no patronage for a man who devotes himself to 'igh art. (p. 221) And Frith notes that Sass had a settled conviction 'that the neglect of the public ... was the result of the dense ignorance of the socalled patrons of art'.11 Although Thackeray is clearly associating Gandish with Sass, he is also placing him within a tradition of historical painting that had begun in the 1760s and risen to a peak of theory and accomplishment by the mid-nineteenth century. In the summary of it that follows I shall draw largely, but not exclusively, upon what Strong describes in detail in Recreating the Past. Historical painting had been given primacy as a genre by the French Academy and others in the seventeenth century. In addition to this status, modern historical subjects gave late-eighteenth-

The Art World

93

century painters new subject matter when they wearied of classical subjects. Patriotism and nationalism also played a part. Benjamin West, one of the early historical painters, summed up the basic principles of the genre as inculcating 'invaluable lessons of religion, love of country, and morality . . . the most instructive records to a rising generation'.12 As Jeremy Maas observes in Victorian Painters, 'At the top of the list [in the hierarchy of subjects for Victorian painting] is the nebulous phrase "High Art", that is, art which consisted of a lofty theme, unsullied by vulgar incidents: this would have included some of the higher flights of historical painting'.13 But the beginning of historical painting on British subjects can be said to date from the annual exhibitions, begun in 1760, of the Society of Artists. The Society offered premiums of a hundred guineas and fifty guineas for subjects from English history. A further impetus was given by Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, founded in 1785 to encourage historical painting, and by Robert Bowyer's Historic Gallery in Pall Mall, which collected historical paintings for an edition of Hume's History of England issued between 1793 and 1806. The Napoleonic wars led to a renewed interest in the writing of history and at roughly the same time the historical novel emerged as a new art form. Sir Walter Scott in particular inspired painters, and one of his subjects, Mary Queen of Scots, had already become a major inspiration for painters of British history. Strong calculates from the contents of exhibitions at the Royal Academy that historical painting reached a peak in the 1840s, about twenty historical subjects a year.14 And the period 1840-70 was the great age of historical painting, practised by Ward, Landseer, Maclise, Lucy, Horsley, Goodall, Frith, Egg, Faed, Crowe, and Cope. One section of Strong's book is on The Anglo Saxons' and notes the cult of King Alfred in historical paintings as exemplified by Benjamin West's 'Alfred Divides his Loaf with a Pilgrim' (1779), Richard Westall's The Boyhood of King Alfred', and both Frances Wheatley's (1792) and David Wilkie's (1806) versions of 'Alfred in the Neatherd's Cottage'. Gandish feels aggrieved about the neglect of his own Alfred 'in a neaterd's 'ut': That story, sir, which I found in my researches in istry has since become so popular, sir, that hundreds of artists have painted it, hundreds! I who discovered the legend, have my picture - here!' (p. 221). (We later learn that Gandish's Alfred was exhibited in 1804, 'but Lord Nelson's death, and victory at Trafalger, occupied the public attention at that time,

94

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

and Gandish's work went unnoticed' [p. 236].) Gandish's painting and the reasons for his sense of injury are clearly comic play with a popular fashion or mainstream of early Victorian art. In the same general category is his Boadicea, another example of unappreciated 'Igh art' (p. 219). Strong points out that among representations of scenes from the Middle Ages and Tudor and Stuart history at Bowyer's Historic Gallery and the Royal Academy, 'Incursions into remoter antiquity in the form of Boadicea and Caractacus are fewer and represent little more than an attempt to find purely classical Roman scenes from British history'.15 Gandish seems to have done Boadicea with the same classical preoccupations: The models of the hancient Britons in that pictur alone cost me thirty pound when I was a struggling man, and had just married my Betsy here. You reckonize Boadishia, colonel, with the Roman elmet, cuirass, and javeling of the period - all studied from the hantique, sir, the glorious hantique' (p. 219). The extent to which Thackeray anticipated that his readers, or some of them, would be conversant with such pictures and trends can be seen in what for a modern reader is probably a mystifying reference - it was to me. In one of his moral reflections on the marriage market, the narrator asks, 'Who was the British nobleman in old old days who brought his three daughters to the King of Mercia, that his Majesty might choose one after inspection.... Ever since those extremely ancient and venerable times the custom exists not only in Mercia, but in all the rest of the provinces inhabited by the Angles, and before princekins the daughters of our nobles are trotted out' (p. 699). Having been frustrated in tracking the allusion down, I was gratified to read in Strong that 'In 1778 [Benjamin West, the artist-antiquarian painter mentioned above, President of the Royal Academy and Historical Painter to King George III] exhibited a scene of mind-boggling obscurity from the Anglo-Saxon period, derived from a passage in the Itinerary of the Tudor antiquary John Leland: "William de Albanac presents his three Daughters (naked) to Alfred, the third King of Mercia" (unlocated)'.16 The picture rather than Leland is the more likely source for Thackeray's question, though the fact that it is a question perhaps suggests that he knew he was stretching the bounds of what a reader might be expected to pick up. Though Thackeray clearly has Sass in mind as he writes about Gandish, another likely original of the portrait is Benjamin Robert

The Art World

95

Hay don (1786-1846), devoted high priest of historical painting, whose Life ofHaydon, From his Autobiography and Journals, edited by Tom Taylor, appeared in the same year as Thackeray started The Newcomes, 1853. A painter of huge and time-consuming canvases, Haydon suffered from poverty pretty constantly, but felt that portrait painting, which might have earned him some money, was a degradation and moreover that the Royal Academy was unjustly dominated by portrait painters. Whereas 'portrait painters have all their wealth and employment from the domestic sympathies of one of the most domestic nations on earth', he says, historical painters have to struggle for patronage against strong prejudice.17 He saw this ganging up of portrait painters as the reason for Sir Martin Archer Shee's becoming President of the Royal Academy (rather than Wilkie): 'Shee', he said, 'is an Irishman of great plausibility, a speechifying, colloquial, well-informed, pleasant fellow, conscious of no high power in Art, and very envious of those who have.' Shee (1769-1850) no doubt suggested Thackeray's Smee, a somewhat toadying, sociable, portrait painter, especially of soldiers. (There are about fourteen of Shee's portraits of distinguished people in the National Portrait Gallery, including those of generals Sir Thomas Picton and William Popham.) The tension between Gandish and Smee is evident in their discussion of Gandish's Boadicea: '"It's not like portrait painting, Smee - Igh art," says Gandish.' '"High art! I should think it is high art!" whispers old Smee; "fourteen feet high, at least!'" (p. 219). The refrain of 'igh art' running through Gandish's discourse no doubt has its origin in Haydon's similarly frequent invocation of 'High Art' (with capitals), not only in the lecture among others that he gave at the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, in 1844 on 'High Art',18 but in his journals; for example 'There is no desire in the English for High Art', or The Election of Sir Thomas [Lawrence] to the chair of the Royal Academy was a blow to High Art it has never recovered', but the election of Shee was the election of 'the most impotent painter in the solar system'.19 On 1 May 1842 (not in Taylor's edition), he prays, 'O God; bless me this month, carry me through as thou hast already done my pecuniary necessities. I have no employment. Extricate, Bless, & protect me, and let my life be spared to see the Victory & triumph of High Art, for the triumph of which I have devoted my Life. Amen'.20 On 22 June 1846 he finished his journal21:

96

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference 22nd. - God forgive me. Amen. Finis of B.R. Haydon 'Stretch me no longer on this rough world' - Lear EndXXVI Volume

Thereupon he shot himself, didn't succeed, reloaded the pistol, slashed his throat twice, and died by his easel. Full of bitterness, gossip and pain, Haydon's journal would have been vividly in mind to many of Thackeray's readers at the same time as the novel itself. British historical painting had its several inner divisions. In addition to the Anglo-Saxon fashion exploited by Gandish, The Newcomes touches on the even stronger fashion for Mary Queen of Scots and, in Clive's work, on the Gargantuan representation of British battles. The eighteenth-century historical resurgence had led to a 'consistent and even obsessive preoccupation of later British history painters with Mary, Queen of Scots'.22 Sir Walter Scott's The Abbot, in particular, encouraged a 'multiplication of abdications and escapes from Lochleven Castle on the walls of the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy from the first appearance of the novel in 1820'.23 And G. P. R. James mined this vein of interest in Darnley (1830) and Rizzio (1849). As Strong notes, 'between 1820 and 1897 no less than 56 works depicting events in her life adorned the walls of the Royal Academy'.24 Among the historical paintings of Clive's friend and fellow student, Sandy M'Collop, are 'the Blowing up of the Kirk of Field [in which Lord Darnley, Mary's husband, was murdered]', 'the Murder of the Regent [the Earl of Moray, half-brother of Mary]' and 'the Murder of Rizzio [Mary's secretary and lover]'. M'Collop is evidently following in the steps of Sir William Allen, a Scottish painter, and friend of Burns and Scott, whose 'masterpiece in mariolotry', The Murder of David Rizzio, appeared in 1833.25 M'Collop, of course, doesn't limit himself to Mary - like many others, he draws on Scott for other scenes of Scottish history and landscape. Reviewing the Royal Academy Exhibition for the Pall Mall Gazette, Fred Bayham writes a puff of his friend: 1906. The M'Collop of M'Collop,' - A. M'Collop, - is a noble work of a young artist, who, in depicting the gallant chief of a

The Art World

97

hardy Scottish clan, has also represented a romantic Highland landscape, in the midst of which, 'his foot upon his native heath', stands a man of splendid symmetrical figure and great facial advantages [no doubt, Fred stood as model]. We shall keep our eye on Mr. M'Collop. (p. 278) For added lustre, Fred attaches to the praise of himself and his friend a quotation from Scott's Rob Roy (ch. 34) where Rob Roy exclaims: 'Speak out, sir, and do not Maister or Campbell me - my foot is on my native heath, and my name is MacGregor!' M'Collop's efforts are merely part of a general interest in things Scottish in The Newcomes, as evidenced by the Scottish affectations of the Duchesse d'lvry and by the characters of James Binnie and the Marquis of Farintosh. The novel as a whole, then, reflects the cultural interests that find a particular focus in M'Collop's paintings. As a youthful painter inspired by his beloved father's military career in India, Clive commences 'as an historical painter, deeming that the highest branch of art; and declining (except for preparatory studies) to operate on any but the largest canvases' (p. 270). Again, Thackeray's London readership would have registered this remark about large canvases. In 1842 a series of competitions, continued over twenty years, for cartoon drawings illustrative of British history or the works of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton was begun to provide decoration for the new Houses of Parliament. A sketch of the crowd viewing the first exhibition of them, in The London Illustrated News of 8 July 1843, shows their grand scale.26 Daniel Maclise's commission to paint two large frescoes for the Houses of Parliament (The Death of Nelson, and The Meeting of Wellington and Blucher), says Maas, 'absorbed all his energies for a number of years and contributed to his decline in health and eventual death'.27 On a subject similar to Clive's, the historical painter Edward Armitage won a premium of £500 in the 1847 oil painting competition for his The Battle of Meeanee'. For his own large-scale historical panorama, Clive settles on one of Arthur Wellesley's great Indian victories, the Battle of Assaye. He painted a prodigious battle-piece of Assaye, with General Wellesley at the head of the 19th Dragoons charging the Mahratta Artillery, and sabring them at their guns. A piece of ordnance was dragged into the back-yard, and the colonel's stud put into requisition to supply studies for this enormous picture.

98

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference Fred Bayham (a stunning likeness) appeared as the principal figure in the foreground, terrifically wounded, but still of undaunted courage, slashing about amidst a group of writhing Malays, and bestriding the body of a dead cab-horse, which Clive painted, until the landlady and rest of the lodgers cried out, and for sanitary reasons the knackers removed the slaughtered charger. So large was this picture that it could only be got out of the great window by means of artifice and coaxing; and its transport caused a shout of triumph among the little boys in Charlotte Street. Will it be believed that the Royal Academicians rejected the Battle of Assaye? . .. [Clive] when he saw it, after a month's interval, declared the thing was rubbish, and massacred Britons, Malays, Dragoons, Artillery and all. (p. 270)

The historical painters took great pains for veracity, but Clive's youthful enthusiasm betrays him (or he indulges in artistic heightening). Wellesley (later Wellington) did have two horses killed under him at Assaye and did, on this occasion, engage in hand-tohand combat, but with his usual uncanny luck he was unwounded. Moreover Wellesley, who notoriously prided himself on gentlemanly sang-froid and silent hauteur, is a far cry from Fred Bayham, whose normal tone is high-spirited bombast, and whose loving interest in the Colonel and things Indian leads to his pirating articles from the Bengal Hurkaru for the Pall Mall Gazette, and delivering a marvelously mangled and exaggerated election speech on the Colonel's bravery 'at Assaye, and - and - Mulligatawny, and Seringapatam' (p. 893). The dead cab-horse is reminiscent of Landseer's experience with the dead lion given him by Regent's Park Zoo in 1848 for studies and casts towards his creation of the lions of the Nelson monument. These took time, but to make matters worse the lion had been delivered when Landseer was out of town, so it had already had time to ripen. 'Anything as fearful as the gasses from the royal remains it is difficult to conceive', wrote Landseer.28 The story of Landseer's lion seems to have been a popular one, Dickens telling an anecdote of Landseer's servant coming in to inquire, 'Did you order a lion, sir?' Landseer's procedure was not exceptional however; among the animal painters and sculptors, dissection and study of corpses was common enough (and dangerous). George Stubbs, whose paintings of horses supported his fascination with anatomy, is said to have worked 'for up to eleven weeks on the

The Art World

99

putrefying carcase of a horse he had manhandled up a flight of stairs'.29 Clive's picture is rejected by the Academy. Despite his trips as an art student to Paris and to the Rhine, and Italy with JJ. Ridley, Clive is essentially as feckless a painter as he is a woebegone lover, lacking the application that eventually leads to Ridley's success (Henry James used the contrast between them as model for Roderick Hudson and Singleton30). The tension between Gandish and Smee is internalised in Clive to the extent that Clive, though he aspires to the grand historical manner, painting's equivalent in status to the epic in literature, is much more successful in sketched portraiture, though he describes it with a touch of Haydon-like condescension: historical pieces our young man had eschewed; having convinced himself either that he had not an epic genius, or that to draw portraits of his friends was a much easier task than that which he had set himself formerly. Whilst all the world was crowding round a pair of J.J.'s little pictures, a couple of chalk heads were admitted into the Exhibition (his great picture of Captain Crackthorpe on horseback, in full uniform, I must own, was ignominiously rejected), and the friends of the parties had the pleasure of recognizing in the miniature room, No. 1246, Portrait of an officer, - viz., Augustus Butts, Esq., of the Life Guards Green; and Portrait of the Rev. Charles Honey man, No. 1272. Miss Sherrick the hangers refused; Mr. Binnie, Clive had spoiled, as usual, in the painting; the chalk heads, however, before named, were voted to be faithful likenesses, and executed in a very agreeable and spirited manner. F. Bay ham's criticism on these peformances, it need not be said, was tremendous, (p. 600) Envious of hard-working Ridley, Clive, whose money has left him lazy, affects a theory of genius to account for his being fit only to paint portraits of Mugginses, complaining, rather like the selfpitying youth of 'Locksley Hall': 'isn't it humiliating? Why isn't there a war? Why can't I go and distinguish myself somewhere, and be a general? Why haven't I a genius? I say, Pen, sir, why haven't I a genius? ... And as for a second place in painting, who would care to be Caravaggio or Caracci?' (p. 662). Clive's career involves not just the choice between historical high

100

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

art and portraits but between the grand manner, whether in the 'Imperio-Davido-classical' school or the school of historical anecdote, and a new Victorian emphasis on the small-scale, familiar, domestic and bourgeois. In Thackeray's art criticism, as Robert Colby says, he is 'endeavouring to raise not only the status of modern artists, but also the prestige of the ordinary, the local, and the temporal as their proper subjects' and to substitute a 'true pathetic' for a 'sham sublime'.31 dive's evolution follows the development of such a preference. J.J. Ridley is generally taken to be an impression of Thackeray's illustrator and Punch associate, Richard Doyle (1842-83), who designed the cover of Punch,32 though like the other portraits of artists in the novel Ridley's character is a composite. Stetz makes an interesting case for Ridley's being inspired at least in part by William Henry Hunt, Ridley being 'a sickly and almost deformed child' (p. 154) and Hunt deformed in his legs, Ridley a butler's son Hunt a tinman's.33 William Michael Rossetti thought Ridley 'might have been moulded upon ... Arthur Hughes'.34 Apart from his book illustrations (he illustrated Ruskin's The King of the Golden River) and contributions to Punch, Doyle's principal genre was fairy painting, already marked by the time he illustrated The Newcomes. In his introduction of Ridley in chapter 11, Thackeray emphasises Ridley's absorption in romance and fantasy, and in doing so reaches a saturation of allusion to opera, fairy tale, painting, legend, and novels from Abellino the Terrific Bravo of Venice to Scott illustrated by an appropriate form of Victorian sketch, 'J.J. in Dreamland' (the frontispiece of volume I), in which the central musing figure is surrounded by a ring of fanciful sketches (a common design for Dickens's part-issue covers and the covers for The Newcomes). Though Ridley is treated rather rhapsodically, he possesses one distinction in Thackeray's world, as Stetz observes, in achieving his ambition without in the end discovering that it has been an unworthy goal.35 In making Ridley a positive foil to Clive, perhaps Thackeray idealises him to a degree inconsistent with his general vision. In addition to reviewing dive's, M'Collop's, Ridley's, and Smee's works in his write-up of the Royal Academy Exhibition, Fred Bayham reviews another genre, that of scenes from literature, in paintings by Smith, R. A., 'Moses bringing home the Gross of Green Spectacles' from The Vicar of Wakefield; Brown, R. A., the 'Don's Attack on the Flock of Sheep' from Don Quixote; and

The Art World

101

Hopkins, The Robber's Cavern' from Gil Bias. Even here there is satirical point in Thackeray's choices as Frith's My Autobiography and Reminiscences makes clear: the example set by [Maclise] in illustrating 'Gil Bias' and The Vicar of WakefielcT caused so many Vicars and Gil Biases to blossom on the walls of the Exhibitions from the hands of many admirers, that the critics fell foul of us; and Thackeray, who was the critic in Fraser of that day, declined to give the names of either Gil Bias or the Vicar in full, but always wrote of the latter as the 'V...r of W d,' and warned us that if our servile conduct was persevered in, he would never look at pictures of either of those distinguished individuals, much less write about them.36 And Frith admits that when he 'began another composition from the tabooed "Vicar of Wakefield", the subject being "Thornhill relating his London adventures to the Vicar's family", and a smaller picture of "Knox reproving Mary Queen of Scots", ... [i]n the same Exhibition with my "Vicar of Wakefield" and "John Knox" was another subject from the "Vicar", and another "John Knox'".37

102

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

These artistic pecking orders and feuds, historical versus portrait, Gandish verses Smee, establishment versus outsider, and the genres mentioned, such as Ridley's fantasies, the various types of historical paintings, fads for Alfred and Mary Queen of Scots, portraits, and the like, reflect and shade off into the cultural ambiance and arguments of the early Victorian art world, lending social substance to the narrative, and connecting it for the informed reader with typical lives, fashions and controversies of the time. And for the less informed reader there is always a sympathetic ally in Colonel Newcome, desperately desirous of sharing his son's enthusiasms, but mystified. In the midst of the artists and their talk the poor colonel was equally in the dark. They assaulted this academician and that; laughed at Mr. Hay don, or sneered at Mr. Eastlake, or the contrary - deified Mr. Turner on one side of the table, and on the other scorned him as a madman - nor could Newcome comprehend a word of their jargon ... what was all this rapture about a snuffy brown picture called Titian; this delight in three flabby nymphs by Rubens, and so forth? (p. 262) Nevertheless, as I have suggested, the Colonel's insensitivity to the plastic arts does not remove him from the universal urge to artifice; his medium, however, is lives - he tries to fashion his son's life and resents the medium's resistance. Another and significant way in which art merges with the other themes and motifs of the novel is as an index of psychology. In dealing with classical allusion, I have already described a major instance in Clive's association of Ethel with the Diana of the Louvre. The image of Diana aptly conveys Ethel's duality of character as huntress and virgin, tantalising and perverse, given to attraction but also to icy rejection. A similar complex of feelings, sexual and aesthetic, emerges through Clive's ostensibly artistic assessment of Ethel and Rosey as possible models. 'As for Ethel, anything so high and mighty I have never seen,... By Jove, how handsome she is! How she turns her long neck, and looks at you from under those black eyebrows! If I painted her hair, I think I should paint it almost blue, and then glaze over with lake. It is blue. And how finely her head is joined on to her shoulders!' - And he waves in the air an imaginary line with his

The Art World

103

cigar. 'She would do for Judith, wouldn't she? Or how grand she would look as Herodias's daughter sweeping down a stair - in a great dress of cloth of gold like Paul Veronese - with the muscles accented like that glorious Diana at Paris - a savage smile on her face and a ghastly, solemn, gory head on the dish - I see the picture, sir, I see the picture!' and he fell to curling his moustache - just like his brave old father. I could not help laughing at the resemblance, and mentioning it to my friend ... he averred, 'that if his father wanted him to marry, he would marry that instant. And why not Rosey?. .. The shadows in Rosey's face, sir, are all pearly tinted. You ought to paint her in milk, sir!' (p. 314) While the passage has the manner of a spontaneous outburst of youthful enthusiasm, it is nevertheless very tight and suggestive writing. At a simple level it communicates dive's sensuous and aesthetic mode of apprehending experience. Beyond that, it reiterates the running motif and characterisation of Ethel as Diana, attractive and daunting. Deeper still, it indirectly communicates dive's own fear of the female as intelligent and enterprising (as I have mentioned elsewhere). Since the novel was published from 1853 to 1855, one has to remember that Salome had not yet gathered around her the associations of Wilde, Beardsley and the decadence; nevertheless, she and Judith had been standard subjects for painting since the Renaissance. Together they certainly convey the idea of woman as destroyer vividly enough. And the contrast with Rosey suggests the other horn of Clive's (or the narrator's) psychological dilemma, that the acceptably subservient Rosey is also mindless and boring as a companion. The contrast between Ethel and Rosey, and the too ready compliance with his father's notion of whom he should marry, foreshadow the tragedy of Clive's emotional life. The dozens of painters mentioned throughout the novel, in passing and anecdotally, give it a patina expressive of Clive's personal and professional interests. But the one who figures most frequently and centrally is of course William Hogarth. Hogarth figures significantly not only in the verbal text but in pictorial allusion.38 The head-letter engraving for chapter 2, recalling Hogarth's 'Industry and Idleness', shows a virtuous apprentice weaving - in reference to Thomas Newcome. 'Like Whittington and many other London apprentices, he began poor; and ended by

104

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

marrying his master's daughter, and becoming sheriff and alderman of the City of London' (p. 18). His story is thus enfolded in a double parallel of allusions, with a suggestion that many more could be found. So in chapter 31 apropos of Lady Kew's plans for the marriage of Lord Kew, Thackeray invokes 'Marriage-a-lamode', comparing its structure with that of fairy tales with a good and bad fairy, or with moral reflections on a Good Principle and a Bad Passion, before telling us that there is 'a Good Spirit coming to the rescue of our young Lord Kew' (p. 414). Later, in chapter 54 just before Jack Belsize carries off Barnes's wife Clara, we see her 'with a gentleman bending over her, just in such an attitude as the bride is in Hogarth's 'Marriage-a-la-mode' as the counsellor talks to her' (p. 720). Doyle then produces a full-page illustration of them, The Old Love Again', echoing Hogarth's design as well as his pattern of moral progress, itself in its typicality an iteration of Thackeray's argument that stories are endlessly repetitive: 'Have you taken your children to the National Gallery in London, and shown them the "Marriage a la Mode"? ... If this fable were not true, if many and many of your young men of pleasure had not acted it, and rued the moral, I would tear the page' (p. 414). As John Harvey notes, reviewers of The Newcomes saw the parallels, the Examiner's remarking: 'What Hogarth meant by his pictures entitled Marriage a la mode Mr Thackeray means by his novel of The Newcomes.'39

The Art World

105

Though there may be limitations to Thackeray's representation of the artist's world in The Neivcomes, it does play upon theories and personalities of the early Victorian art scene more thoroughly than has generally been noticed. Characters and views are a composite of those to which a reasonably alert reader would respond, even if in touch with the art world only through the pages of such papers and periodicals as Fraser's Magazine, and The Morning Chronicle, to both of which Thackeray contributed. Thackeray's tone is generally satirical, as befits the pervasive vision of vanity he is creating and the pen that also created the eminent art-critic, Michael Angelo Titmarsh. But the sense of topicality does not preclude a concomitant sense of the eternally recurrent, suggested for example in his appropriation of Hogarth's moral progresses, that suffuses the whole novel.

4 History and India Historical allusion in The Newcomes is a significant part of the general and important subject of Thackeray and history. His novels form social and historical surveys of English life almost generation by generation from the early eighteenth-century to his own day. In Henry Esmond, he contributed significantly to the genre of the historical novel. His lectures on The Four Georges, as Robert Colby notes, were attended by Carlyle, Macaulay, Prescott, Hallam, and Motley, and the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica invited him to contribute an article on the Age of Anne.1 In his novels, just as he deliberately oscillates between romance and reality, so he frequently calls in doubt the boundaries between fiction and history; both phenomena are parts of the same outlook. He sees fiction as communicating information and truth that histories ignore or conceal. At the beginning of his lecture on Steele in The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, brooding on the subject of truth in history, autobiography and fiction, he concludes: 'Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life of the time; of the manners, of the movement, the dress, the pleasures, the laughter, the ridicules of society - the old times live again, and I travel in the old country of England. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?' (p. 543). Conversely, he argues that 'Most histories with the exception of Holy Writ are just as false as romances with this exception that the latter are longer and more pleasantly written'. 2 Of Pendennis's narration of The Newcomes, we read: the writer of the book, into whose hands Clive Newcome's logs have been p u t . . . dresses up the narrative in his own way; utters his own remarks in place of Newcome's; makes fanciful descriptions of individuals and incidents with which he never could have been personally acquainted; and commits blunders which the critics will discover.... And, as is the case with the most orthodox histories, the writer's own guesses or conjectures are printed in exactly the same type as the most ascertained patent facts. I fancy, for my part, that the speeches attributed to Clive, 106

History and India

107

the colonel, and the rest, are as authentic as the orations in Sallust or L i v y . . . . In this manner, Mr. James, Titus Livius, Professor Alison, Robinson Crusoe, and all historians proceeded, (p. 297) Thackeray's challenging of the distinctions between fiction and history is itself an interesting episode in a tension that had existed since the beginnings of the novel form. As LennardJ. Davis has shown, the novel started in a period when factual and fictional narratives were not strongly discriminated, and the early novelists went out of their way to insist on the truth of their narratives and diminish their claims to authorship.3 Many of them were journalists, and some of their narrative techniques, such as Richardson's moment to moment epistolary progression, approximated the journalistic mode of reporting stories as they developed. A more rigorous distinction between fact and fiction developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century. But by the time Thackeray was writing the distinction had begun to blur again in another way, very much influenced by Scott, whose antiquarian interests fed his novels, and who brought those interests to the fore in clusters of historical notes to his fiction. Thackeray's devotion to Scott is fundamental. He not only builds on Scott's foundations but enjoys highly conscious fun with them, as in Rebecca and Rowena, where in providing what purports to be a more satisfactory continuation and conclusion of Ivanhoe, he not only resorts to medieval histories for the stuff of his narrative but also saturates it with multitudes of farcical anachronisms. At the same time historians contemporary with Thackeray - Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude, and Prescott, to mention only a few - were resorting to fictional tropes and techniques to give history the liveliness and social curiosity of novels. The relationship between Thackeray and Macaulay is particularly interesting, as Jane Millgate's perceptive analysis has shown.4 Thackeray therefore had a considerable element of his readership peculiarly prepared for his ironic reflexivity. In playing off one mode of discourse against another, Thackeray is thoroughly aware of course that the effect is not merely for one to cancel another out. Within their own spheres they are affective, and one attraction of the detailed recreation of social circumstance for his readership, especially as history comes closer to the moment of reading, is the sense of experience shared, with one's class, one's city, and one's nation. Satire need not destroy this

108

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

conservative feeling of solidarity; who better than the middle class at satirising the middle class; a Londoner at satirising Londoners; an Englishman at satirising the ways of the English. The Book of Snobs is full of such double implication, starting off from the sense of community then rebounding upon it: There is always something uneasy in a Frenchman's conceit. He brags with so much fury, shrieking, and gesticulation; yells out so loudly that the Francais is at the head of civilization, the centre of thought, &c., that one can't but see the poor fellow has a lurking doubt in his own mind that he is not the wonder he professes to be. About the British Snob, on the contrary, there is commonly no noise, no bluster, but the calmness of profound conviction. We are better than all the world; we don't question the opinion at all; it's an axiom. And when a Frenchman bellows out, 'La France, monsieur, la France est a la tete du monde civilise!' we laugh good-naturedly at the frantic poor devil. We are the first chop of the world: we know the fact so well in our secret hearts that a claim set up elsewhere is simply ludicrous. My dear brother reader, say, as a man of honour, if you are not of this opinion. Do you think a Frenchman your equal? You don't - you gallant British Snob - you know you don't: no more, perhaps, does the Snob your humble servant, brother, (p. 381) Here is solidarity, an assertion of community, 'we', but a solidarity that ironically subverts itself. The technique and attitude are signalled by the full title of the work: The Book of Snobs, By One of Themselves. In the wrapper illustration for Vanity Fair, the preacher, dressed as a fool, moralises to other fools: 'the moralist, who is holding forth on the cover (an accurate portrait of your humble servant), professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation is arrayed' (p.95).5 Books as thoroughly intertextual, reflexive and parodic as Thackeray's characteristically inspire distrust as being ironic, and therefore trivial. The history of Thackeray criticism is full of uneasiness about his doublenesses, some readers condemning him as a sentimentalist, others as a cynic. Dickens felt that 'he too much feigned a want of earnestness'.6 It is interesting to see that the novelists of post-modernism have incurred the same distrust as

History and India

109

Thackeray for their parodic resort to intertextuality both literary and historical. 'The assumption seems to be that authenticity of experience and expression are somehow incompatible with double-voicing and/or humor.'7 The suspicion perhaps is aggravated where historical allusion is involved, since history has traditionally purported to address the 'world' and truth. And nineteenth-century historians, more particularly those in the Rankean mode, aspired to history that should completely consist of factually accurate statements about an extra-literary world of facts and happenings. 'Typically', says Hayden White, 'the nineteenthcentury historian's aim was to expunge every hint of the fictive, or merely imaginable, from his discourse, to eschew the techniques of the poet and orator, and to forego what were regarded as the intuitive procedures of the maker of fictions in his apprehension of reality'.8 Recent theories such as White's of the writing of history, however, see it as a fictional act presenting much the same intricacies of language, narrative and intertextuality as the writing of novels: Although historians and writers of fiction may be interested in different kinds of events, both the forms of their respective discourses and their aims in writing are often the same. In addition, in my view, the techniques or strategies that they use in the composition of their discourses can be shown to be substantially the same, however different they may appear on a purely surface, or dictional, level of their texts.9 Moreover, the past is mediated in texts and we see not the past world itself but its textual detritus. The philosopher of history Dominick LaCapra, for example, argues that 'the past arrives in the form of texts and textualized remainders - memories, reports, published writings, archives, monuments, and so forth'. 10 Any seasoned reader of Thackeray - and certainly anyone trying to get into the first hundred pages of The Newcomes - will see the relevance of this notion to Thackeray's peculiar narrative method. Thackeray's text is resonantly documentary; think of old Osborne's collection of George's letters almost from infancy in Vanity Fair, of Rawdon Crawley's will, written before Waterloo and encapsulating much of his character and career, or of the series of letters back and forth to and from India in 'Colonel Newcome's Letter Box' (chapter 3). Thackeray', as Juliet McMaster observes, 'felt vividly

110

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

that all we can grasp of the past is remnants, fragments, relics history for him is resident in cigar-butts, laundry bills, proofsheets, the fossilized footprint. That is why the document, the last will and testament of a dead time, figures so largely in his "veracious histories". Unlike the historian he was at liberty to invent his own documents; but it is characteristic of the way his imagination worked that he should so often feel the need to invent documents before his people and their histories would come alive for him.'11 There are several significant historical contexts for The Newcomes. One that hovers throughout is the British experience of India. The Anglo-Indian context is present in an array of minor detail, reference to famous historical figures, for example: Richard Barwell, a nabob of great wealth; Lord Minto, Governor-General of India; Lord Hastings who established British supremacy in central India; even George Chinnery (d. 1852), a painter who visited India and published a series of etchings, Oriental Heads, in 1839-40. Anglo-Indian terms colour the novel's language: pindaree (a mounted marauder), sepoy (a native Indian soldier), bahawder (a great man), kitmutgar (a footman), Bengali Budgerows (barges), cousomahs (butlers), kincob (embroidered Indian cloth), hookah (apparatus for smoking through water), chillum (smoke, properly the tobacco receptacle of a hookah), lakh (100,000, usually rupees) punkas and purdahs and tattys (fans, purdah screens, wet matting), bhang (narcotic), Suttee (immolated Hindu widow), saice (groom). Colonel Newcome, at the time of the second Mahratta war, serves with distinction in the army of the East India Company and at some of its most remarkable actions, at Argaum (under Arthur Wellesley, eventually Duke of Wellington), Bhartpour and Laswari. The Colonel of course is based in part on Thackeray's step-father, Henry Carmichael-Smyth. And behind Thackeray's description of the Colonel sending his little son home to England are his own feelings about being shipped home at the age of five (before Carmichael-Smyth had appeared on the scene). What a strange pathos seems to me to accompany all our Indian story! Besides that official history which fills the Gazettes, and embroiders banners with names of victory; which gives moralists and enemies cause to cry out at English rapine; and enables patriots to boast of invincible British valour - besides the splendour and conquest, the wealth and glory, the crowned ambition, the conquered danger, the vast prize, and the blood

History and India

111

freely shed in winning it - should not one remember the tears, too? Besides the lives of myriads of British men, conquering on a hundred fields, from Plassy to Meanee, and bathing them cruore nostro: think of the women, and the tribute which they perforce must pay to those victorious achievements. Scarce a soldier goes to yonder shores but leaves a home and grief in it behind him. The lords of the subject province find wives there: but their children cannot live on the soil. The parents bring their children to the shore, and part from them. The family must be broken up. Keep the flowers of your home beyond a certain time, and the sickening buds wither and die. In America it is from the breast of a poor slave that a child is taken: in India it is from the wife, and from under the palace, of a splendid proconsul, (p. 66) Like many English male authors, Thackeray saw the Indian adventure as heroic enterprise; like some, he saw it as exploitation; like few, he appreciated the woman's viewpoint.12 Returning to England so young, Thackeray's direct experience of India was small but, as Gordon Ray observes, 'he was raised among AngloIndians whose talk was chiefly about the land that they had left. He was brought up on such books as the histories of India of James Mill and Orme, Bishop Heber's Narrative of a Journey through India, Southey's Curse ofKehama, and Tom Moore's Lalla Rookh. India thus continued to be a living force in his imagination. Moreover, the indirect effect of Thackeray's Indian heritage and experience was immense.'13 Henry James too, observing that Thackeray's people, on both sides, for generations, had been drops in the great bucket . . . the huge, hot, horrible century of English pioneership, the wheel that ground the dust for a million early graves', considers Thackeray's birth at Calcutta 'as making for his distinction . . . . The whole story, in truth, strikes us to-day as a sort of decorative pedestal for his high stature'.14 Returned Anglo-Indians, civilian or military, were regarded condescendingly by the English, and Ray sees that rift as giving Thackeray 'a detached and critical perspective from which to view the structure and customs of English Society'.15 The condescension of English people to their own countrymen in the Indian service could be quite intricate. 'Rosa's father', sneers the terrible Mrs. Mackenzie, who has seen plenty of foreign service herself, 'was a king's officer, not a company's officer, thank God!' (pp. 946-7). And the Newcome Sentinel, during his election campaign, casts a

112

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

slur on the Colonel as 'a sepoy republican' (p. 874), a phrase which, by conjuring up a rebellious native-Indian soldier under British officers, suggests both sedition within the established system and, on the part of the writer who makes no distinction between native sepoy and English officer, smug contempt for the Indian service in general. Such condescension is most pronounced of course in the attitudes of Colonel Newcome's banking relatives, especially in despicable Barnes. On a larger scale, we must be careful not to oversimplify Thackeray's attitudes merely as, say, 'imperialistic'. As always, Thackeray's social, national and racial distinctions are finely gradated and likely to be charged at any point with his characteristic parodic doubleness. Thackeray certainly participates in the whole cultural hegemony Edward Said sums up as 'orientalism', implicit in which is an assumed superiority of the Occident to the orient.16 As a writer for Punch and elsewhere, Thackeray indulged in all sorts of jibes and ridicule that must offend modern liberal sensibilities - against the Irish, the French, Americans, Chinese, Jews, blacks etc. Ray puts some of this down to the 'defiantly British and insular' John Bullishness of Punch and its readership. Some of it is inspired by a characteristic urge to deflate sanctimoniousness in causes otherwise noble. The centre for all the Indian lore in The Newcomes is, of course, Colonel Newcome. Something of a scapegrace in the eyes of his pietistical step-mother, Thomas Newcome is allowed a cavalry cadetship to prepare for the Indian army. His career, like Thackeray's knowledge of India, is textually determined: 'Orme's History [Robert Orme's, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan from the year 1745, 1763], containing the exploits of Clive and Lawrence, was his favourite book of all in his father's library' (p. 30). He can 'repeat whole pages of it' as a boy and still remembers them as a pensioner (p. 989). Orme's History itself has a talismanic power in the novel. After the Colonel and Clive have been ruined by the failure of the Bundelcund Bank, Ethel finds a legacy (or the intention of one, which she honours) from the Colonel's step-mother in a copy of Orme's History which she had been reading on the night of her death (pp.42, 988). He not only chooses his career under the impress of Orme but names his son after one of its heroes, Clive, the victor of Plassey and one of the most famous Indian administrators. There may, in fact, be a touch of special partisanship in this

History and India

113

naming as well, something Thackeray's contemporaries would be more attuned to, since Robert Clive was rancorously attacked at the end of his career, subjected to a parliamentary inquiry (1772-3), became addicted to medicinal opium, and eventually committed suicide. His reputation was not enhanced by James Mill's History of British India (1817), which the Colonel has heard of as a Very learned history' (p. 989), but has not read. There Mill's judgement was so severe that Macaulay, in his essay on Clive (1840), considered Mill showed 'less discrimination in his account of Clive than in any other part of his valuable work'.17 Indeed, Macaulay begins his essay by commenting on England's remarkable distaste for its whole Indian history: It might have been expected, that every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history would be curious to know how a handful of his countrymen, separated from their home by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few years, one of the greatest empires in the world. Yet, unless we greatly err, this subject is, to most readers, not only insipid, but positively distasteful.18 Even as late as the 1870s, Trollope observes that nothing empties parliamentary benches faster than a notice that Indian affairs are about to be discussed.19 The Colonel's admiration for Clive is part of his carefully established eighteenth-century education and outlook, which make him seem to his early-Victorian contemporaries eccentric, outlandish, a mixture of Roger de Coverley and Don Quixote, with whom he is allusively associated many times. Nevertheless by the 1850s attitudes towards the Indian service were changing.20 The book Macaulay is reviewing praises Clive and so does he. And Thackeray in listing the famous Indian battles, Argaum, Assaye, Bhartpour, Laswari, Seringapatam, reminds his readers that one of their greatest heroes, the Duke of Wellington, was establishing his military fame in some of them. Thackeray doesn't describe battles. As in Vanity Fair, the martial background is allusively there while he concentrates on the domestic, the Colonel's fatherly solicitousness, various ladies' attempts to snare him, his kindness to lonely children. Indeed the great Indian battles are parodically presented on occasion as the stuff of Victorian bombast and bathos, as in Clive's attempt at a large-scale historical canvas of the Battle of Assaye with bombastic Fred

114

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Bayham standing in as model for the intensely reserved Wellesley, the 'iron Duke' as he was later to be called. Full-scale imperial condescension to orientals seems evident in the Colonel's encounter, at Mrs. Newcome's reunion, with 'Rummun Loll, the celebrated Indian merchant, otherwise His Excellency Rummun Loll, otherwise His Highness Rummun Loll, the chief proprietor of the diamond mines in Golconda' (p. 97). A shady character, he subsequently persuades the Colonel to invest in the Bundelcund Bank, thus precipitating the Colonel's eventual catastrophe. His name is already suggestive, 'Rummun' being a fictitious title that echoes 'Rana', a title of Rajput princes, and Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu, as well as the holy name, Raman, the Compassionate, but more clearly British slang, a 'rum one', odd or disreputable. Seeing the Colonel, Rummun Loll's 'princely air was exchanged for one of the deepest humility', and the Colonel receives his Hindustani remarks 'twirling his mustachios with much hauteur' (p. 98). As for Loll, we soon see him lolling (a stereotypical racial threat to white virginity). 'The Indian Prince was so intelligent!' gushes Mrs. Newcomer The Indian what?' asks Colonel Newcome. The heathen gentleman had gone off, and was seated by one of the handsomest young women in the room, whose fair face was turned towards him, whose blond ringlets touched his shoulder, and who was listening to him as eagerly as Desdemona listened to Othello. The Colonel's rage was excited as he saw the Indian's behaviour. He curled his mustachios up to his eyes in his wrath. 'You don't mean that that man calls himself a prince? That a fellow who wouldn't sit down in an officer's presence...' (p. 98) And Doyle's accompanying illustration shows Loll reclining among a bevy of fascinated young women. Thackeray then has concisely presented the full racial-sexual stereotype of the insinuating oriental. Indians are not gentlemen and they pose a sexual threat. British officials, not always of very distinguished status in England, lived on a comparatively grand scale in India (the Colonel has fifty servants) and affected aristocratic hauteur towards natives of even the highest eminence, and it was disturbing to them when Indians were treated with social deference in England. As Kenneth Ballhatchet in Race, Sex and Class under the Raj

History and India

115

observes, Curzon, later in the century, was to be much vexed about problems of sex and status in letting Indian princes visit England, and he sounds just like the Colonel: 'With unpleasing relish Curzon told Hamilton of the contrast in situation of a certain prince in England, where he was "a favoured guest at Windsor and Sandringham", and in India, where "he regards it as a high honour to be asked to dinner at Government House" '.21 The anxiety about a sexual threat is fundamentally anxiety about the structure of power. The scene with Rummun Loll is not as simple as it might seem, however, and it is certainly not an indication of unconscious or entirely sympathetic racism on Thackeray's part. As an eccentric in this society, the Colonel may be seen as having a Quixotic license to express what others choose to ignore - that the Rummun is a presumptuous scoundrel - and to be seen therefore as the champion of simple truth. But then, the Colonel is, and has been from the beginning, a straight-laced, naive, unaccommodating character, a touch self-righteous. Here as elsewhere we can objectively see the Colonel striking a pose. In discoursing to Pendennis on Fielding for example, the Colonel loses himself in a tirade that shows his thoroughly plausible blending of eighteenth-century mores, class sensitivity and racial condescension: A book, sir, that tells the story of a parcel of servants, of a pack of footmen and ladies' maids fuddling in ale-houses! Do you suppose I want to know what my kitmutgars and cousomahs are

116

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

doing? I am as little proud as any man in the world: but there must be distinction, sir; and as it is my lot and Clive's lot to be a gentleman, I won't sit in the kitchen and booze in the servants' hall. (p. 50) He is so rapt that he forgets his company, falls to denouncing Tom Jones as though in person, and recovers himself with an apology: 'I - I - I beg your pardon' (p. 51). The stereotypes of innocence and arrogance characteristically undercut each other. The Colonel is both admirable and fallible. When Thackeray was well on in the book, a Miss Bray asked him if he had had a good night, and he replied: 'How could I with Colonel Newcome making a fool of himself as he has done.' Mrs. Bray: 'But why did you let him?' Thackeray. 'Oh, it was in him to do it. He must.'22 Just as in the scene at the Cave of Harmony near the novel's beginning, and as in his election campaign, the Colonel's idiosyncrasies make us see him critically, however much he may be admirable on balance. Wherever Thackeray's racial sympathies may lie, in Colonel Newcome and his society Thackeray gives us a critically accurate picture of English attitudes in and to the Indian service. Although one sort of readership might find reassurance for English superiority in the Colonel's hauteur, another would find a less congenial but precisely drawn picture of English conceit. The failure of the Bundelcund Bank draws upon several ranges of Thackeray's and his readership's experience. His step-father, Henry Carmichael-Smyth, and Thackeray himself, lost much of the family fortune in the failures of Indian banks in the 1830s, particularly that of Cruttenden and Company for £1350000 in 1834.23 Thackeray had already spoken bitterly in Vanity Fair (ch. 60) about the skullduggery by which Bank executives managed to survive snugly despite the massive failure of their institutions. Jos Sedley, not grand enough to live 'in Moira Place where none can live but retired Members of Council, and partners of Indian firms (who break [go bankrupt] after having settled a hundred thousand pounds on their wives, and retire into comparative penury, to a country place and four thousand a year)', furnishes his house with the furniture of Mr. Scape who became a partner in 'the great Calcutta house of Fogle, Fake, and Cracksman, ... two years

History and India

117

before it failed for a million, and plunged half the Indian public into misery and ruin' (p. 761-2). Like the Colonel, Scape is meticulous about seeing his creditors properly paid. In The Newcomes, just before the crash, Clive wonders: Those partners who had come home, having sold out of the Bank, and living in England so splendidly, why had they quitted it?' (p. 884), and at one of the Colonel's dinners we find 'Mr. Ratray, who had returned, filled with rupees from the Indian bank' (p. 898). W. H. Carey describes this phenomenon in The Good Old Days of Honourable John Company: The effect of the ruin and dismay which then spread in Calcutta was not felt among the partners of the fallen houses, as the older merchants seeing the storm coming had returned home with fortunes, leaving penniless adventurers to take their places in the falling agency houses'.24 Financial crises in banks were not limited to India, however, and in his comments on the Bundelcund Bank Thackeray shows an awareness of the history of English banking that would have touched many of his readers. 'Founded, as the prospectus announced, at a time when all private credit was shaken by the failure of the great Agency Houses, of which the downfall had carried dismay and ruin throughout the presidency: the B.B. had been established on the only sound principle of commercial prosperity - that of association' (p. 646). This seems to refer to the historical change in England, after a major crisis in 1825, from agency houses that dealt primarily with short-term bills of credit, which could be passed on from one hand to another with interest (termed a discount) charged each time for the service, to joint-stock banks whose concern was primarily deposit banking.25 Thackeray knew these details with some precision, having worked for a time as a bill-discounter in 1833. Because of associations of billdiscounting with shady deals and usury, he was very touchy on this subject ever after, protesting to the editor of Fraser's in 1843 when one of its writers wrote a satirical sketch involving 'Bill Crackaway', who had 'added to the occupation of editor of a pseudophilosophical magazine the business of a bill-broker in the City'.26 As Ray observes, a jealous hack alluded to Thackeray as 'that admired old ex-note-shaver'.27 In any case, the failure of the Bundelcund Bank is not exotically remote from the experience or knowledge of Thackeray's English readers, who had witnessed similar evolutions in banking at home. He does cater to their xenophobia and racism however by making Rummun Loll and his

118

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

company the cause of the Bundelcund Bank's failure. We must nevertheless remember that Barnes Newcome as banker is no model of moral probity: he creates a panic in the market by refusing thirty thousand pounds' worth of the Bundelcund's bills; and when the Colonel stands for election to the directors of the East India Company, Barnes gives the support of Hobson Brothers and Newcome to a rival and opposes the Colonel as well in election to parliament. The whole texture of Indian allusion in The Newcomes provides for typically Thackerayan dislocation and double vision: the English returned from India versus the English at home; eighteenth-century values versus Victorian; the grand versus the grandiose; the heroic versus the mundane and domestic. It has been argued that history and memory as constructions of the past differ in that memory keeps the past and all its social, personal and ideological tensions alive and present. History as scholarly reconstruction, on the other hand, involves a degree of detachment, generality or, more negatively as Nietzsche and many modern artists have argued, of Apollonian abstraction, making one incapable of living adequately in the present.28 In The Newcomes, the Colonel keeps the past alive as memory and present value. Dr. Johnson and the eighteenth-century authors are his standard newfangled authors like this chap Tennyson mystify him. So with his social views: his courtly code is at odds with the values of his Victorianbanking brothers. And his identification with Don Quixote, Roger de Coverley and Sir Charles Grandison makes him an incongruous and comic, though in some ways an admirable, figure. More sinisterly, he reifies the past by imposing it on his son's present. Clive, under the pressure of the Colonel's desire to make him happy, repeats the sad emotional pattern of the Colonel's life - 'the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done'. The new generation repeats the sorrows of the old. So much for learning from history. But if Clive honours his father, we as readers are kept conscious of the generation gap and the tragedy of that imposed past. Clive, reconstructing the Battle of Assaye in his giant canvas, with Fred Bayham and a dead and stinking horse as models, is also attempting to reconstruct history and the damned thing won't come alive. What is present memory for his father is for Clive a matter of reconstruction. The Colonel yearns to know his son's mind and

History and India

119

those of the young Turks his companions; Clive despairingly venerates his parent. The effect for the reader is to contemplate the tension between two modes of feeling and understanding. The tropes in which Thackeray presents the Colonel's career are synecdoche and irony: synecdoche in that the Colonel's life is a microcosm; irony in that Thackeray's strategies of presentation reflexively call attention to themselves as offering different or opposing interpretations of experience. In one view, the cyclic pattern of experience offers conservative comfort: 'Plus ca change; plus c'est la meme chose'. But the cycle is a cycle of frustrations the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Time and chance happeneth to them all. Faced with the chaos of experience, the characters of The Newcomes obsessively shape it into artistic design or, more basically, apprehend it as design only to be frustrated in what they took to be reality.29 Pattern is arbitrary, a choice among various possible outcomes as in the final paragraph of the book: 'Anything you like happens in fable-land'. And all the consciousnesses are isolated. As Thackeray had said in Pendennis: 'Ah, sir - a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine - all things in nature are different to each ... you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us' (p. 184). The past is at once a tyrant and irrecoverable - history is always unique and always the same.

5 France of the Citizen King If the Colonel's career allows Thackeray to pursue his account of English development into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and into the imperial background of India, his multifarious allusions to France bring him to the Romantics and the generation preceding the actual writing time of the novel. He had always been interested in and knowledgeable about France, having spent a good part of his youth there in the thirties. That was the age of the July Revolution and Louis Philippe, the Citizen King, socalled for his election as King of the French rather than King of France and for his bourgeois style and manner. Thackeray had written extensively about Louis Philippe's France in The Paris Sketch Book (1840). Like Clive, he saw Paris as an art student, and The Newcomes is liberally sprinkled with allusion to French artists. But in a larger sense France under Louis Philippe was an appropriate ancillary to Thackeray's study of the English middle class. The July Revolution was a triumph of the bourgeoisie, and its ideological exponents liked to draw analogies with the English revolution of 1688 (Lord John Russell saw the French theorists as 'French Whigs' l ) as well as with their contemporaries, the entrepreneurs of the English industrial revolution. As a modern historian sums it up: 'It is difficult to avoid a cynical assessment of "1830". Despotism shifted from chateau to Stock Exchange'.2 French satirists were not slow to anticipate in their own society the kind of critical vision Thackeray gives of the English middle class (though of course the English bourgeoisie and aristocracy were reaching an accommodation, largely through the marriagemarket Thackeray describes, whereas in France the July Revolution was a bourgeois displacement of the restored artistocracy). Among the most notable instances were Daumiers' and Charles Philipon's caricatures of the bourgeoisie and especially of Louis Philippe, whom Philipon, from the shape of Louis's head, represented as a pear (poire signifying both pear and idiot) - they were prosecuted and the September laws passed repressing freedom of the press. Thackeray describes the pear episode in The Paris Sketch Book 120

France of the Citizen King

121

(pp. 179-80) and exploits the same associations both in drawing and words in 'Codlingsby' where Louis Philippe appears with 'a cotton umbrella, and old trousers, and old boots, and an old wig, curling at the top like a rotten old pear'. Thackeray, or his alter-ego Titmarsh, took as irreverent a view of the July Revolution as his satirical French contemporaries. Titmarsh in the Paris Sketch Book writes a letter, dated 30 July 1839, to the editor of the Bungay Beacon: My dear sir, in their aptitude to swallow, to utter, to enact humbugs, these French people, from Majesty downwards, beat all the other nations of this earth. In looking at these men, their manners, dresses, opinions, politics, actions, history, it is impossible to preserve a grave countenance; instead of having Carlyle to write a History of the French Revolution, I often think it should be handed over to Dickens or Theodore Hook, and, oh! where is the Rabelais to be the faithful historian of the last phase of the Revolution - the last glorious nine years of which we are now commemorating the last glorious three days? (Paris Sketch Book, p. 34) English readers of The Newcomes would feel some recent connection with affairs in France since, when Louis Philippe's regime came to an end in the revolution of 1848, he fled to England where he lived at Clairemont, Surrey, until his death in 1850. French society enters the novel in several ways: in the Colonel's youthful passion for Leonore de Blois (later Comtesse de Florae), an attachment broken off by the parents; in Clive's trips to Paris with the Colonel, and later to visit Madame de Florae (and Ethel); in the account of the Due and Duchesse d'lvry and their entourage in the Baden chapters; and most impressively in the character of Paul de Florae, of whom Saintsbury claims There is certainly no one who can touch him as a sketch of a foreigner in the enormous range of the English novel' (xxi). The first trip to Paris in chapter 22 is largely travelogue, registered in Clive's letter home to Pendennis. Its technique is not only travelogue in itself but about the process of being a tourist. Clive and the Colonel are equipped with the current guide-books, their modes of travel are described (basins on the channel steamer, coupe to Paris), the restaurants they eat at (huitres de Marenne at the Cafe de Paris, dinner at the Trois Freres Provengaux with the Viscount de

122

Thackeray's Cultural frame of Reference

Florae, supper at the Cafe Anglais with Mademoiselle Finette and acquaintances from the theatre), people seen at the opera, "M. Thiers, and Count Mole, and George Sand, and Victor Hugo, and Jules Janin' (p. 273). But the major discussion is of the Louvre, introduced through a major work of contemporary English literature. Looking about him Clive recalls Carlyle's famous account of the Swiss Guards massacred by the revolutionary mob when Louis XVI surrendered to the Assembly: 'What a great man that Carlyle is! I have read the battle in his History so often, that I knew it before I had seen i t . . . . The colonel doesn't admire Carlyle' (p.272). Easing into the Louvre by way of Carlyle is a way not only of bringing French history home to English readers, but of distinguishing once again the Colonel's classical outlook from Clive's romanticism. (A pity the reference is also anachronistic, the date being 1833 and The French Revolution published in 1837.) Clive's most important experience however is of the Louvre's art works, especially the Venus de Milo, though his memory will subsequently focus on the Louvre's statue of Diana, a recurrent motif in the novel, identified in his mind with Ethel. As befits a letter by a green youth to one of his friends (Clive is eighteen), the style is full of gush and exclamations. Far more sophisticated in the evocation of a cultural ambiance by historical and biographical reference are the Baden chapters, where Clive is about 20 and the date about 1834. There he encounters the Due and Duchesse d'lvry, the Due having been an emigre during the restoration, thoroughly royalist in his outlook, and suffering a sense that the times are out of joint under the bourgeois government of Louis Philippe. The following little tour de force is introduced as only one part of the characterisation of the Due, an old aristocrat irked by the poetic extravagance of his youthful, melodramatic wife. The account of the French writers he likes and dislikes is an indirect index of his political opinions as well: He was of old France, she of new. What did he know of the Ecole Romantique, and these jeunes gens with their Marie Tudors and Tours de Nesle, and sanguineous histories of queens who sewed their lovers into sacks, emperors who had interviews with robber captains in Charlemagne's tomb, Buridans and Hernanis, and stuff? Monsieur le Vicomte de Chateaubriand was a man of genius as a writer, certainly immortal; and M. de Lamartine was

France of the Citizen King

123

a young man extremely bien pensant, but, ma foi, give him Crebillonfils, or a bonne farce of M. Vade to make him laugh; for the great sentiments, for the beautiful give him M. de Lormian (although Bonapartist) or the Abbe de Lille. And for the new school! bah! these little Dumas, and Hugos, and Mussets, what is all that? 'M. de Lormian shall be immortal, monsieur/ he would say, 'when all these freluquets are forgotten.' After his marriage he frequented the coulisses of the Opera no more; but he was a pretty constant attendant at the Theatre Fran^ais, where you might hear him snoring over the chefs-d'oeuvres of French tragedy, (p. 409) The differences between the Duke and his wife, including their ages and political outlooks, are reflected in this list of Romantic writers, Hugo, Dumas, Lamartine, Musset, Chateaubriand, and of adversaries of the Romantics, like De Lormian, author of 'Le Classique et le Romantique: dialogue'. Chateaubriand, though a major Romantic, is presumably all right in the Duke's eyes as a leading constitutional royalist, an opponent of the Bonapartes, and choosing to live in retirement during the July Monarchy - Lamartine also abandoned his diplomatic career after the July Revolution. The same division of French writers, ostensibly on talent but really on political outlook, can be seen in Mrs. Trollope's Paris and the Parisians in 1835, immediately contemporary with the action of The Newcomes, except perhaps that Mrs. Trollope is even grosser in her judgement. The Due d'lvry would have warmed to her sagacity. amidst this plenitude of destructiveness, they have not yet contrived to make any one of the puny literary reputations of the day weigh down the renown of those who have never bent their voices to the cause of treason, regicide, rebellion, or obscenity. The literary reputations of Chateaubriand and Lamartine stand higher, beyond all comparison, than those of any other living French authors ... no single work has appeared since the revolution of 1830 which has obtained a substantial, elevated, and generally acknowledged reputation for any author unknown before that period.3 What, not even Victor Hugo, the greatest poet of nineteenth-

124

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

century France? With English probity and supremely confident authority Mrs. Trollope pronounces: I might say that of him France seems to be ashamed.... He is the head of a sect - the high priest of a congregation who have abolished every law, moral and intellectual, by which the efforts of the human mind have hitherto been regulated . . . . But Victor Hugo is NOT a popular French writer.... I consider this a proof of right feeling and sound taste... .4 As for La Tour de Nesle by Dumas pere, about Buridan and the sanguineous queen of whom the Due complains, Mrs. Trollope cites it as a prime example of 'the outrageous school of dramatic extravagance which had taken possession of all the theatres in Paris'; and she breaks down in attempting to describe it: This is enough, and too much, as to the plot ... nothing but vice, - low, grovelling, brutal vice'.5 She dismisses Balzac too, but takes comfort from his remark that ideas generated today will be old tomorrow and dead the day after: T should indeed be truly sorry to differ from him on this point; for herein lies the only consolation that the wisdom of man can suggest for the heavy calamity of witnessing the unprecedented perversion of the human understanding which marks the present hour'.6 Thackeray's judgement on her views about France is given in The Paris Sketch Book: 'when such authors as Lady Morgan [Sydney Morgan, author of France, 1817] and Mrs. Trollope, having frequented a certain number of tea parties in the French capital, begin to prattle about French manners and men, - with all respect for the talents of those ladies, we do believe their information not to be worth a sixpence; they speak to us, not of men, but of tea-parties' (p. 97). Nevertheless, though provincial, exclamatory and without the experiential refinements of the Due's background, her comments illustrate the historical plausibility of the political and literary constructs informing the differences between the Due d'lvry and his modish young wife. The Duchesse d'lvry, for her part, cultivates the new tastes and fashions represented by the Romantics. She also communicates the Romantic aura of vice so disheartening to Mrs. Trollope. Several of the works referred to are topically specific to the narrated time: Dumas pere's La Tour de Nesle (1832), Hugo's Hernani (1830) and Marie Tudor (1833). The Duke d'lvry being archiroyaliste, Madame la Duchesse must make herself ultra-Philippiste.... After being

France of the Citizen King

125

Royalist, Philippist, Catholic, Huguenot, Madame d'lvry must take to Pantheism, to bearded philosophers who believe in nothing, not even in clean linen, eclecticism, republicanism, what know I?' (p. 411). Her various books of poetry chronicle her changing political and religious enthusiasms. In her poetry, her gauntness, her penchant for romantic intrigue and her retinue of lovers, she affects a resemblance to Mary, Queen of Scots. She calls her lovers and male acquaintances after Mary's lovers and detractors Both well, Rizzio, John Knox - and her lodgings after Mary's castle, Lochleven. Her Scottish extravagance is appropriate to her time, place and Romantic sensibility. France felt a connection with Mary from her marriage to the Dauphin Francois in return for French aid against the English. Her popularity, ascending with the surge of enthusiasm for British history in the late eighteenth century, reached a peak both in painting and literature in the 1830s. Sir Walter Scott, enormously popular in France, fuelled the interest in Mary with The Abbot and The Monastery (1820), and consonant with the histrionic tastes of the Duchesse, Mary was popular on the Romantic stage as well, for example in Schiller's Maria Stuart (1800). The Duchesse's most devoted attendant at Baden is the fiery young poet M. Victor Cabasse de Castillones, son of a grocer who had come up in the world by marriage. She calls him Stenio after the jaded Lelia's enthusiastic lover in George Sand's recent novel Lelia (1833).' He had at one time exalted Republican opinions, and had fired his shot with distinction at St. Meri. He was a poet of some little note - a book of his lyrics - Les Rales d'un Asphyxie - having made a sensation at the time of their appearance. He drank great quantities of absinthe of a morning; smoked incessantly: played roulette whenever he could get a few pieces: contributed to a small journal, and was especially great in his hatred of I'infame Angleterre. Delenda est Carthago was tattooed beneath his shirtsleeve . . . . Le leopard, emblem of England, was his aversion; he shook his fist at the caged monster in the Garden of Plants, (p. 445) Amusing in his extravagance, but a deadly little enthusiast, he wounds Lord Kew in a duel. His fantastic Anglophobia comes of the Black Prince having 'insulted a lady of the house of Castillones' in the Middle Ages. Delendo est Carthago (Carthage must be

126

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

destroyed) recalls Cato the Elder's conclusion to all his speeches after seeing Carthage's prosperity. Again, M. Cabasse is an extraordinary compound of allusions and cliches both literary and historical, a mindless but fierce reiterator of layered history. The contemporary historical note is in his firing his shot with distinction at St. Meri. I doubt many English readers would catch it now, though informed Victorians might. In the insurrection of June 1832 in Paris, 110 republicans set up their headquarters at 30 Rue St. Meri, and from behind their barricades held off repeated attacks of the army with remarkable temerity until overwhelmed. What sort of appeal does such writing have? It is lively and witty enough to be appreciated without a lumber of annotation, but the informed reader - informed in ancient and modern history, Romantic and classical literature, French politics of the early nineteenth century, and Bohemian affectations - acquires a sense of complex cultural implication wherein personalities blend with, or take their colouring from, politics, religion, art and drama. Though the scene in view is far from the hills of Scotland, Thackeray demonstrates how he has absorbed what Scott had to offer the novel form, that intermingling of character and mental environment. Its cultural density lends the narrative a special richness and resonance, as well as sounding the novel's theme of recurrence yet again: the Duchesse and Cabasse, though in a debased and lowmimetic form, live their lives in formulas inherited from Racine, Corneille, Cato. In her histrionics, the Duchesse reiterates the impulse of other characters in the novel to make life imitate art. She puts her suitors through 'tragedies of jealousy, pantomimes of rapture, and farces of parting' (p. 444). 'She was Phedre, and if in the first part of the play she was uncommonly tender to Hippolyte, in the second she hated him furiously. She was Medea, and if Jason was volage, woe to Creusa!' (p. 455). And Thackeray's selfreferentiality, pointing up these vanities, also enters to provide an interpretive framework: the Duchesse affects her histrionics 'As in a fair, where time is short and pleasures numerous, the master of the theatrical booth shows you a tragedy, a farce, and a pantomime, all in a quarter of an hour' (p. 444). Baden is another booth in Vanity Fair. Well-educated contemporaries must have savoured the sense of cultural and historical density, traditional and contemporary, almost anywhere they looked in The Newcomes. For such a reader, this section of the novel, which is usually regarded as an unnecessary longeur, has its own richness and appeal.

France of the Citizen King

127

The air of sexuality, overt and furtive, that surrounds the Duchesse is probably what the English reader would expect of French high society. Thackeray reinforces it by indirect, figurative reference, to Calypso for example or 'the Marquise Ariane to whom the Prince Thesee had behaved so shamefully', to Herculaneum 'from the Forum to the Lupanar' or brothel, and to Milton's Comus: '].]. compared Ethel, moving in the midst of these folks, to the lady amidst the rout of Comus' (pp. 355-6). It is a matter of course that Florae should take young Clive to see Mademoiselle Finette in her dressing room and invite her to dinner with several literary fellows; the Due d'lvry at sixty is still visiting 'Phryne and Aspasie [famous courtesans of ancient Greece] in the coulisses' or theatre green-rooms (p. 407). Florae's pockets are emptied by 'Mademoiselle Atala of the Varietes (une ogresse, mon cher, who devours thirty of our young men every year in her cavern in the Rue de Breda!)' (p. 478). The Varietes, a Montmartre theatre of 'bouffoneri exorbitante', also absorbs the attention of Lord Farintosh, of whose engagement to Ethel Florae exclaims: 'Engaged! This young marquis is engaged to the Theatre des Varietes, my mother. He laughs at the notion of an engagement.' And he continues with an inspired topographical allusion: When one charged him with it of late at the club; and asked how Mademoiselle Louqsor - she is so tall, that they call her the Louqsor - she is an Odalisque Obelisque, ma mere; when one asked how the Louqsor would pardon his pursuit of Miss Newcome? my Ecossais permitted himself to say in full club, that it was Miss Newcome pursued him. (p. 613) The monumental obelisque Florae has in mind in his verbal play is that from Luxor, Egypt, from the reign of Rameses II, now set up in the Place de la Concorde;7 an odalisque, of course, is a female slave, especially in a harem, and a popular subject for erotic painting. As a typical feature of his being French, Florae is convinced 'that no woman could pass many hours in his society without danger to her subsequent peace of mind' (p. 477), and it is understood that he refrains from devastating Rosey or Laura Pendennis for their husbands' sakes. Like master, like man; he warns his valet Frederick to show like consideration for Pendennis's nurse-maid: 'None of thy garrison tricks with that young person, Frederic! vieux scelerat. Garde toi de la, Frederic,

128

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

si non, je t'envoie a Botani Bay; je te traduis devant le Lord Maire!' (p. 749). Thackeray communicates French attitudes to sex in a number of ways and occasionally distinguishes them from English ones. In chapter 46, The Hotel de Florae', we find that the proper Princess de Montcontour, Florae's wife nee Higg, a dissenter from Manchester, has a bed-chamber, which, to her terror, she is obliged to open of reception-evenings, when gentlemen and ladies play cards there. It is fitted up in the style of Louis XVI. In her bed is an immense looking-glass, surmounted by stucco cupids: it is an alcove which some powdered Venus, before the Revolution, might have reposed in. Opposite that looking-glass, between the tall windows, at some forty feet distance, is another huge mirror, so that when the poor princess is in bed, in her prim old curlpapers, she sees a vista of elderly princesses twinkling away into the dark perspective; and is so frightened that she and Betsy, her Lancashire maid, pin up the jonquil silk curtains over the bedmirror after the first night.... A boudoir, rose-tendre, with more cupids and nymphs by Boucher sporting over the doorpanels - nymphs who may well shock old Betsy and her old mistress - is the princess's morning room. 'Ah, mum, what would Mr. Humper at Manchester, Mr. Jowls of Newcome' (the minister whom, in early days, Miss Higg used to sit under) 'say if they was browt into this room!' But there is no question of Mr. Jowls and Mr. Humper, excellent dissenting divines, who preached to Miss Higg, being brought into the Princesse de Montcontour's boudoir, (pp. 603-4) Poor Princess - erotically placed mirrors, and nymphs by Boucher, Madame de Pompadour's favourite and an accomplished decorator of boudoirs and painter of nudes, whose beautiful 'Young Girl Resting' (1752) scandalised Denis Diderot, and he not from Manchester at all. Thackeray, as the Preface to Pendennis suggests, is somewhat restive under the Victorian restraints against describing sexuality, but like other Victorians he finds his own system of codes and signals that do the job effectively. Frequent and, as we have seen, pointed reference to French writers - Racine, Corneille, Moliere, Crebillon fils; and for the moderns, Balzac, Dumas, Paul de Kock, George Sand, Hugo, Janin, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, de Lormian, Jacques Abbe de

France of the Citizen King

129

Lille, de Musset - provides cultural context and process as does the litany of French painters: Gerard, Dubufe, Scheffer, Vernet, Boucher, Gudin, Delaroche and Lancret. In addition a convincing network of generational and political allusions fleshes out the ambiance of French society. The congregation of acquaintances at the gambling casinos of Baden is repeatedly called the Congress of Baden after the 'congress system' of diplomatic conferences as well as the Congress of Vienna held to settle European affairs after the Napoleonic war. The fate of Louis XIVs descendants on the throne of Spain is pursued into the intricacies of the Carlist wars of 183340 and later (pp.410, 432, 595). The Hotel de Florae has been owned by a member of the Directory and been visited by Madame Tallien, Madame Recamier, and Madame Beauharnais (Josephine), eminent in the salons of the Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary society. The Due d'lvry has been 'an emigrant with Artois, a warrior with Conde [eminent emigres and counter-revolutionaries], an exile during the reign of the Corsican usurper' (p. 406). The Duchesse d'Angouleme and the Duchesse de Berry, notorious for her attempt to raise a revolt against Louis-Philippe in 1832, her arrest in La Vendee, and her release from prison in disgrace when she was found to be pregnant, extend their favour to the newlymarried Duchesse d'lvry - and 'nothing would have better pleased the duchesse than to follow MADAME in her adventurous course in La Vendee, disguised as a boy above all' (p. 410). The Due is received coldly among the 'august exiles [Charles X and the Dauphin] at Goritz' because she is suspected of having informed on de Berry (p. 410). And among the bits of 'exalted tittle-tattle' (p. 638) that Lady Kew keeps track of is 'what was happening among the devotees of the exiled Court at Frohsdorf (in Austria, where the Due of Bordeaux, the exiled pretender to the French throne, spent most of his life). The glancing way in which these allusions are incorporated suggests a readership, perhaps an ideal readership, thoroughly informed on foreign affairs, and for whom a hint is sufficient. Implicit texts recede behind the text at hand, historically, socially and anecdotally enriching it for informed readers with what Edith Wharton called a 'diffused significance',8 and creating for the less informed an air of authority without much impeding their surface progress. In his evocation of a foreign culture in movement, Thackeray was indulging himself in a virtuoso performance with the d'lvry s and Baden, somewhat at the expense of the novel since many

130

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

readers find the Congress of Baden chapters rather digressive. Out of them comes one of the novel's triumphs however, the characterisation of Paul de Florae, Comte de Montcontour, cousin to the Duchesse d'lvry and eventually heir to the title, Due d'lvry, which he chooses not to use. Though Madame de Florae contributes some, Florae's speech causes a fairly high quantity of French to be used in the novel, as well as inexpert English resulting from direct translation of French idioms into English and from not quite grasping English idiom. It is not unusual for an author to attempt a French colouring with a few tricks of speech and pronunciation, but in this field the elaboration of Florae's language is a triumph. Thackeray has not worried himself unduly about unilingual readers. His fun with Florae's speech can only be appreciated by a readership comfortably conversant with the French language. For example: 'She filled her salon with ministers to make you die' (a vous fair mourir, to be the death of you, p. 354). The same unpractised awkwardness is seen in Leonore's speech: 'he looked so like you as I repeal me of you' (forje me vous rappelle, p. 702), or 'so behold you of return my friend' (de retour, p. 701). Comparing bellicose Jack Belsize and Clara with Corneille's Rodrigue and Chimene from Le Cid, Florae comes out with the wonderful comment: 'Suppose you kill ze Fazer, you kill Kiou, you kill Roostere, your Chimene will have a pretty moon of honey' (p. 382). 'Que diable goest thou to do in this galley' (p. 758), a partly translated quotation from Moliere, is a peculiar mixture of vehemence and the formality, 'goest thou', of either the style of dignified translation or the distinction between French vous and tu. Again, in Florae's complimenting Kew for standing up to Belsize: Touchez-la, mon petit Kiou. Tu as du cceur. Godam; you are a brave! A brave fellow!' (p. 381), there is a convincing wobble between the French adjective, brave, used as a noun and the English adjective, brave. And the 'Godam' probably carries as much resonance of the centuries-old French term for Englishmen, Godams (in recognition of their favourite expletive), as of the expletive itself. Several of Florae's words are amusing hybrids, as when he refuses Barnes's offer of a carriage to return from Greenwich saying, 'we came by the steamer, and I prefer the peniboat'', successfully combining the French penible, laboured or painful, with English penny boat (p. 483). He switches between English and French from word to word and sentence to sentence, and with great verve, so that we get the genuine impression of a mind straddling two languages and two cultures.

France of the Citizen King

131

Florae is a bicultural phenomenon. He has married an English woman from Manchester, a dissenter whose family are industrialists. Her principles are uncongenial, she brings less money to the marriage than he hoped, and the two are separated when he enters the novel. In some ways Florae is stereotypically French. He considers himself invincible with women. He is a gourmet, though 'a very sober drinker like most of his nation'. And his gusto is physically conveyed, as when 'partaking of his favourite ecrevisses, giving not only his palate but his hands, his beard, his moustachios and cheeks a full enjoyment of the sauce which he found so delicious' (p. 382). At his bachelor dinners in Greenwich with Clive and Warrington, 'ma fois, the little whites baits elicited his profound satisfaction' (p. 476). His conversation is freighted with French allusion, as when he describes the Duchesse d'lvry as 'murderer, poisoner, Brinvilliers' - after the Marquise de Brinvilliers (1630-76) who poisoned her father and two brothers and was beheaded and burned (p. 471 ).9 He is voluble and exuberant in gesture. He even accommodates his young English friends' enthusiasm for drinking songs and glees with one of the most popular French songs of the nineteenth century (elaborated in vaudeville, drama and eventually film): Tanfan la tulipe' (1819) by Emile Debraux (p. 477): Tiens voici ma pipe, voila mon bri-quet; Et Quand la Tulipe fait la noir tra-jet Que tu sois la seule dans le regi-ment Avec la brule-gueule, de ton cher z'a-mant.10 The song follows the exploits of a French soldier given to wine, women and adventure and is clearly suitable to the company. Florae's fortunes improve in the course of the novel's narration. On first appearance he is penurious, pawning his clothes in order to gamble. After Baden, we hear of him next in lodgings in Leicester Square, which, 'though dingy, were such as many noble foreign exiles have inhabited' (p. 477). Barnes, impressed by Florae's rank and with an eye to banking profits from the Higgs, manages a reconciliation between Florae and his wife, and we discover them now 'magnificiently lodged' at a hotel in Jermyn Street (p. 525), which indeed was notable in the early nineteenth century for luxurious and comfortable hotels: Blake's, Reddish's, Miller's, Topham's and the St. James. He adapts successfully to being a member of the board of directors of the Anglo-Continental Railway,

132

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

and is 'bien vu by the government. He might have had the Embassy Extraordinary to Queen Pomare' (Queen of Tahiti, and recently in the news for accepting French protection in 1847) (p. 606). Florae is especially bicultural because he is possessed by Anglophilia. "En Angleterre je me fais Anglais, vois tu, mon ami' (p. 749). He resorts to his wife's country estate near Newcome, determined to be the very epitome of an English country squire, and with great success, 'a most wonderful Briton indeed!' even on that horror of the civilised world, an English Sunday morning: He wore top-boots and buckskins.... In conversation with his grooms and servants he swore freely, - not that he was accustomed to employ oaths in his own private talk, but he thought the employment of these expletives necessary as an English country gentleman. He never dined without a roast beef, and insisted that the piece of meat should be bleeding, 'as you love it, you others'. He got up boxing-matches; and kept birds for combats of cock. He assumed the sporting language with admirable enthusiasm - drove over to cover with a steppere - rode across contri like a good one - was splendid in the hunting-field in his velvet cap and Napoleon boots, and made the Hunt welcome at Rosebury (pp. 750-1) At forty-five, he gives up being a young man all at once, expands his waist-coats, and allows the grey in his moustache. The Floracs, with their religiously mixed marriage, develop further the religious threads of The Newcomes. Madame de Florae initially cuts up rough with her French relations: 'She told my sainted mother that she was an idolatress.... She called us other poor Catholics who follow the rites of our fathers, des Romisches; and Rome, Babylon; and the Holy Father - a scarlet - eh! a scarlet abomination' (p. 603). Her behaviour is also trying to Florae's brother, an Abbe, whose Catholicism is too loose for the Due d'lvry, his father: 'I knew my son had become a Cordelier [a Franciscan]; I went to hear him, and found he was a Jacobin' (p. 354). That should mean he was a Dominican, from the Dominican church of St. Jacques, but the Due probably means Jacobin in the radical political sense as well, after the political club that met in the Dominican monastery during the revolution. When Madame de Florae undergoes a conversion from Methodism to Anglicanism under the unctuous persuasion of Honeyman, the Abbe is soothed

France of the Citizen King

133

because Anglicanism seems to him an encouraging step towards Catholicism. He improves on her disposition and The visit reconciled the family to their English relative' (p. 604). She has a rather more difficult time with English clerics. Having friends among the Newcome dissenters, she visits the 'little branch Ebenezer', and is therefore assumed by the local Anglican rector, Dr. Potter, to be of little social consequence: The old clergy, you see, live with the county families. Good little Madame de Florae was pitied and patronized by the Doctor; treated with no little superciliousness by Mrs. Potter and the young ladies, who only kept the first society' (p. 745). When Paul becomes a Prince, attitudes change considerably and he is amused by the spectacle of British snobbery and obsequiousness: 'What men are you English!... Did'st thou see how the Reverend eyed us during the sermon? He regarded us over his book, my word of honour!' A quietly effective emblem of toadying, the minister fawning on an aristocrat over his Bible. But Florae, despite his enthusiastic Britishness, his greying moustache, and the religious environment, remains sufficiently Gallic: ' "Savez-vous qu'elle est furieusement belle la fille du Reverend?" whispered his highness to me. "I have made eyes at her during the sermon"' (p. 749). The evocation of French culture in The Newcomes is easy, thorough and entertaining. In class, it is restricted to a high level of society as is the rest of The Newcomes. But the novel's characters are anchored in a detailed and accurate knowledge of French history, politics, literature, art and religion, not ostentatiously paraded, often lightly touched upon in passing, but all the more convincing for being taken for granted. The reader has a sense or illusion that what appears is only part of an extended living organism.

6 London and the Significance of Topography London is the appropriate centre for Thackeray's world of complex reference, containing within itself the immense richness of history, social range, variety of occupation, artistic vitality, political power and imperial enterprise that justifies Johnson's summary comment that 'when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford'. 1 In the time covered by The Newcomes, which also in large part coincides with Thackeray's lifetime, London had entered on a period of extraordinary expansion, swallowing up its satellite communities like some gigantic organism. Contemplating miles of new 'stock jobbers' houses', Cobbett in 1822 called it 'the great wen'.2 If, in one view of it, it seems a great organism, in another it seems like a magnet pulling knowledge, people and wealth into it from all over the world. Invalided out of the Indian army in the 1880s, and gravitating to London, Arthur Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson less commendingly called it 'that great cesspool into which all the loungers of the Empire are irresistibly drained'.3 England's surge of commercial, industrial and imperial wealth resulted not only in the growth of London but in the rise and fall of numberless individual fortunes. Social mobility vastly increased, inspiring the folklore of enterprise and self-help leading to the realisation of great expectations. Such progressions might be registered in the convention of the old eighteenth-century moral pattern or 'progress', such as those in Hogarth's engravings of the Fellow 'Prentices in Industry and Idleness. Chapter 2 of The Newcomes begins with a head-letter sketch of the virtuous apprentice at his loom, referring to the elder Thomas Newcome who comes to London from the north to engage in the cloth trade. So patterned, the individual fortune becomes part of an age-old formula of industry, thrift and success which, as R. H. Tawney and G. M. Young have observed, formed the basis of combined religious and commercial ethics in the Victorian period. As Young says: To be 134

The Significance of Topography

135

serious, to redeem the time, to abstain from gambling, to remember the Sabbeth day to keep it holy, to limit the gratification of the senses to the pleasures of a table lawfully earned and the embraces of a wife lawfully wedded, are virtues for which the reward is not laid up in heaven only'.4 Figuring forth this fundamental Victorian alliance between religion and business, Thackeray begins with a cloth merchant who marries a wealthy religious dissenter from Clapham, the employer's daughter in fact. And to further emphasise his motif of eternal recurrence, he reinforces the Hogarthian convention of moral progress with allusion to the story from popular legend and pantomime, of Dick Whittington, also a mercer: 'Like Whittington and many other London apprentices, he began poor; and ended by marrying his master's daughter, and becoming sheriff and alderman of the City of London' (p. 18), a story that goes ironic as Barnes brags of it: 'Mr. Newcome's grandfather came to London with a satchel on his back, like Whittington. Isn't it romantic?' (p. 420). Present values, and the spectacle of the Victorian nouveau riche, the new come, localised in London, are thus linked with traditional and universalising moral patterns going back to folklore, fables and Ecclesiastes. The novel gets under way with the religious rites of Clapham, now part of the London boroughs of Wandsworth and Lambeth, but early in the nineteenth century a village separate from the city,

136

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

'five miles from the standard at Cornhill' or the Bank of England (p. 21). The centrality and representativeness of Thackeray's linkage between Clapham and the City in constructing this fable of his age is undeniable. G. M. Young, in choosing to begin his masterly survey of the period with the combination of evangelicalism and commerce, was in effect repeating what several perceptive Victorians had said of their own times. In the mid-sixties Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, sums up these two 'master concerns' of the whole middle class with the exclamation: 'how generally, with how many of us, are the main concerns of life limited to these two: the concern for making money and the concern for saving our souls! And how entirely does the narrow and mechanical conception of our secular business proceed from a narrow and mechanical conception of our religious business! What havoc do the united conceptions make of our lives!'5 Carlyle had observed the same phenomenon in the 1840s, arguing that the real rather than apparent Hell of the English is the 'terror of "Not succeeding"; of not making money, fame, or some other figure in the world, - chiefly of not making money! Is not that a somewhat singular Hell?'6 And Dickens presents the same vision in the pietistical avarice of Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit. The Newcomes, despite such monsters as Barnes and Mrs. Mackenzie, is a gentler version of the Victorian social fable, perhaps because Thackeray's is a much more elaborately intricate social fabric, perhaps because, as in his subtitle to The Book of Snobs, 'By One of Themselves', he identifies more with the middle-class and their failings or vanities and takes an ironic view of both heroes and villains. His treatment of the Hobsons at Clapham is clearly an evocation of the Clapham sect, which flourished from about 1790 to 1832, a group of wealthy and distinguished Evangelicals who included William Wilberforce, parliamentary leader of the anti-slavery movement and a founder of the Church Missionary Society; Henry Thornton, a banker and son of an eminent Evangelical father; Zachary Macaulay, father of Lord Macaulay; and James Stephen, father of Sir James Stephen (who prepared the bill abolishing the slave trade) and grandfather of both Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the eminent jurist, and Leslie Stephen, who eventually married Thackeray's younger daughter, Harriet. They pursued a number of major philanthropic enterprises: the abolition of the slave trade, the provision of hospitals and education for the poor, the improvement of factory conditions by state action, the amelioration of the

The Significance of Topography

137

criminal law and state of prisons. As Vidler remarks in The Church in an Age of Revolution, they had an eighteenth-century sense of class and 'worked for rather than with the poor'.7 They were wealthy, comfortable and earnest, qualities all combined in Sophia Alethea Hobson, Colonel Newcome's stepmother: To manage the great house of Hobson Brothers and Newcome; to attend to the interests of the enslaved negro; to awaken the benighted Hottentot to a sense of the truth; to convert Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Papists; to arouse the indifferent and often blasphemous mariner; to guide the washerwoman in the right way; to head all the public charities of her sect, and do a thousand secret kindnesses that none knew of; to answer myriads of letters, pension endless ministers, and supply their teeming wives with continuous baby-linen; to hear preachers daily bawling for hours, and listen untired on her knees after a long day's labour, while florid rhapsodists belaboured cushions above her with wearisome benedictions; all these things had this woman to do, and for near fourscore years she fought her fight womanfully: imperious but deserving to rule, hard but doing her duty, severe but charitable, and untiring in generosity as in labour.... (pp. 20-1) Thackeray departs from his model in giving Clapham a nonconformist flavour, associating it with Quakers and Methodists. The Clapham Sect actually consisted of Evangelicals within the Established Church. The distinction was not always clearly observed however; dissenters fought for the abolition of slavery alongside the Evangelicals, and Clapham was tolerant of their differences. Evangelicals were sometimes known as Church Methodists. But associated, as Arnold was to portray them, with the 'Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion',8 dissenters perhaps struck a more strident note for Thackeray's reader and were therefore more available to satire, as in the names he gives their preachers: Gideon Bawls and Athanasius O'Grady. To Thackeray's readership, the Clapham group would have been familiar and his slight dislocations would have kept them in the realm of fiction and a general imaginative argument. In his depiction of the 'serious paradise' at Clapham, Thackeray resorts to several archetypes of Eden and the golden age which bring it within the fold of his original emphasis on the recurrent and universal.

138

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Though the fables of Whittington and the Virtuous Apprentice present one mould in which the story of Victorian social mobility can be cast, fluctuations of fortune in this society can be registered in quite another way, less visible to the modern reader but immediately recognisable to Thackeray's Londoners. He can register the fortunes and misfortunes of his characters by simply chronicling their addresses and their migrations from one address to another. As the city built itself, some noble districts maintained their status, others became seedy and their inhabitants moved. New districts tried for an exalted tone. The newly wealthy might not reach Park Lane but they could buy posh houses nearby in recently built Tyburnia. The building up of London involved not just distinctions of new and old but modulations of social status according to the infinitely gradated English class-consciousness. Topography then is a social code, alerting Londoners to the probable status and condition of a street's or district's inhabitants without the necessity for further analysis or character commentary. To savour such nuances modern readers probably need help. Those well-read in Victorian literature will probably pick up some of what is implied. Others, especially non-Londoners and foreigners, will probably miss a great deal. One editor commenting on Henry James's The Tree of Knowledge', for example, and perhaps already exasperated by James's complicated style, says tartly: 'We may wonder even more whether James supposes he is really giving us a picture of the landscape when he says Brench and the Mallows live where "the soft declivity of Hampstead began at that time to confess in broken accents to Saint John's Wood'".9 Well, he is and he isn't. As an account of location and contour the sentence is unobjectionable, but to a contemporary it would have suggested another landscape as well, a moral and social one, Saint John's Wood being known not only for its pleasant semi-rural villas but for the residents of many of those villas, the mistresses of well-todo Londoners - thus the confession and the broken accents. James understood this kind of resonance very well, just as he appreciated it in Thackeray and Balzac. Clapham then has such a resonance, though a much more respectable one. Mrs. Hobson Newcome's sons, Brian and Hobson, inherit the family banking enterprise of Hobson Brothers, 'doing a most respectable business, especially in the Dissenting connexion' and, through Sir Brian's aristocratic marriage, establishing 'a considerable West-End connexion' (pp. 58-9). Their

The Significance of Topography

139

places of residence reflect their status and alliances. Having married Lady Ann, daughter of the Earl of Kew, Sir Brian lives in Park Lane, Mayfair, which had held its position as an aristocratic and fashionable district from the mid-eighteenth century and still does. He sits in Parliament among the mild Conservatives and espouses High Church doctrines. His brother Hobson having married an attorney's daughter, Maria, lives in Bryanston Square, about a half mile away but in a newer district, begun about 1812 for the nouveau riche. Hobson attends Marylebone Chapel, where Charles Wesley is buried, and thrills the Vestry with his denunciations of aristocratic corruption. Maria shudders out of the Chapel when its clergyman briefly affects a surplice. 'Bryanston Square could not forget the superiority of Park Lane's r a n k . . . . Mrs. Newcome ... is not only envious, but proud of her envy. She mistakes it for honesty and public spirit. She will not bow down to kiss the hand of a haughty aristocracy. She is a merchant's wife and an attorney's daughter. There is no pride about her' (p. 55). Mayfair, or May Fair as Thackeray spells it, is significant in the aspirations of several characters. The Reverend Charles Honeyman, the Colonel's improvident and spoiled brother-in-law with a talent for sentimental and elegant preaching, acquires a fashionable chapel, Lady Whittlesea's, in Denmark Street Mayfair. As rivals spring up and fashions change, his popularity wanes, but he receives support from his money-lending landlord, Sherrick (some say his name is Shadrack), who stores wine in Lady Whittlesea's cellars (perhaps an allusion to Exeter Hall, where Spurgeon later preached and where the Temperance Society, which also used the Hall, was shocked to find the cellars let to a wine

10 merchant ).

When Sherrick's wife and daughters are brought in as singers in the choir, the Chapel's fortunes improve. Honeyman's 'hermitage' (Ridley's boarding house) is in a fictional Walpole Street not far from Lady Whittlesea's but fading 'into lodgings, private hotels, doctors' houses, and the like' (p. 160). The Mayfair location of Lady Whittlesea's Chapel nevertheless indicates Honeyman's success and the idea of religion as fashionable entertainment. Clive also dotes on Mayfair. As he puts it in the chapter of pastoral drama (ch.47): 'I live in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square: which is not within the gates of Paradise. I take the gate to be somewhere in Davies Street, leading out of Oxford Street into Grosvenor Square. There's another gate in Hay Hill: and another in Bruton Street, Bond...' (p. 618). Which is to say, streets leading to

140

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Queen Street Mayfair, where Ethel is staying with aristocratic Lady Kew in a house rented for the season (p. 528). For both Clive and Honeyman, Mayfair is an exalted environment, one to which Honeyman clings precariously by catering to the religious fashions of the rich, and in which Clive as a mere painter does not belong (Ethel suggests to the Colonel that Clive should change his vocation). He is excluded as lover and because of his lower class. When Sir Brian dies, Barnes, as the rich snob he is, a baronet now and an MP, moves first to an unspecified house then, upon his marriage to Lady Clara Pulleyn at St George's Church in Hanover Square, to 'a much more spacious mansion in Belgravia' (p. 643). St George's was a church noted for fashionable weddings (and including those of Lady Hamilton, Shelley, and Disraeli). Belgravia was built up from the 1820s and for the next thirty years as a rival to Mayfair; and Eaton Place, where Barnes has his house, arose from 1828. Barnes and his successive dwellings are thus tuned to, and representative of, the historical development of the city. The Colonel and Clive, though half-brother and nephew of the bankers, belong in other surroundings. The Colonel is distinguished and wealthy, but he is an Indian officer. He and his friend Binnie in the early 1830s rent a house in Fitzroy Square, a location suitable, as it happens, both to the Colonel, who is well off, and to Clive, an aspiring artist. The square itself, by the time The Newcome.s was published, had become associated with successful artists, including Charles Eastlake, President of the Royal Academy, at number/; Sir William Ross, miniature painter to the Queen, at number 38; and David Roberts, eminent landscape painter, at number? Fitzroy St. The nearby general area from Soho north on the west side of Tottenham Court Road was full of artists. Clive in his aspiration to become a painter gets a studio in Charlotte Street just south of Fitzroy Square and not far from Newman Street. In 1840 in Heads of the People (Works, I) Thackeray had written a mock natural history of London artists: as genteel stockbrokers inhabit the neighbourhood of Regent's Park, - as lawyers have taken possession of Russell-square, - so Artists have seized upon the desolate quarter of Soho. They are to be found in great numbers in Berners-street. Up to the present time, naturalists have never been able to account for this mystery of their residence. - What has a painter to do with Middlesex

The Significance of Topography

141

Hospital? He is to be found in Charlotte-street, Fitzroy-square. And why? Philosophy cannot tell, any more than why milk is found in a coco-nut. Look at Newman-street. Has earth, in any dismal corner of her great round face, a spot more desperately gloomy? ... and here, above all places, must painters take up their quarters . . . . (pp. 576-7) In these locations for his characters, Thackeray evokes not only present place but evolution, the ebbs, flows and relationships of fashion and economics. The sketch just quoted begins with a migratory pattern, following Soho from the mighty periwigs and gilded clattering coaches of William's time down to the present, where 'a solitary policeman paces these solitary streets, - the only dandy in the neighbourhood'. The same sense of evolutionary process recurs in The Newcomes fourteen years later: Some of the most dismal quarters of the town are colonized by her [British art's] disciples and professors ... who has not remarked the artist's invasion of those regions once devoted to fashion and gaiety? ... There are degrees in decadence: after the Fashion chooses to emigrate, and retreats from Soho and Bloomsbury, let us say, to Cavendish Square, physicians come and occupy the vacant houses, which still have a respectable look, the windows being cleaned, and the knockers and plates kept bright, and the doctor's carriage rolling round the square, almost as fine as the countess's, which has whisked away her ladyship to other regions. A boarding-house mayhap succeeds the physician, who has followed after his sick folks into the new country: and then Dick Tinto [the poor artist from Scott's Bride of Lammermoor] comes with his dingy brass-plate, and breaks in his north window, and sets up his sitter's throne.11 (p. 214) The larger organism of the city is in effect one of the characters of The Newcomes, as is appropriate to Thackeray's essentially historical social vision. Like everything else in his world, it is in a constant process of growth, transformation, and decay. Clive's further migrations coincide with his and the Colonel's increased affluence as the Bundelcund Bank prospers. He leaves the studio to J.J. Ridley and moves to more splendid quarters: 'Clive occupied ancient lofty chambers in Hanover Square now'

142

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

(p. 659). Prince Talleyrand lived there about that time, and it housed one of the Colonel's favourite clubs, the Oriental. Upon his marriage to Rosey, Clive orders 'a sumptuous mansion in the Tyburnian district, and one which became people of their station' (p. 815). Tyburnia, a part of Bayswater between Edgeware Road and Pembridge Road, with its plans for squares, crescents and terraces, began to attract the professionals and wealthy merchants in the 1830s.12 Thackeray elaborates the kind of house 'as gorgeous as money could make it' that Clive, the sensitive artist, now inhabits: How different it was from the old Fitzroy Square mansion with its ramshackle furniture, and spoils of broker's shops, and Tottenham Court Road odds and ends! An Oxford Street upholsterer had been let loose in the yet virgin chambers; and that inventive genius had decorated them with all the wonders his fancy could devise. Roses and Cupids quivered on the ceilings, up to which golden arabesques crawled from the walls; your face (handsome or otherwise) was reflected by countless looking glasses, so multiplied and arranged as, as it were, to carry you into the next street. You trod on velvet, pausing with respect in the centre of the carpet, where Rosey's cipher was worked in the sweet flowers which bear her name. What delightful crooked legs the chairs had! What corner-cupboards there were filled with Dresden gimcracks, which it was a part of this little woman's business in life to purchase! What etageres, and bonbonieres, and chiffonieres! What awfully bad pastels there were on the walls! What frightful Boucher and Lancret shepherds and shepherdesses leered over the portieres! What velvet-bound volumes, mother-of-pearl albums, inkstands representing beasts of the field, priedieu chairs, and wonderful nick-nacks I can recollect! ... and poor Clive, in the midst of all these splendours, was gaunt, and sad, and silent.... (pp. 824-5) After the crash of the Bundelcund Bank and a stint in Boulogne, Clive, with the Pendennises' help, sets up a studio in Howland Street near Fitzroy Square once again (pp. 940-1). Thackeray's characteristic word for his characters' changes of residence is 'migration', and in the essay on artists quoted above he sees their migrations as the stuff of natural history. In other words, he writes a figurative ecology of London, in which time and

The Significance of Topography

143

process are as important as place, and place may signify many things. In mellowing from dissenting rigour to the genteel and fashionably Gothic Anglicanism of Charles Honeyman, the Princess de Montcontour 'had migrated (in spirit) from Clapham to Knightsbridge, as so many wealthy mercantile families have likewise done in the body' (p. 527). Pendennis's migrations express his growing success as a writer, from rooms in the Temple, and Jermyn Street (p. 642), to a cottage at Richmond Hill (pp. 669-70), to a 'modest-furnished house ... in the Pimlico region' (p. 855), to 'a spacious old house in Queen's Square, Westminster' (p. 932). In all these instances of residence and movement, Thackeray is using a kind of topographical shorthand which knowledgeable contemporary Londoners could decode with a pleasurable sense of understanding their historical, sociological, economic and class implications. Outsiders might get a sense of glimpsing the mysteries of a complicated metropolis. The particularities of London, however, as in his other oscillations between romance and realism, particular and general, are always capable of merging with the endless cycles of general human experience: London becomes Rome; Lady Ann becomes Trimalchio's widow, Calista; The Newcomes fuses with Petronius's Satyricon; and migrations, progressions and mutabilities remind us, as always in Thackeray, for whom the bell tolls. Sir Brian dies, and Lady Ann lets out the house in Park Lane: Lady Ann . .. was too poor to inhabit it. But Park Lane is the best situation in London, and Lady Ann's means were greatly improved by the annual produce of the house in Park Lane: which, as we all know, was occupied by a foreign minister for several subsequent seasons. Strange mutations of fortune; old places; new faces; what Londoner does not see and speculate upon them every day? Celia's boudoir, who is dead with the daisies over her at Kensal Green, is now the chamber where Delia is consulting Dr. Locock, or Julia's children are romping: Florio's dining-tables have now Pollio's wine upon them: Calista, being a widow, and (to the surprise of everybody who knew Trimalchio, and enjoyed his famous dinners) left but very poorly off, lets the house and the rich, chaste, and appropriate planned furniture, by Dowbiggin, and the proceeds go to keep her little boys at Eton. The next year, as Mr. Clive rode by the once familiar mansion (whence the hatchment had been removed, announcing

144

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

that there was in Coelo Quies for the late Sir Brian Newcome, Bart.), alien faces looked from over the flowers in the balconies. He got a card for an entertainment from the occupant of the mansion, H.E. the Bulgarian minister; and there was the same crowd in the reception room and on the stairs, the same grave men from Gunter's distributing the refreshments in the diningroom, the same old Smee, R.A. (always in the room where the edibles were) cringing and flattering to the new occupants; and the same effigy of poor Sir Brian, in his deputy-lieutenant's uniform, looking blankly down from over the sideboard, at the feast which his successors were giving, (pp. 640-1) Where people live is not the only urban index of their status and interests. The clubs they frequent, the taverns, the lecture halls and learned societies, the chapels and churches, the banks, the military barracks, the restaurants, the art galleries, the moneylenders, the shows, the dinners they attend, the music they listen to, the newspapers they read, tell us not only about them but about what they constitute, a society. Thackeray's urban allusiveness here again establishes the sort of community with his readership that his many travel books presumably aimed at. If they are not already well-informed, it gives them a guided entree. For the more knowledgeable it evokes in detail a world they believe they know, and of which they can feel connoisseurs, a middle-class world by and large, of the sort he describes (with a stinger to unsettle the comfort of it all) as 'the most polite, and most intelligent, and best informed, and best dressed, and most selfish people in the world' (p. 320). London's club world figures significantly in the book. For the Colonel and Binnie, the Oriental Club in Hanover Square, founded in 1824 for those in the East Indian trade and service, is a natural resort, a home away from home for people who have always been away from home. Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair, the Collector of Boggley Wallah, had had to dine 'at the fashionable taverns (for the Oriental Club was not as yet invented)' (Vanity Fair, p. 27). The Colonel divides his time between the Oriental and Nerot's hotel when he arrives from India: 'All the apple and orange-women (especially such as had babies as well as lollipops at their stalls), all the street-sweepers on the road between Nerot's and the Oriental, knew him, and were his pensioners' (p. 73). When the Colonel holds his dinner at which Clive throws wine in Barnes's face,

The Significance of Topography

145

several gentlemen from The Oriental attend, including Scots of Binnie's acquaintance. When 'Tom Hamilton, of his regiment, comes up for election at the Oriental', the Colonel takes pains to be there (p. 197). And after Binnie's horse falls down and injures him, we see him hobbling to the Oriental as his leg mends (p. 295). One of Thackeray's more famous pieces of social psychology is expressed in club terms: There is no good (unless your taste is that way) in living in a society where you are merely the equal of everybody else.... The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors. Be the cock of your village; the queen of your coterie;... If I cannot take the lead at White's or the Travellers', let me be president of the Jolly Sandboys at the 'Bag of Nails', and blackball everybody who does not pay me honour, (pp. 118-19) To savour this discrimination, one must know that White's is the oldest (1698) and most august gentlemen's club in London.13 Its members have included the richest and most distinguished members of society. We see Jack Belsize, neither rich nor distinguished but later to be Lord Highgate, looking up the dictionary at White's 'to see whether eternal was spelt with an e, and adore with one a or two' for his love letters to Clara Pulleyn (p. 368). And Lord Farintosh tells his 'friends at White's what uncommonly queer people those Newcomes were. "I give you my honour there was a fellow at Lady Ann's whom they call Clive, who was a painter by trade - his uncle is a preacher - his father is a horse-dealer, and his aunt lets lodgings and cooks the dinner"' (p. 565). The Travellers, founded in 1819, was for gentlemen who had resided or travelled abroad 'at least 500 miles from London in a straight line'. The Bag of Nails, on the other hand, was a pub at Arabella Row (changed to Lower Grosvenor Place in 1879) and Buckingham Road. Its inn sign was a satyr and a group of Bacchanals, high-falutin' creatures which the Cockney tongue deflated by calling them 'bag o' nails'. Lord Kew gambles at Crockford's (1827-44), notorious for its 'hazard-bank' at which the proprietor presided, and from which he retired a millionaire after starting as a fishmonger. Ethel accuses Lord Farintosh of 'late hours, and smoking, and going to that horrid Platt's' (p. 560), presumably Pratt's, near St. James's Street, owned by an ex-croupier of Crockford's. It opened only late in the evening. When the Colonel is persuaded to stand for election at

146

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Newcome, Tucker of the Neivcome Independent declares, 'We ought to have a Liberal as a second representative of this great town - not a sneaking half-and-half ministerialist like Sir Barnes, a fellow with one leg in the Carlton and the other in Brookes's' (p. 869). Again the reference is pointed. The Carlton was founded in 1832 for those anxious to restore the Tory party after its signal defeat of that year. Members were expected to espouse Conservative principles, and still are. In 1852 Gladstone, a Peelite, while reading in the club was told by some Tory MPs 'that he had no right to belong to a Conservative Club, but ought to be pitched out of the window in the direction of the Reform Club'.14 Brooks's, founded in 1764, became the Whigs' club. Though most are genuine, some of the clubs in The Newcomes are fictional. Bays's Club, pictured in the illustration, 'Mr. Barnes Newcome at his Club', figures as the location for several displays of Barnes's mean spirit. Perhaps the name and the sketch derive from the well-known bay window added to the centre of White's facade in 1811 and where Beau Brummell regularly put himself on display. Pendennis seems to frequent the Megatherium (p. 58), a rather curious choice of name for the early 1830s. Megatherium was a giant ground-sloth of the pleistocene era, eighteen feet long and weighing several tons, of whom Darwin wrote in his journal of the voyage of the Beagle (1839): 'their ponderous forms and great strong curved claws seem so little adapted for locomotion, that some eminent naturalists have actually believed, that, like the sloths, to which they are intimately related, they subsisted by climbing back downwards on trees, and feeding on the leaves. It was a bold, not to say preposterous, idea to conceive even antideluvian trees, with branches strong enough to bear animals as large as elephants.'15 Richard Owen, whom Thackeray knew, wrote the classic accounts of the ground-sloths in Mylodon (1842) and Megatherium (1860) - Thackeray refers to Owen and the Megatherium at the beginning of chapter 47. But dinosaurs and their ilk were popular in the early 1850s when The Newcomes was published. Dickens, on the first page of Bleak House (1852-3), writes of a fog so thick, 'it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill', and Owen had designed models of some prehistoric creatures for the Crystal Palace in 1854. Megatheria were humorous extinct animals, and in that light probably appropriate namesakes for the club of a struggling but not too impecunious writer like Pendennis.

The Significance of Topography

147

In addition to clubs, several pubs are mentioned. In keeping with Thackeray's general tone of old-fogyism and nostalgia (he was only 47 when he said, 'At 47 Venus may rise from the sea, and I for one should hardly put on my spectacles to have a look'16), he speaks of pubs and taverns as belonging to the past. I assume clubs were more a part of his immediate life as a successful and respectable author. His account of the Cave of Harmony, supposedly modelled on Evans's in Covent Garden, famous for its suppers and music, provides an Edenic opening to the novel: 'having listened delighted to the most cheerful and brilliant of operas, and laughed enthusiastically at the farce, we became naturally hungry at twelve o'clock at night, and a desire for welsh-rabbits and good old gleesinging led us to the "Cave of Harmony"' (p.7). The Haunt, another Bohemian resort for suppers and songs, 'where painters, sculptors, men of letters, actors, used to congregate', receives a similarly lengthy and nostalgic description in chapter 25: 'so much has our social life changed.... James Boswell himself, were he to revisit London, would scarce venture to enter a tavern' (pp. 31617). As with these renamed or fictional resorts which belong to a vanished golden age, so with some of the genuine ones: Halfway House, where the Covent Garden carters paused on their way, was removed in 1846 - There is no halfway house now; no merry chorus at midnight' (p. 341). The King's Arms, Kensington, is also part of the disappearing past, 'the last place in or about London', says John Timbs in Curiosities of London, 'where the old coffeehouse style of society was still preserved'.17 Clive celebrates there the first thirty guineas he has earned by selling prints (p. 341). He later entertains the Pendennises at the Star and Garter in Richmond, an inn nostalgically decribed by Serjeant Ballantine in Some Experiences of a Barrister's Life (1882) as very pretty, with garden-rooms, a limewalk, and a sweep of lawn. Clive and Pendennis are also in the habit of taking a penny boat to Greenwich for supper at unnamed taverns with Florae, 'where, ma foi, the little whites baits elicited his profound satisfaction' (p. 476). These allusions to tavern life gone by serve several functions: of course they flesh out the intricate picture of London, but they also mark changes of fashion and manners in a characteristically Thackerayan mode: The time is not very long since: though to-day is so changed. As we think of it, the kind familiar faces rise up, and we hear the pleasant voices and singing. There they are met, the honest

148

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

hearty companions. In the days when the Haunt was a haunt, stage-coaches were not quite over. Casinos were not invented: clubs were rather rare luxuries: there were sanded floors, triangular sawdust-boxes, pipes, and tavern parlours. Young Smith and Brown, from the Temple, did not go from chambers to dine at the Polyanthus, or the Megatherium, off potage a la Bisque, turbot au gratin, cotelettes a la What-d'you-call-'em, and a pint of St. Emilion: but ordered their beefsteak and pint of port from the 'plump head waiter at the Cock': did not disdain the pit of the theatre: and for supper a homely reflection at the tavern. How delightful are the suppers in Charles Lamb to read of even now! - the cards - the punch - the candles to be snuffed - the social oysters - the modest cheer! Whoever snuffs a candle now? . .. Those little meetings, in the memory of many of us yet, are gone quite away into the past. (pp. 316-17) The pubs and restaurants, so chosen, suggest the passage and richness of historical time, but also echo the notes of Arcadia and Ecclesiastes. And they appeal to a readership learned and curious not only about the city but about the city in literature - even here we need to know Tennyson ('Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue' for the plump headwaiter) and Lamb's essays.18 Thackeray's knowledge of London is extensive and peculiar; nevertheless, as we can see, he works from memory and occasionally falls into anachronism. In one case, he gives us a bum steer of another sort. When Jack Belsize has been in the Queen's Bench Prison for debt and is released, Lord Kew sends his carriage for Jack and gives 'a great feast at Grignon's on the day of his liberation .... He and many other sinners had a jolly night' (p. 368). It seems that Thackeray has conflated the fashionable Grignon's in Paris, mentioned by Balzac in Gobseck, with Grillion's, 7 Albemarle Street, a suitably fashionable place for Kew and Belsize. The city is further articulated in its shops.19 Honeyman's room smells fragrantly of perfumes from Truefitt's or Delacroix's in New Bond Street. Truefitt, perfumer and hairdresser, was a favourite with Thackeray - readers will remember his famous and scathing account of George the Fourth: T try and take him to pieces, and find silk stockings, padding, stays, a coat with frogs and a fur collar, a star and blue ribbon, a pocket handkerchief prodigiously scented, one of Truefitt's best nutty brown wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth and a huge black stock, under-waistcoats, more under-

The Significance of Topography

149

waistcoats, and then nothing' (p. 783). Clive reflects changing fashions when he visits Truefitt's: 'Our young friend was induced to enter the hairdresser's, and leave behind him a great portion of the flowing locks and the yellow beard, which he had brought with him from Rome. With his mustachios he could not be induced to part; painters and cavalry officers having a right to those decorations' (p. 525). Gunter's Tea Shop, 7-8 Berkeley Square, founded in 1757, was a famous part of the London scene for supplying 'English, French and Italian wet and dry sweetmeats'. Philosophising democratically about the respectability of butlers, Lord Kew asks, 'Suppose you were to put ten of Gunter's men into the House of Lords, do you mean to say that they would not look as well as any average ten peers in the house?' (p. 240). The bachelor Honey man entertains his friends with luncheon from Gunter's (p. 288). And since the establishment was renowned for its elaborate wedding cakes, highly popular in Mayfair weddings, the newspapers, upon Lady Clara's wedding to Barnes, naturally describe 'the cake, decorated by Messrs. Gunter with the most delicious taste and the sweetest hymeneal allusions' (p. 474). They also remark on 'the bride's coronal of brilliants, supplied by Messrs. Morr and Stortimer' - that is, Storr and Mortimer, and Hunt, jeweller's and gold and silversmiths of 156 New Bond Street (p. 474). Inspired by the Louvre's Venus de Milo, which reminds him of Ethel, Clive rhapsodises: 'I wish we might sacrifice. I would bring a spotless kid, snowy-coated, and a pair of doves, and a jar of honey - yea, honey from Morel's in Piccadilly [L. Morel, oilman and winemerchant, 210-11 Piccadilly], thyme-flavoured, narbonian, and we would acknowledge the Sovereign Loveliness, and adjure the Divine Aphrodite' - thus mixing the familiar phrases of Latin poetry with the low mimetic of London commerce (p. 272). When anxious Henchman throws his cigar in the fire out of consideration for Farintosh, he provokes the response, 'Why don't you fling some more in? You can get 'em at Hudson's [Tobacconist to the Royal Family, 132 Oxford Street] for five guineas a pound' (p. 779). Rosey 'sat good-humouredly for hours at Schoolbred's [Schoolbred and Cook, Linendrapers and hosiers, 115 Tottenham Court Road] whilst mamma was making purchases' (p. 569). Dwellers in such houses as Lady Ann's in Park Lane enjoy 'rich, chaste, and appropriate planned furniture by Dowbiggin' (p. 640); that is, from Thomas Dowbiggin and Company, upholsterers and cabinet makers, 23 Mount Street, Grosvenor Square.

150

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Richard Tattersall's auction-room for horses, founded in 1766, near Hyde Park Corner has a special allusive significance in the novel. The banker, Hobson Newcome, reinforces his more downto-earth character, affecting the country squire, by telling the assembly at the Colonel's house-warming, 'I was four hours in the hay-field before I came away, and in the City till five, and I've been to look at a horse afterwards at Tattersall's, and I'm as hungry as a hunter, and as tired as a hodman' (p. 238). But Tattersall's fed into The Newcomes in another and more important way, as Robert Colby points out.20 Punch's Pocket Book for 1847 satirises the marriage market, which is one of the novel's main themes, with a coloured foldout depicting 'the Matrimonial Tattersall's', where various prospective wives and husbands are being auctioned off in a Mayfair house. The parody is recalled both in the headletter of chapter 54, showing Ethel being auctioned off by Lady Kew (just before the

description of the engagement party for Ethel and Lord Farintosh), and in the famous episode where Ethel appears before the family wearing a 'Sold' tag (a lady in the Punch cartoon wears a tag marked £20000). These episodes neatly overlap, setting up commercial, moral and social analogies between horse auctions, art exhibitions, and the pervasive marriage market. After a visit with Lady Kew to the annual spring exhibition of the Society of Painters

The Significance of Topography

151

in Watercolours (at 20 Lower Brook Street and Bond Street), and amused by the little green 'Sold' tickets in the corners of the paintings on display, Ethel suggests that 'we young ladies in the world, when we are exhibiting, ought to have little green tickets pinned on our backs, with 'Sold' written on them; it would prevent trouble and any future haggling, you know.'... On that same evening, when the Newcome family assembled at dinner in Park Lane, Ethel appeared with a bright green ticket pinned in the front of her white muslin frock, and when asked what this queer fancy meant, she made Lady Kew a curtsy, looking her full in the face, and turning round to her father, said 'I am a tableau-vivant, papa. I am number 46 in the Exhibition of the Gallery of Painters in Watercolours.' ... and Lady Kew, jumping up on her crooked stick with immense agility, tore the card out of Ethel's bosom . . . . (pp. 361-2) Horses, paintings, and daughters are all commodities. Discouraging dive's participation in the bidding for Ethel, Pendennis says his own disparaging account of the marriage market is 'as true as Tattersall's' (p. 537). And perhaps there is more than a casual connection between these allusions to Tattersall's and the description of Ethel as 'stubborn in training, rebellious to the whip, and wild under harness,' so that 'rather than ride the filly, she [Lady Ann] would put the saddle on her own back and let the filly ride her...'. Barnes concludes, 'If the tightest hand were not kept on her, there's no knowing what she mightn't do' (pp. 432-3). Both Thackeray and his readers realised that commercial namedropping could go too far. In his parody of Mrs. Gore, 'Lords and Liveries', in Novels by Eminent Hands, he guys her penchant for communicating a sense of the fashionable world by alluding to shop names. The Westminster Review in 1831 aired a comic suspicion of her being commercially sponsored: 'A book like Pin Money is, in fact, a sort of London Directory.... We are not sure the authoress of this work has made any bargain with her tradespeople; but we are very certain she might.... None of the persons commemorated would hesitate to give a popular authoress the run of the shop, for the sake of being down on her list.'21 Thackeray, however, was not above exploiting some of the same tricks he

152

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

made fun of. Brand-name and shop-name snobbery has a venerable tradition from Byron to the present - consider James Bond's guns, cars, clothes, champagnes and other paraphernalia. In Thackeray's own work, specificity of commercial detail, though it may point to snobbery as in Barnes's case, is merely part of the normal middle-class scene. The city's cultural life is communicated by the various institutions, exhibitions and performances the characters attend. The Colonel gets into heavy weather with Maria Newcome for his kindness in entertaining Lady Ann's children and attempting to distribute gold sovereigns to her own boys. He takes the children from Park Lane to see the show at Astley's Amphitheatre where he laughed delighted at Mr. Merryman's jokes in the ring. He beheld the Battle of Waterloo with breathless interest, and was amazed - amazed, by Jove, sir - at the prodigious likeness of the principal actor to the Emperor Napoleon, whose tomb he had visited on his return from India.... (p. 205) The Colonel is enjoying this show in the 1830s, more than fifteen years after Waterloo, but as Richard Altick observes in The Shows of London: 'London audiences had an insatiable appetite for patriotic spectacles. In the very season, nine years after the event, that a paper remarked, "London is sick to death of Waterloo", Astley's The Battle of Waterloo, replete with cavalry advances, bugle calls, and cannon fire, ran for 144 consecutive performances and then went into the repertory to become the second most frequently performed show in the house's history, excelled only by Mazeppa.'22 Astley's, with its horse-shows, panoramas, acrobatics and the like, was a popular London entertainment for generations. Dickens too describes it in chapter 39 of The Old Curiosity Shop. Such spectacles however are too vulgar for Maria Newcome, jealous of Lady Ann's family, and making up for social rank with what she considers to be intellectual distinction: Mind, I make no allusions . . . . When they [her boys] are at home, I desire that they may have rational amusements: I send them to the Polytechnic with Professor Hickson, who kindly explains to them some of the marvels of science and the wonders of machinery. I send them to the picture galleries and the British

The Significance of Topography

153

Museum. I go with them myself to the delightful lectures at the institution in Albemarle Street. I do not desire that they should attend theatrical exhibitions, (p. 209) The Polytechnic, 309 Regent Street, for the advancement of the arts and practical science, especially connected with agriculture, mining, machinery, manufacturing and industry, opened in 1838 (thus, another slight anachronism in Maria's attending it). The institution in Albemarle Street was the Royal Institution of Great Britain, founded in 1799 for the 'promotion, diffusion and extension of science and useful knowledge'. These allusions to popular learning must be added to the luminaries attending Maria's soirees for a full idea of Maria's earnest middle-class desire to achieve distinction and status by courting culture. And they suggest her idea of culture. Shakespeare is out, merely, like Astley's, 'a theatrical exhibition'. Because it is the Colonel's wish ('Should I interpose between a child and his father?') she grudgingly sends young Clive 'to the pit with one of our footmen' (p. 209). Maria's Evangelical inclinations, hostility to plays, and predilection for useful knowledge are in tune with that vein of Victorian culture represented by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, though of course she is no Gradgrind. Mr. Binnie, the Colonel's companion from India, an irreverent Scot who admires David Hume, makes less self-deluded use of London's learned institutions: 'he had a hundred pursuits of his own, which made his time pass very comfortably. He had all the Lectures at the British Institution; he had the Geographical Society [3 Waterloo Place], the Asiatic Society [5 New Burlington Street], and the Political Economy Club' (p. 243). But once again Thackeray's attention slips - while it is possible that Binnie attends the British Institution, 52 Pall Mall, for promoting the fine arts, and which held two exhibitions a year, one of old masters, one of living artists, the lectures and Binnie's interests suggest instead that Thackeray had in mind the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, or the London Institution at Finsbury Circus 'for the Advancement of Literature and the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge' (which also had a fine collection of topographical books).23 The art world, already discussed, is omnipresent in the novel studios, academies, print-sellers, sellers of artists' supplies, and exhibitions. In addition to the exhibition of the Society of Painters in Watercolours, already noted, exhibitions of the Royal Academy

154

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

get frequent mention, both in the puffery of Fred Bayham's reviews and as Clive fails to get his pictures hung there while Ridley succeeds. Musical London is also present everywhere, from sentimental singers like Incledon (1763-1826), whose once-popular style at Covent Garden and Vauxhall 'with flourishes and roulades' the Colonel has acquired, to current celebrities of high art. A mere introduction of Clive to his father's London banking agent brings forth this burst of Jingle-like allusion: Baines represents a house in the Regent's Park, with an emigrative tendency towards Belgravia - musical daughters - Herr Moscheles, Benedick, Ella, Osborne, constantly at dinner sonatas in P flat (op. 936), composed and dedicated to Miss Euphemia Baines, by her most obliged, most obedient servant, Ferdinando Blitz. Ferdinando Blitz, with his sonatas in P flat, is pretty clearly a Thackeray an comic invention, like Messrs. Twankeydillo and Quatremains, but Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870) was an eminent conductor, who conducted the first British performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis; Sir Julius Benedict (1804-85) conducted Italian and English opera at the Lyceum and Drury Lane respectively; John Ella (1802-88) was a distinguished violinist and lecturer on music at the London Institution; and George Alexander Osborne (1806-93), friend of Chopin and Berlioz, composed, played, and taught in England. They were part of the reasonably cultured Londoner's consciousness. Since the Colonel is a distinguished soldier there is, as we have seen, a good deal of military lore in The Newcomes. As the Colonel's son and a friend of Jack Belsize of the Life Guards Green, Clive has an entree into London's military establishment, realised here in several barracks. Belsize and Kew, who is also an ex-member of the regiment, introduce him to the Guard dinner in St. James (p. 255) and to the Knightsbridge Barracks, where Belsize is stationed (p. 268). The Guards have their migrations too, between Knightsbridge and Regent's Park Barracks in Albany Street, where Captain Crackthorpe has Clive to dinner (p. 574), and where we have conversations among the soldiers in the smoking room (pp. 575-6): Jack Belsize

The Significance of Topography

155

'hasn't touched a card for nine months; is going to give up play. So is Frank, too, grown quite a good boy. So will you, too, Butts, you old miscreant, repent of your sins, pay your debts, and do something handsome for that poor deluded milliner in Albany Street.' (p. 575) Clive becomes their 'painter in ordinary', doing portraits of several of them. Sherrick, a money-lender among other things, has business with several guardsmen in difficulties (p. 592). And later in the novel, when Clive is in distress about Ethel, Captain Crackthorpe tells Pendennis: '"Our friend the painter and glazier has been hankering about our barracks at Knightsbridge" (the noble Guards Green had now pitched their tents in that suburb) "and pumping me about la belle cousine"" (p. 697). Particularity and attention to environment, occupation, status and history mark all of Thackeray's references to the urban ambiance. From young Moss's residence in Wardour Street, notable for shops selling old clothes, furniture, pictures, china, in which he has an interest as well as in money-lending, to the wealthy City Livery Companies (Hobson belongs to the fictitious Oystermongers' Company), to the Mansion House ball and Lord Mayor's Show where Barnes courts Clara Pulleyn, London is there with remarkable richness and density, not simply as backdrop but intimately and appropriately linked with the lives and fortunes of Thackeray's characters. As in the other types of allusion with which the novel abounds, its manifold references to London are sophisticated, rich with implication. The sense imparted of London's human ecology (as we have seen, Thackeray himself adopts the figure of natural historian in thinking about the city's life, history and evolution) connects with his general vision in many ways. Time intrigues him. His novels portray English society virtually generation by generation from the childhood of Henry Esmond in the late seventeenth century to the middle age of Pendennis and Warrington in the mid-nineteenth century of The Adventures of Philip. But within any epoch, he focuses on process. In Vanity Fair he shows us commerce shifting from the old notion of the honest merchant, Sedley, to the new one of the sharp and ruthless businessman, Osborne. In The Newcomes several social changes are taking place, marked in the city's growth and entertainments. As he repeatedly says with nostalgic regret,

156

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

the Regency period of stage-coaches, bare-knuckled boxing matches, and general tough levity is gone, and the new mode of moral earnestness taking over. The Victorian coalescence of business, evangelicalism, and enthusiasm for useful knowledge, highlighted in the evolution of Newcome Brothers, and in Hobson and Maria Newcome's social gatherings, is articulated in great detail. And though he sees time in terms of these historical, social and urban movements, his emphasis on process also reflects the eschatological pattern of the vanity of human enterprises: "time and chance happeneth to them all'. And as always in Thackeray, time is the bringer of death. Death pervades his fiction, from the horrific fears and grotesqueries of characters like Miss Crawley to the mere act of going downstairs and spotting that arch in the staircase where one day the undertaker's men will ease the coffin as they carry you out.24 As The Newcomes begins with a London public school, Grey Friars (Charterhouse) near Smithfield, so with many reminders of the cyclical repetitiousness of human experience, it ends there with the Colonel, an aged pensioner, answering the chapel bell in his delirium as he dies with the schoolboy response, 'Adsum!'. I think there is no doubt that Thackeray's is one of the major novelistic evocations of a great city, worthy of standing beside Dickens's, Balzac's, Zola's and Gissing's, though different from all of them. Thackeray's London, unlike Dickens's, is a place of varied cultural life. It is restricted to the middle and upper classes, but it draws them with fine precision and gradation. His aristocrats convince. Except for servants, there are virtually no proletarians. Seven Dials, the docks, Tom-all-Alone's and London's underworld are clearly not his domain as they are Dickens's. And his depictions of London scenes, though presented in a closely woven texture of multiple allusion, are not phantasmagoric, animistic, quaint or explosive as Dickens's tend to be - one thinks of 'Meditations in Monmouth Street' in Sketches by Boz, the view from Todgers's in Martin Chuzzlewit, the opening pages of Bleak House and its representation of Krook's establishment, or of Hexam's corpse-laden river in Our Mutual Friend. Thackeray's London breathes with the enlightened and varied interests of literate, sophisticated, culturally informed readers - the readers of the great Victorian journals, alert to movements in commerce, religion, education, art and music, readers who would quickly pick up, decode, and savour his kaleidoscopic range of reference. It is a normal world, where his characters, whatever their submerged

The Significance of Topography

157

agonies and lusts - and he can convey a good deal of twisted passion beneath the polite surface of his narration - inhabit the ordinary daylight world of London shops, parks and institutions without the glimmer of stage-lights. They can be melodramatic and bombastic, like the Campaigner and Fred Bayham, but they are ironically seen doing it, unlike those characters in Balzac or Dickens who achieve a heightened intensity by moving gradually and seriously into the grand gestures and obsessions of melodrama. I am not naively trying to suggest that Thackeray is giving a more direct representation of reality. Far from it. His prose of allusion within allusion, opening out in complicated ways like a Chinese box or puzzle, is intensely fictive and textual. But it is for the most part calm and discursive. Again, where Dickens or Balzac would be likely to go into lengthy visual description of a scene, Thackeray often expects his readers to know enough to reconstruct it from hints and allusions. He pays us the compliment of being in the know and ready to pick up the fine points of good gossip, gossip with a richly-informed acquaintance. We may have here, in this wide-ranging cultural allusiveness, a clue, if one were needed, for why many profoundly thoughtful Victorians like Henry James and George Eliot considered Thackeray, to use her words, 'as I suppose the majority of people with any intellect do, on the whole the most powerful of living novelists'.25 In spite of his occasional carelessness or anachronism, Thackeray used and appealed to the well-stocked storehouse of the educated Victorian mind. Like Balzac and Zola, Thackeray gives a highly particularised impression of the city. And like them he is drawn to the contemporary analogy of natural history in explaining the city's growth and ecological relationships. All their characters are to be seen as organisms symbiotically responding to their environments. But Thackeray's analogy between the urban novelist and the natural historian was fortunately a passing and momentary one, uncluttered by the pretentiousness of Zola's pseudo-scientific theory, in Therese Raquin, say, where the earnest scientific lore jostles painfully against strident melodrama of the most conventional order. It is undeniable that Balzac has a much larger range than Thackeray, but as Gordon Ray observes, speaking of Vanity Pair, among the novelists of the world, indeed, only Stendhal and Balzac had earlier shown how to establish character in society by deluging the reader with information concerning the daily routine,

158

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

the employments, the pleasures, and the manners of their figures . . . . Whether his subject is the City or Russell Square, the artist world of Soho or Continental Bohemia, he knows accurately the life that he is describing. Nor does Thackeray fail to take time as well as social sphere into account in his picture of manners ... an accurate period colouring is thus imparted to his story with ease and authority.26 There are other points of resemblance between Thackeray and Balzac: the general depiction of a society governed by self-interest, the recurrent characters. In timespan Thackeray's canvas is considerably broader, from the 1690s to his time of writing. The differences from Balzac are marked, of course, in social range and sombreness. The playfulness and lower pressure of Thackeray's narrative stance, in the conversational tradition of Laurence Sterne, on the other hand, allows for his larger allusiveness. If we have isolated the social and topographical references to London in this chapter in order to concentrate on his evocation of urban social life, we must remember that suffusing it is all the other allusiveness of Thackeray's style, to myth, the Bible, fairy-tale, children's literature, art history, popular lore, song and on and on.

7 Newspapers Letters and newspapers of several descriptions stitch places, characters and continents together in The Newcomes. Events and people are not just noticed in papers and journals - they are noticed from particular points of view, mostly in actual but also in fictional papers and journals of various political, artistic and social interests. Every morning at the home of the banker, Sir Brian, appears A pile of newspapers and letters for the master of the house, The Newcome Sentinel, old county paper, moderate conservative, in which our worthy townsman and member is praised, his benefactions are recorded, and his speeches given at full length; the Newcome Independent, in which our precious member is weekly described as a ninny, and informed almost every Thursday morning that he is a bloated aristocrat, as he munches his dry toast. Heaps of letters, county papers, Times and Morning Herald [major papers for political, foreign and financial news] for Sir Brian Newcome; little heaps of letters (dinner and soiree cards most of these), and Morning Post [extensive reporting of society events] for Mr. Barnes, (p. 183) The chapter in which this breakfast scene occurs is virtually built around the newspapers. We soon move to another breakfast where Lady Ann begins to read the Morning Post, and glances over the names of the persons who were at the Baroness Bosco's ball, and Mrs. Toddle Tompkyns's soiree dansante in Belgravia Square. 'Everybody was there/ says Barnes, looking over from his paper. 'But who is Mrs. Toddle Tompkyns?' asks mamma. 'Who ever heard of a Mrs. Toddle Tompkyns? What do people mean by going to such a person?' (p. 187) Barnes, who is reading a county paper, suddenly sneers, 'My uncle, the colonel of sepoys, and his amiable son, have been 159

160

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

paying a visit to Newcome - that's the news I have the pleasure to announce to you' (p. 187). Barnes and his father then fall to reading out and deploring unfavourable comparisons between themselves and the Colonel in the Newcome Independent: "The spirit of Radicalism abroad in this country", says Sir Brian Newcome, crushing his egg-shell desperately, "is dreadful, really dreadful. We are on the edge of a positive volcano'" (p. 192). Sir Brian's fears for the establishment are appropriate for 1830. The government was still doing its best by means of the Stamp Tax to squelch the radical newspapers, but they throve anyway. As Richard Altick observes, 'In Great Britain as a whole during the period 1800-1830, the annual sale of newspaper stamps had virtually doubled, from sixteen million to thirty million, while the population had grown half as fast, from ten and a half million to sixteen million. Furthermore, an individual paper probably passed through more hands than it had earlier/1 Newspapers could be read cheaply in coffee-houses and subscription reading rooms; even people unable to read could club together and have them read aloud. The period covered by The Newcomes from dive's arrival in England in 1820 to the late 1840s saw the great expansion of the popular press, and the sense of a community keeping tabs on itself by newspapers and journals at home and abroad is reflected by their pervasiveness in the novel. There are about twenty-three of them, real and invented: Bell's Life in London, the Bengal Hurkaru, the Court Journal, the Day, the Examiner, the Farmer's Magazine, Galignani's, the Globe, John Bull, the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Herald, the Morning Post, and The Times, as well as the Dorking Intelligencer and Chanticlere Weekly Gazette, the Morning Press, the Newcome Chronicle, the Newcome Independent, the Newcome Sentinel, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Penny Voice of Freedom, the Scourge, the Trimestrial Review, and the Whip. A number of papers, including the Morning Herald, the Court Journal, the Morning Post and the Newcome papers, report Barnes's fashionable wedding, but the Morning Post is the one that reports on the fashionable world most frequently in the novel. 'Oh, Ethel, what a standard we folks measure fame by! To have your name in the Morning Post, and to go to three balls every night' (p. 635). The Post 'naturally omitted all mention of such low people as Mrs. De Lacy [Barnes's cast-off factory girl] and her children' at Barnes's wedding (p. 475). Ethel's and Lady Kew's visits to various castles, complete with a list of 'a brilliant circle of friends' of 'Duke This and

Newspapers

161

Earl That', in attendance find coverage (p. 695), as do Barnes's banquets in celebration of Ethel's betrothal. The Post's reporting of Clara's elopement is quoted with alarm by Todhunter and Henchman, Lord Farintosh's cronies: 'Elopement in high life - excitement in N —come, and flight of lady Cl— N—come, daughter of the late and sister of the present Earl of D—rking, with Lord H—gate; personal rencontre between Lord H—gate and Sir B—nes N— come. Extraordinary disclosures' (p. 779). For solemn occasions however, the voice of The Times seems necessary: there is a lengthy extract from The Times obituary notice for Lady Kew (p. 723). Barnes's divorce trial and the Newcome Divorce Bill 'filled the usual number of columns in the papers, - especially the Sunday Papers. ... and, for the ends of justice and morality, doubtless, the whole story of Barnes Newcome's household was told to the British public' (p. 773). Thackeray himself had looked up the trial of Norton v. Melbourne, 'having a crimcon [criminal conversation] affair coming in the Newcomes.'2 The Newcome trial at the Court of Queen's Bench, contested by Serjeant Rowland and Oliver, QC (Charlemagne's heroic knights in The Song of Roland), gives rise to some highly unlikely, but thoroughly Thackerayan, classical reporting. The Day, the principal morning paper of that period [it had started out, like some other papers, owned by a trade, in this case the auctioneers3], came out with a leading article the next morning, in which every party and every institution was knocked about. The disgrace of the peerage, the ruin of the monarchy (with a retrospective view of the well known case of Gyges and Candaules), the monstrosity of the crime, and the absurdity of the tribunal and the punishment, were all set forth in the terrible leading article of the Day. (p. 774) The major reporter of that retrospective crimcon case is Herodotus in his History of Greece (I, 7), where he tells how Candaules, King of Lydia, allowed Gyges to spy on his naked Queen, whereupon the queen, understandably vexed, urged Gyges to kill him. He did and married the queen. Candaules displaying the queen, however, is also a notable piece of Victorian art, a painting in 1831 by William Etty, known for his sensual nudes. As often, the Thackerayan allusion is a bundle of associations nested one within another.

162

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

In his presentation of the trial through the newspapers, all discriminated in kind as morning, evening and Sunday papers, Thackeray here as elsewhere in the novel reflects a world thoroughly textualised, where personal life, through mass media and on a scale never before possible, has become matter for various sorts of rhetorical exercise and public entertainment: The whole country looked on and heard the wretched story, not only of Barnes's fault and Highgate's fault, but of the private peccadilloes of their suborned footmen, and conspiring housemaids' (pp. 744-5). In addition to The Times and Morning Herald that we see Sir Brian combing, several papers take a part in the financial affairs of the novel. The imperial spread of these enterprises makes itself felt by news from the Bengal Hurkaru (from Hindi for 'messenger'), one of the major Indian newspapers for the first sixty years of the nineteenth century. It initially reports the success of shares in the Bundelcund Bank. And Fred Bayham pirates its accounts of the Bundelcund directors for his own journalism, transferring 'from the columns of the Bengal Hurkaru to the Pall Mall Gazette the most astounding descriptions of those Asiatic Nights Entertainments, of which the very grandest was to come off on the night when cholera seized Rummun Loll in its grip' (p. 901). When the Hobson Brothers and Newcome Bank, through Barnes's ill will, precipitates a crisis for the Bundelcund Bank by refusing its bills, a City article in the Globe announces that the Bundelcund has shifted its business to Baines and Jolly (p. 834). When abroad, characters keep in touch with English gossip and social concerns by frequenting Galignani's. Pendennis expects Clive to see Fred Bayham's art reviews there (p. 277), Clive reads about Lord Kew's duel in Galignani (p. 469), and George Barnes slips Kew a Galignani to lighten the diet of missionary stories his mother has been reading to him as he recovers from his duel (p. 496). Giovanni Galignani (1752-1821), born in Brescia, started an English library in Paris in 1800, a monthly periodical called the Repertory of English Literature in 1808, and Galignani's Messenger in 1814, a French newspaper in English which became a daily just before he died, and which flourished from 1818 to 1848 under his sons Jean Antoine and Guillaume. Galignani's reading room and newspaper are testimony to the increased sense of social life as something registered, lived and validated in newsprint, even beyond one's borders, an international means for the English to continue the textual confirmation of their existence and importance.

Newspapers

163

An incidental character like Mr. Bagshot, member for a Norfolk borough and who only appears once, is characterised by his club, the Carleton; his wine, 'the '24 claret now, that of '15 being scarce'; his tavern, the Blue Posts; and his papers, John Bull and Bell's Life in London, a paper evolved from Pierce Egan's Life in London and Sporting Guide (p. 152). The French too are alert to such classifying signifiers. When Clive and the Colonel, newly arrived on the Channel steamer at Dieppe and no doubt ready to try out their continental savoire faire, ask for a petit dejeuner soigne the waiter, used to English tourists, offers '"A nice fried sole, sir, - nice mutton chop, sir," ... and the last Bell's Life to amuse us after our luncheon' (p. 271). In another small fragment of social iconography, Maria Newcome, happily scandalised by Clara's adulterous elopement with Jack Belsize, bores the whole household with homilies: The punishment of worldliness and vanity, the evil of marrying out of one's station, how these points must have been explained and enlarged on! Surely the Peerage was taken off the drawingroom table and removed to papa's study, where it could not open, as it used naturally once, to "Highgate, Baron", or "Farintosh, Marquis of", being shut behind wires and closely jammed in on an upper shelf between Blackstone's Commentaries and the Farmer's Magazine' (p. 806). The family's aristocratic connections, once accidentally on display, are now matter for scandal and to be put out of reach. Blackstone, the handbook of country squire and magistrate, and the Farmer's Magazine are a metonymy for her husband, Hobson, who affects the country gentleman, his pockets 'never destitute of agricultural produce, samples of beans or corn, which he used to bite and chew even on 'Change' (p. 76). As heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter, so real papers signify but imaginary ones allow for more playful signification. The fictional Pall Mall Gazette, already contrived in Pendennis, and for which Fred Bayham becomes the art critic, was such a good idea that an actual journal, combining the features of a newspaper and literary journal, took its name in 1865 and numbered Maine, Trollope and James Fitzjames Stephen among its contributors. Fred's art reviews are freighted with parodic implication about the themes and styles of contemporary art. But the Newcome Independent and the Newcome Sentinel ('our twaddling old contemporary the Sentinel' [p. 872], as the Independent puts it) are the two chief fictional papers parodying the ways of partisan political journalism. The Sentinel is Tory, favours Sir Brian, likes Florae (a

164

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

prince and an Anglophile), and attacks the Colonel as 'a sepoy republican' (p. 874). The Independent, owned by Mr. Batters and with Tom Potts (an echo of Mr. Pott, editor of the Eatanswill Gazette in Pickwick?) as reporter, is radical and gets the most attention. Its style is heavy irony as in the letter to the editor that arouses Sir Brian's ire against radicalism: Mr. Independent - ... I am a Briton and a man, though I have not the honour of a vote for my native borough; if I had, you may be sure I would give it to our admired and talented representative, Don Pomposo Lickspittle Grindpauper Poor House Agincourt Screwcome.... (p. 191) Warrington is persuaded to write for it but refuses to write about Barnes's desertion of the factory girl. He accepts its invitation to report Barnes's lectures on the poetry of childhood and womanhood: but 'the irony was so subtle, that half the readers of the paper mistook his grave scorn for respect, and his gibes for praise' (p. 858). Ethel reads and laughs at the 'dreadful article' (p. 876). In fact the scandal of Clara's elopement, says Potts, 'serves the paper better than Mr. Warrington's articles' (p. 792). As papers do, the Independent adjusts life to suit its dramas. Enjoying Barnes as a target, it selects from the Colonel's bizarre mixture of political attitudes the liberal views it wants to promote, 'a work in which I should think the talented editor of the Independent had no little difficulty' (p. 874), encourages him to oppose Barnes for election, and supports his campaign. In short, though it is perhaps more to be expected, newspapers, like most characters in The Newcomes, are busy fusing fact and fiction, stylising life, and not altogether remote in technique from those initial fables of chapter I. Newspapers in their number and variety supplement the allusive texture of historical events, places, names, professions, classes, fashions, and literary registers that create the peculiar social and moral density of Thackeray's world.

8 Names In his excellent study of Thackeray's language, K. C. Phillipps writes, There is one minor aspect of Thackeray's art in which he excels. This is the selection of wittily apposite proper names for his characters, with appropriate titles, property, and appendages'.l In The Newcomes the sheer number of such names is impressive. I count something like ninety. They include major characters, the Newcomes themselves, whose name expresses upward mobility in the new industrial and commercial society, and minor characters of every sort. One might quarrel with the idea that these names are allusive - most are, though what they allude to is various, but some are not. Charles Slyboots, who engages in clandestine correspondence with a young lady, has a simple colloquialism as a name; Lady Barwise is of course the wife of a chief justice; and what should Madame de Flouncival be but a 'great milliner', or Quackenboss but a fashionable doctor? The topographical names however are allusive, with a fairly rich cluster of social association. Lord Kew, an engaging young aristocrat whose rank is significant in the novel, draws his name from a place closely associated with courtiers and royalty from the sixteenth century on. His friend, Jack Belsize, later Lord Highgate, is less polished and affluent, and draws his name from a north-London manor that had a chequered history, partly distinguished, as a residence of the Chesterfields, partly commercial, as when bought by a coal merchant who built a chapel where couples could be married if they arranged their wedding breakfasts there - later by an entrepreneur who made a pleasure garden of it. The Right Honourable Cannon Rowe, President of the Board of Control for Indian Affairs, has a thoroughly plausible name, but an informed Londoner would recognise an allusion to Canon Row, the location of the Board of Control. He attends a dinner with Sir Currey Baughton (one can taste the Indian connection), the Persian Ambassador and Bucksheesh Bey (no doubt accustomed to receiving baksheesh), and Mr. Horace Fogey (a touch of authorial self-reflexivity like the spectacles that identify Thackeray in illustrations of social gatherings?) (p. 210). 165

166

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

The names of the religious community are suitably Biblical, philosophical or historical, but differentiated by class and denomination: the wealthy Sophia Alethea Hobson and her uncle, Zachariah Hobson; the Methodist preachers, Gideon Bawls, Athanasius O'Grady: Mr. Jowls and Mr. Humper, who are imagined disapproving of Madame de Montcontour's French boudoir, carry a sombre physical or temperamental suggestion (to have the hump is to be in a sulky fit - on the other hand to hump is to have sexual intercourse). Charles Honeyman, whose name suggests sweetness, is a fashionable and elegant Anglican clergyman with a chapel in May fair. No wonder that he squabbles with 'the Reverend Simeon Rawkins, the lowest of the low church, sir, a red-haired dumpy man, who gasped at his h's and spoke with a Lancashire twang - he'd no more do for May Fair than Grimaldi for Macbeth' (p. 323). We hear of a bishop's wife called Mrs. Rotchet (from 'rochet' the name of a surplice-like vestment), and a Miss Crochet, a vicar's daughter (suggesting her occupation). Lady Walham, much given to missionary tracts, hides a copy of Oliver Twist beneath 'Blatherwick's Voice from Mesopotamia' (p. 496). Lady Kew advises Ethel not to be converted by Madame de Florae since there are no suitable Roman Catholic matches to be made in the marriage market - even counting Lord Durwentwater (the name of the Old Pretender, son of James II), Bartholomew Fawkes (combining hints of the martyr and Guy Fawkes), and Lord Campion (after the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion), none 'can be called a desirable person', says little Mr. Rood (Old English for the cross) the solicitor (p. 609). The musical world supplies several suggestive names. Signor Twankeydillo, the piano teacher, has a somewhat onomatopoeic name, but his colleague, Monsieur Quatremains has a name like many others in Thackeray that depend on our knowledge of foreign languages, in this case French for 'four hands'. So with the Italian singer, Madame Pozzoprofondo (deep well), the famous contralto, and the baritone, Signor Mezzocaldo (luke-warm - but notice that a mezzo-caldo is 'not a bad drink - a little rum - a slice of fresh citron - lots of pounded sugar, and boiling water for the rest' [p. 468]. Clive drinks it with his fellow Bohemians in Rome). Herr von Lungen, the eminent hautboyplayer should have good breath control. That ill-conditioned basso who deserts Honeyman's choir is (substituting an e for an o) named Bellew. And along with Messrs. Moschelles, Benedick, Ella, and

Names

167

Osborne, all real musicians on the London scene, who are constantly at dinner, the musical Miss Baines is also intimate with Ferdinando Blitz (lightning) who composes for her sonatas in P flat (op. 936). Several characters, especially at Baden, rejoice in German names: Count Fettacker (a compound of 'fett' for fertile and 'acker' for field); Countess Schlangenbad (from 'schlange', snake); Madame Hempenfeld (field of hemp), whose hair or wig is of a curious colour; and M. de Klingenspohr (clinking spur), who waltzes with Ethel. Sometimes the spelling is slightly changed, as in Rowe and Bellew, sometimes one has to imagine a slightly skewed pronunciation, as with the geologist Sir Robert Craxton, whose colleagues are Professor Quartz and Baron Hammerstein. Intellectuals, attending Maria Hobson's heavy soirees, don't fare well in names, Professor Schnurr, for example (German Schnurre means to rattle or joke, schnurrig queer), or Dr. Windus, 'the deuce to talk' (p. 210). With another of her guests, the joke is doubled: 'That splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash [a hippopotamus-hide whip used for punishment in Egypt and Turkey] Pasha', who began his career as 'a hairdresser from Marseilles, by name of Monsieur Ferchaud [hot iron]...' (p. 106). Owlet, the philosopher, has his metaphysics beaten down at the Haunt. The great surgeon, Sir Cutler Sharp, is respectfully treated, and we see him in conversation with Miss Pinnifer, author of Ralph the Resurrectionist. Bland little Rosey, who likes everything, is 'quite puzzled to say' which she likes best, 'Mr. Niminy's "Lines to a Bunch of Violets", or Miss Piminy's "Stanzas to a Wreath of Roses'" (p. 311). As Phillipps observes, such names often carry with them an implicit moral comment; they are 'characterisation by shorthand', often involving 'a slight puzzle which it is flattering to the reader to be able to solve'.2 Their full enjoyment implies a reader of cosmopolitan interests and culture, able to translate the foreign terms and pick up the social implications as in the name or names of the zealous Frenchman who seeks a duel with Lord Kew: His family were grocers at Bordeaux, and his father's name was M. Cabasse ['cabas' is the French word for a straw marketbasket]. Cabasse had married a noble in the revolutionary times; and the son at Paris called himself Victor Cabasse de Castillones; then Victor C. de Castillones: then M. de Castillones. (p. 446)

168

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

The plebeian marketbasket recedes in stages and the aristocratic appropriation takes over. Madame de Cruchecassee (broken pitcher), mentioned also in Vanity Fair and Pendennis as having a tarnished reputation, is similarly rich in implication, the female symbol of the urn or pitcher having become a symbol for virginity in both poetry and painting - for instance, in the 'frail China jar' associated with Belinda's virginity in Pope's The Rape of the Lock and in Greuze's painting, The Broken Pitcher'. Hogarth turned the motif low-mimetic by substituting a chamber pot for the pitcher in the sketches 'Before' and 'After'. Rummun Loll, the duplicitous Indian financier who helps bring the Bundelcund Bank to ruin, carries the dual suggestion of the holy name, Raman, the Compassionate, and the slang term 'rum one', dangerous or suspect. The Honourable Cornwallis Bobus, Member of the Council, combines the name of Cornwallis, Governor General of India, and General defeated by the Americans in the War of Independence, with Bobus, meaning booby.3 A name can reflect fashion and social history - admiring Clive's mustachios, Ethel says: The young men here [in Paris] wear them. I hardly knew Charles Beardmore when he arrived from Berlin the other day, like a sapper and miner' (p. 634). Lord Levant (from 'levant', to abscond without paying debts) is an insolvent, and Mrs. Bolter, a 'levanting auctioneer's wife' (p. 929). Marquis lago and Prince lachimo (recalling the traducers of women in Othello and Cymbeline) hang about the sexually suspect Duchesse d'lvry. The weakness of several characters for gambling is shown in their names: Count Punter, Cavaliere Spada, Deuceace, Mr. Loder [a dicing term]. They associate with Captain Blackball. And we should not be surprised to learn that Mrs. Captain Kitely's husband (a kite is a card-sharp or swindler) languishes in the Boulogne jail. Lord Lackland 'plays his coronet, of which the jewels have long since been in pawn, against Miss Bags's three per cents' (p.359).4 The author of The Book of Snobs naturally creates names that suggest snobbery, class distinction and toadying. They cluster around Lord Farintosh: 'one of the Miss Toadins, and Captain Walleye, or Tommy Henchman, Farintosh's kinsman and admirer, who were of no consequence, or old Fred Tiddler [a small fish]' (p. 574). Tufthunt is 'a low beast' (p. 559). The chattering attorney at the Colonel's table boasts of 'the day when Viscount Tagrag dined with them, and Earl Bareacres sent them the pheasants'

Names

169

(p. 898). Several facets of the aristocracy are struck off: Lord Dozely is seen in a front pew at Honeyman's chapel when it prospers. Not much can be expected of Lord Greenhorn. Young Lord Croesus, 'whom all maidens and matrons were eager to secure, was astounded to find that he was utterly indifferent' to Ethel (p. 307). As for the ladies, Lady Hermengilde and Lady Yseult, Lady Rackstraw's lovely twins who possess the names of unfortunate medieval heroines, are deserted by their admirers when Ethel appears in the marriage market. Naming allusions sometimes come in strings. Both chicken jokes and cheese jokes proliferate in The Newcomes. Lord and Lady Dorking, whose family seat is Chanticlere, have for children Lady Clara Pulleyn, Viscount Rooster, and 'a brood of little chickens', Hennie, Biddy and Adelaide (p. 369). Their given names, Tancred and Sigismunda, however, add another dimension, suggestive of parental manipulation of children (from James Thomson's play, Tancred and Sigismunda) and thus of the fate of their daughter, Clara. Lord and Lady Cheddar of Wiltshire have a daughter, Miss Rennet, who is engaged to Henry Churningham - 'a doosid good match for the Cheddars' (p. 301). As Phillipps observes, it was 'an underscoring of the vanitas vanitatum motif that the titles of the grandest nobility should have underlying them such humble domestic agricultural themes as cheese, sheep-rearing [the Southdowns and Sheepshanks of Vanity Fair] and poultry'.5 To these prominent persons we might add the minor typographical characters: 'If Lord and Lady Blank, of Such-and-such Castle, received a distinguished circle (including Lady Dash), for Christmas and Easter, without reading farther than the names of the guests, you may venture on any wager that Captain Asterisk is one of the company' (p. 598). A similar set of names, but particularly interesting for their Thackerayan trick of containing a substantial history condensed within themselves, is that of the Scots, Lord Farintosh and his mother Lady Glenlivat, two Scotch whiskies. Both names, like several others in Thackeray's fiction, had been tried out before Lord Glenlivat and the Marquis of Farintosh figure in chapter 14, 'On University Snobs', in The Book of Snobs, where Lord Glenlivet 'broke his neck at a hurdle-race, at the premature age of twentyfour' . And Farintosh is mentioned as a gay young peer in Novels by Eminent Hands ('Lords and Liveries'). More appositely in 'A Night of Pleasure' in Sketches and Travels in London, at the Cave of Harmony we find it said of Bardolph of Brasenose: 'That chap is

170

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

here every night. They call him Lord Farintosh. He has five glasses of whisky-and-water every night - seventeen hundred and twentyfive goes of alcohol in a year' (p. 225). The nickname clearly assumes an understanding readership. For 'Farintosh' has a history, alluded to by Robert Burns in 'Scotch Drink'. Thee, Ferintoshl O sadly lost! Scotland lament frae coast to coast! Now colic-grips, an' barkin hoast, May kill us a'; For loyal Forbes's Charter'd boast Is taen awa! Following the Malt Tax imposed after the Act of Union in 1707, highlanders, ignoring such English fiddle faddle, continued to make contraband whisky in abundance. In fact one of Robert Burns's employments was to prevent its landing on the coasts of Clyde and Solway. One distiller exempt from duty, however, was Forbes of Culloden, who enjoyed his privilege for services during the revolution. His distillery at Ferintosh in Cromarty was so bountiful that Ferintosh was 'a name almost synonymous with whiskey'.6 Forbes's privilege was 'taen awa' in 1785 - thus Burns's grief. Something as Scottish as Scotch whisky seems appropriate for the name of a major, noble and wealthy Scottish character: 'at the Court Balls, whether he appeared in his uniform of the Scotch Archers, or in his native Glenlivat tartan, there certainly was not in his own or the public estimation a handsomer young nobleman in Paris that season' (p. 610). Accompanying this description Doyle gives us a full-page sketch of Farintosh, 'The Marquis "en Montagnard"', dancing in a kilt with Ethel. His full name and titles are: 'FARINTOSH, MARQUIS OF. Fergus Angus Malcolm Mungo Roy, Marquis of Farintosh, Earl of Glenlivat, in the peerage of Scotland; also Earl of Rossmont, in that of the United Kingdom' (p. 703). The names, Fergus Angus Malcolm Mungo Roy, include kings of Scotland from the first one, Fergus; a Scottish saint, Mungo; and a poet, soldier and Jacobite favourite of Prince Charles, Roy, a name also, perhaps primarily, resonant of Rob Roy Macgregor, the highland freebooter (and hero of Scott's Rob Roy Ross and Cromarty were two of the northernmost counties of Scotland (combined in 1889), and Farintosh's two titles as earl extend the associations of his name beyond whisky to history and

Names

171

politics as do all his Christian names. To do him justice, though a rakish young man, he is not described as a drunkard. What is the general effect of such techniques? One has to agree with Phillipps that names like these are witty, laden with social and moral significance, and even frequently, through alterations of spelling and the like, plausible. Moreover they are part of the tradition of the novel, where names like Thwackum, Allworthy, Trunnion and Slop are common enough and themselves look back to theatrical names like Malvolio, Mosca, Quickly, and Shallow, and to medieval and renaissance allegory. And Trollope will continue the practice with such names as Quiverful, Slow and Bideawhile, Chaffanbrass and Fillgrave. Still, both their number and ingenuity in The Newcomes must affect the reading consciousness in special ways, drawing attention to their artificial construction and their place as signifiers within a social and moral discourse. At however many stages of remove, they are allies with allegory, requiring the reader not only to pursue an action but to consider it from various perspectives, so that the apparently single narrative becomes several types of discourse. Such names invite attention to the novel not in terms of its relation to everyday life but in terms of its fictionality. They draw attention to the mental play involved in the act of creation. In doing so, in their small way they reinforce the same effect produced by other elements of Thackeray's discourse. He has said over and over that the present action is merely a localising of eternally recurrent patterns. He emphasises the textuality of history and the blurred lines between history and fiction. He sees his characters and cultures as evolutionary and poses as their natural historian and taxonomist. His narrator is a preacher and ready to hold up the action at any point in order to philosophise and deliver a sermon. He develops his city's topography as a semiological system of moral, intellectual, artistic and class signifiers. He saturates his narrative with supplementary fictions, fables, plays, operas, paintings and songs that call attention to the mental and creative processes operative in trying to formulate what we like to call reality. And lest that all hang together too comfortably, he presents himself as just another inhabitant of Vanity Fair, or as a fogy, and leaves his story unfinished for the reader to conclude, since 'anything you like happens in fable-land'. There is an almost Nietzschean emphasis on creativity, the fictive process itself.

Notes Chapter 1: The Richest of Victorian Fictions 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom (New York: McGrawHill, 1958) p. 237. John Loofbourow, Thackeray and the Form of Fiction (Princeton University Press, 1964) p. v. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 126. Michael Wheeler, The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1979) p. 3. Wheeler discusses his usage at some length, comparing it with those of Harold Bloom and Ziva Ben-Porat. In his study of allusion in the Victorian novel, however, he does not include Thackeray, the most allusive novelist. Herman Meyer, The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel, trans. Theodore and Yetta Ziolkowski (Princeton University Press, 1961). Walter J. Ong, 'The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction', PMLA (1975), pp. 9-21. Ong makes a distinction between 'audience' and 'readership' and favours 'audience'. I have generally used the term 'readership'. See John Pemble's The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford University Press, 1988). See Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline: the Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1941) pp. 341 ff. and 379. Thackeray, Letters, III, pp. 181 and 187.

Chapter 2: Literary Allusion in The Newcomes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

I have discussed the repetitive pattern and the tension between life and artifice, as well as artifice in life, in 'The Pygmalion Motif in The Neivcomes', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 29:1 (1974) pp. 22-39. Jack P. Rawlins, Thackeray's Novels: A Fiction that is True (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974). L.M. Findlay writes interestingly and amusingly about this phenomenon of reflexivity in the Victorian novel generally in ' "Raly it's give me such a turn": Responding to the Reflexive in the Nineteenth-Century Novel', English Studies in Canada (1986) pp. 192209. See, for example, Ziva Ben-Porat, The Poetics of Literary Allusion', PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, I (1976), no. 9, p. 117. Thomas Carlyle, 'Characteristics', in Scottish and Other Miscellanies, Everyman edition (London: Dent, 1915) pp. 187. Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature, 3 vols (New York: 1900) III, p. 312.

172

Notes 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

173

Juliet McMaster, Thackeray: The Major Novels (University of Toronto Press, 1971) p. 12. Her first chapter discusses the problems and achievement of Thackeray's narrative technique and responses to it. It can be argued, of course, that Keats too allows for such a collapse in his exclamation, 'Cold Pastoral!' The love, 'ever warm', of the scene is also cold and distant, embodied in a perfection remote from humanity - 'All breathing human passion far above'. Tennyson may be behind a mildly amusing passage in the text where the Colonel and Clive are received at Court, Clive 'heartily ashamed of the figure he cut in that astounding uniform which English private gentlemen are made to sport when they bend the knee before their gracious sovereign' (p. 815). Warrington so embarrasses Clive with his ridicule that the Colonel puts Warrington in his place 'with great hauteur'. The dress was cocked hat, silk stockings, and sword. Thackeray had occasion to think about it when Tennyson was made Poet Laureate in 1850. Tennyson, over six-feet tall, couldn't afford the costume, so he borrowed it from the diminutive poet Rogers, who had lent it also to Wordsworth. Thackeray was amused by his friend's vanity: 'He has just been here much excited about his court dress and sword (he says his legs are very good but we know what the Psalms say on that subject)' ['He delighteth not in the strength of the horse: he taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man' Psalms, 147-10[. (Gordon N. Ray, ed., The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray 4 vols [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945-6] II, 711). We see here, perhaps, the vein of Warrington's levity. See also Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1949) pp. 260-1. Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793-1905 (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1980) pp. 109-10. M. L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain, 1500-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1959) p. 80. Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (New York. McGraw-Hill, 1955) p. 98. James Hannay, A Brief Memoir of the Late Mr. Thackeray (London: Simpkin, Marshal and Co., 1864). 'Quantum distet ab Inacho' is from Horace, Odes, III, 19, 1 on impatience with pedantic accounts of past history when the poet is inclined to present dissipation. And 'dignus vindice NODUS' is from Horace's Arts Poetica, line 191, where Horace says of drama, 'Don't have a god intervene unless there is a knot or crisis (nodus) worthy of such an unraveller' loosely then, a noose worthy of the person involved. Thackeray, Letters, II, 553n. Thackeray, Works, XIII, p. 582. Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom (New York: McGrawHill, 1958) pp. 92-^. Elizabeth Eastlake, Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, C. E. Smith (ed.) 2 vols (London, 1895) II, p. 107.

174 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

Notes See John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion (London: Oxford University Press, 1987) pp. 62-5. Elizabeth Nitchie, 'Horace and Thackeray', Classical Journal, XIII (March 1918) pp. 393-419. The model for Bayham's toast is Cicero's comment on Pompey as imperil Romani decus ac lumen (he that was the glory and the light of Roman Empire), Phillipic, II, 54. E. F. Kellett, Literary Quotation and Allusion (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennicet Press, 1933) p. 9. A proverbial rendering of the idea in Ovid's Ars Amatoria, II, 313. Perhaps the suorum refers to Clive alone several sentences back, if it is not merely an error. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; and Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Clarke, Classical Education in Britain, 1500-1900, pp.80, 76. The standard of classical training at Charterhouse seems to have been somewhat rigid and behind the times. Ray, citing Henry L. Thompson's Henry George Liddell (London, 1899), says 'Dr. Russell's method did not encourage wide reading. In six years his best students got through only "four or five greek plays, with Person's notes, two or three books of the Iliad, a little Pindar, Cicero's Offices and some of his orations, ... the Georgics of Virgil, ... most of the satires and Epistles of Horace, ... and Plato's Apology"' (p. 97). Kings 3:16-28. G. K. Chesterton, Introduction to The Book of Snobs (London: Blackie, 1911) p. ix. Juliet McMaster discusses Thackeray's stance as moralist narrator sensitively in Thackeray: The Major Novels (Toronto University Press, 1971), see especially pp. 12-22. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, Worlds Classics (London: Oxford University Press, 1903; repr. 1949) p. 87. He considers himself worldly-wise in these financial dealings, but Pendennis rather obscurely concludes: 'If he had lived to be as old as Jahaleel a boy could have cheated him' (p. 327). Including the reference among other slips Thackeray made in the text of The Newcomes, Saintsbury observes that 'such a person as "/flhaleel" does not occur in the Bible' (xxvii) - perhaps Thackeray has in mind Jahleel, third of the sons of Zebulun (Genesis 46:14 and Numbers 26:26), though Jahleel's age is not mentioned. Juliet McMaster, Thackeray: The Major Novels (University of Toronto Press, 1971) p. 20. See also Jack P. Rawlins, Thackeray's Novels: A Fiction that is True (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) pp.!2ff. K. C. Phillipps, The Language of Thackeray (London: Andre Deutsch, 1978) p. 27. Barbara Weiss in The Hell of the English: Bankruptcy and the Victorian Novel (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986), pursuing the thread of money-making throughout the novel, considers the ending problematic because it does not resolve the problems connected with 'dirty' money, and the postscript

Notes

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

175

about fable-land 'as insincere as it is peculiarly illogical' (p. 134). Wordsworth, Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, 1800. Thackeray, Letters, III, p. 304. See my 'The Pygmalion Motif in The Newcomes', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 29 (1975), pp. 22-39; repeated in Modern Critical Views: William Makepeace Thackeray, Harold Bloom (ed.) (New York: Chelsea, 1987) pp. 21-35. I have borrowed several of my comments in this paragraph from this article. Robert A. Colby, Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity: An Author and his Public (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979) p. 365. Julia Kristeva, Semeotike: Recherches pour une semeanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969) p. 146. Michael Riffaterre, 'L'Intertexte Inconnu', Litterature, 41 (Feb. 1981) p. 4. Peter Dembowski says, for example, Tintertextualite s'addresse, non pas a la decouverte de 1'origine de ces pre-texts ou precontextes, mais plutot a leur role dans le texte'. 'Intertextualite et Critique des Textes', Litterature, 41 (Feb. 1981) p. 20. Robert A. Colby, Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979) p. 51. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D, Mon. 6 April 1772. Thackeray, Letters, II, p. 815. Judith Wilt, 'Steamboat Surfacing: Scott and the English Novelists', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 4 (1981) pp. 459-86. Ibid, pp. 464-5. Manfroni or the One-Handed Monk (1809) by Mary-Anne Radcliffe; The Bravo of Venice (1805) by M. G. Lewis; Rinaldo Rinaldini, Captain of Banditti (1801) by Christian August Vulpius; Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) by Jane Porter; The Scottish Chiefs (1810) by Jane Porter. See my 'The Pygmalion Motif in The Newcomes', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 29 (1974) pp. 22-39. Thackeray's memory errs a little. Quentin's uncle uses a piece of gold chain to pay for masses for dead relatives, and doesn't pay for his wine. Before leaving Scott, we might note in passing how the regression of texts can be not only complex but deceptive. In a passage where Lord Farintosh says farewell to bachelorhood with his drinking companions, we learn 'The farewell at Greenwich was so affecting that all "traversed the cart", and took another farewell at Richmond' (p. 782). Traversed the cart? So expert a reader of slang as Eric Partridge (in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English) says the phrase means 'delay departure, be loathe to depart' and cites this passage in The Newcomes as his authority, but Thackeray himself, as the quotation marks indicate, is quoting, in this case Matthew Prior's The Thief and the Cordelier': 'Now fitted the halter, now traversed the cart/And often took leave, but seem'd loth to depart!' The Oxford English Dictionary notes that a 'loth to depart' was a song or a tune played on taking leave of friends (earliest usage

176

49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

Notes 1584). With his expertise in glees and popular songs, Thackeray is quite likely to know all about that. But as to 'traversed the cart', Prior's couplet is the epigraph of Scott's Ivanhoe, the likeliest place for its coming to Thackeray's attention. See S. M. Ellis, The Solitary Horseman: The Life and Adventures of G.P.R. James (Kensington: Cayme Press, 1927) p. 258, and Juliet McMaster, 'Novels by Eminent Hands: Sincerest Flattery from the author of Vanity Fair1, Dickens Studies Annual, 18 (1989). But Thackeray misremembers the names, mentioning Fanny where he possibly means Anny. Robert Colby, Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity: An Author and his Public (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988) p. 88. Robert Colby, Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979); John Carey, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (London: Faber and Faber, 1977); and Joe K. Law, Thackeray and the Uses of Opera', Review of English Studies, 39 (Nov. 1988), pp. 502-12. Carey, 'Prodigal Genius', p. 103. Ibid, p. 114. Thackeray, Letters, I, 85-6. Carey, 'Prodigal Genius', p. 104. The opera is also described in Balzac's Gambara (1837). John K. Law, Thackeray and the Uses of Opera', p. 506. Ibid, p. 505. Ibid, p. 507, and Thackeray, Letters, II, p. 643. W. P. Frith, RA, My Autobiography and Reminiscences, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1887) pp. 106-8. Thackeray, Works, VII, pp. 98-100. See Geoffrey Bush and Nicholas Temperley, English Romantic Songs 1800-1860, Musica Britannica, vol.43 (1979) p.xviii. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 3 vols. (London: 1851) III, p. 15. Sources and details for most of these songs are as follows: 'Bonnets of Bonny Dundee, The', from The Christmas Box for 1828, words by Sir Walter Scott (in Robert Chambers's The Scottish Songs, 1829); 'Chough and the Crow, The', from The Robbers by Horatio Parker, words by J. Baillie (in W. L. Tomlins's Laurel Song Book, 1901); 'Derby Ram, The', a Derbyshire county song (in G. R. Bantock, One Hundred Songs of England, 1914); 'Deserter, The', a traditional song (two versions are listed in Cecil Sharp's Collection of English Folk songs, 1974); 'Fine Old English Gentleman, The', by Charles Purday (in P. C. Buck's TOxford Song Book, 1919); 'Garryowen', (in T. Crofton Crocker, The Popular Songs of Ireland, 1839); 'Home Sweet Home', from Sir Henry Bishop's opera Clari, the Maid of Milan, words by John Howard Payne; 'Jock O'Hazeldean', also known as 'Why weep ye by the tide, ladye?', to the air 'Willie and Annet, or, In January Last', words by Sir Walter Scott; 'Johnny I hardly Knew Ye', Irish folk song; Tom Bowling', music and words by C. Dibdin (in Oxford Song Book, 1919); 'Wapping Old Stairs', by J.

Notes

66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

177

Peray (in E. Duncan, The Minstrelsy of England, 1905-9); 'When the Bloom is on the Rye', from My Pretty Jane by H. R. Bishop, words by E. Ftizball (in L. C. Elson, Songs of Many Nations, 1905). I have not found 'The Red Cross Knight' or The Wolf, both of which are mentioned by the street-ballad singer in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851) III, p. 15, 'What's that to Anyone', nor 'Should he Upbraid?'. Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955) p. 89. Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare. The tale was first printed in Charles Perrault's Histoires ou Contes du Temps passe in 1697. Thackeray knew it not only in this collection (from which he quotes in French in The Newcomes, chapter 1) but also in George Colman's musical farce Blue-Beard, or Female Curiosity (1798) and James Robertson Planche's Bluebeard, an Extravaganza (which moves the setting from Turkey to Gilles de Rais's fifteenthcentury Brittany. Thackeray made a small picture book, The Awful History of Blue Beard, in 1833 and in Eraser's Magazine in 1843 he published 'Bluebeard's Ghost', in which Mrs. Bluebeard mourns her saintly spouse. In 1847 he used the story for one of his Novels by Eminent Hands, 'Barbazure', a parody of G.P.R. James. In 1851, during a stay in Paris, he wrote an unpublished fragment of a play in blank verse in which Bluebeard discusses marriage over the breakfast table with his friend Butts. Sketches of and allusions to Bluebeard, however, appear throughout Thackeray's work. His affinity for the story may stem from the fact that he kept his own wife shut away as a result of her madness. For a detailed account of Thackeray and the Bluebeard story as well as the text of 'Bluebeard at Breakfast', see Juliet McMaster, 'Bluebeard at Breakfast: an Unpublished Thackeray Manuscript', in Dickens Studies Annual, 8 (1980) pp. 197-230. Probably the Life of Saint Teresa, Written by Herself, translated from Spanish by the Reverend John Dalton (London, 1851). Amina is the wife of Sidi Nu'Uman, 'that fellow in the Arabian Nights who married Amina - the respectable woman, who dined upon grains of rice, but supped upon cold dead body' (Philip, ch. 19, p. 272). See the 'History of Sidi Nu'uman' (in Sir Richard Burton's edition it is in volume 10). Isaac Watts, the author of Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715); Ann Letitia Barbauld, poet and editor of Lessons for Children (1778) and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781); and Jane Taylor, author (with her sister, Ann) of Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804), of Rhymes for the Nursery (including Twinkle, twinkle, little star'), and Hymns for Infant Minds (1810). For an account of Victorian animosities aroused by the suppression of Fairy tales or their appropriation for moral or useful instruction, see Michael C. Kotzin's Dickens and the Fairy Tale (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972). St. Willibald was a Saxon saint (d. 786); St. Botibol may derive from

178

74. 75. 76. 77.

Notes St. Botolph who has more than 70 English churches named after him or, more likely, Thackeray just fancies Botibol as a silly name. (Thackeray's 'old woman' instead of 'fine lady' comes from an earlier version of the rhyme). Elizabeth Newbery published a moralised selection for children about 1791 called The Oriental Moralist or the Beauties of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Geoffrey Tillotson, Thackeray the Novelist (Cambridge University Press, 1954) pp. 37-8. The Queen of Hearts/She made some tarts/All on a summer's day;/ The Knave of Hearts/He stole the tarts,/And took them clean away.

Chapter 3: The Art World 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Margaret Statz, 'The Newcomes and the Artist's World', Pre-Raphaelite Studies (1983) 80-95. Thackeray, 'A Second Lecture on the Fine Arts', 1839, Works, II, p. 394. Stetz, 82-3. She quotes Ford Madox Brown's 'Diary' from PreRaphaelite Diaries and Letters, ed. W. M. Rossetti (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1900) p. 145. Robert Colby, Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity: An Author and his Public (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979) Part One, Section 2, 'Literyture and the Fine Harts', pp. 57-86 and 374-7. See also Helene E. Roberts's, '"The Sentiment of Reality": Thackeray's Art Criticism', Studies in the Novel, 13 (1978) pp. 21-39. Stetz, p. 90. Strong, Recreating the Past: British History and the Victorian Painter (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) p. 11. Ibid, p. 33. W. P. Frith, R. A., My Autobiography and Reminiscences, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1887) followed by Further Reminiscences (1888). Ibid, I, pp. 35, 40. Ibid, I, p. 37. Which Venus 'of the Louvre' Gandish saw 'in 1814' is mysterious. The Venus de Milo was discovered in 1820. Perhaps the joke is that Gandish, a historical painter proud of his researches, has a slippery sense of history. Ibid, I, p. 33. Quoted by Grose Evans in Benjamin West and the Taste of his Times (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1959) p. 31. Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters (London: Barrie and Rockliff, The Cresset Press, 1969), p. 22. Strong, Recreating the Past, p. 36. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 26. Benjamin Robert Haydon in Malcolm Elwin (ed.) The Autobiography and Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon (London: Macdonald, 1950) p.462. Ibid. T this day lectured at the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, where Davy, Coleridge and Campbell lectured before me', p. 621.

Notes 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

179

Ibid, pp. 598, 460, 462. Willard Bissell Pope (ed.), The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon 5 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963) Vol. v, p. 148. Haydon, in Willard Bissell Pope (ed.) The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon Vol. v, p. 553. Helen Smailes and Duncan Thomson, The Queen's Image (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1987) p. 57. Ibid, p. 65. Strong, Recreating the Past: British History and the Victorian Painter, p.106. Ibid, p. 128.

26.

Ibid, p. 35.

27. 28.

Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters, p. 24. Edwin Landseer, quoted in Campbell Lennie, Landseer, The Victorian Paragon (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976) p. 212. Ibid, p. 212. See my article, 'An Honourable Emulation of the Author of The Newcomes', Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1978) pp. 399-419. Robert Colby, Thackeray's Canvas of Humanity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979) pp. 65-6. J. R. Harvey, in Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (London: Sidgewick and Jackson, 1970) pp. 94-5, makes the connection and observes that Doyle used his own face for illustration of J.J. for the frontispiece of The Newcomes (as Thackeray had described him in the text). Viola Hopkins Winner, in 'Thackeray and Richard Doyle, the "wayward artist" of The Newcomes', Harvard Library Bulletin, 26 (1978) pp. 193-211, gives a detailed account of the collaboration between Thackeray and Doyle, with several pages of illustrations. She considers that the 'pervasiveness of the fairy-tale and the animal fable elements in the novel may safely be attributed to Thackeray's associations with him' (p. 197). John C. Olmsted discusses 'Richard Doyle's Illustrations to The Newcomes' in Studies in the Novel, 13 (1978) pp. 93-108. Stetz, 'Thackeray's The Newcomes and the Artist's World', 84-5. W. M. Rossetti, Reminiscences (London: Brown Langham, 1906) p.147. Stetz, Thackeray's The Newcomes', 86. W. P. Frith, My Autiobiography and Reminiscences, 2 vols. (London: Bentley, 1887) I, p. 96. Ibid, I, p. 110. Thackeray's illustrations have been studied by Joan Stevens in The Use of Illustration in Vanity Fair', Review of English Literature, 6 (1965); 'A Roundabout Ride', Victorian Studies (1969); 'Vanity Fair and the London Skyline' and Thackeray's Pictorial Capitals', Costerus (1974) pp. 13-41 and 113-40; Patricia R. Sweeney, Thackeray's Best Illustrator', Costerus (1974) pp. 83-111; and J. R. Harvey in Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (1970), emphasising the influence of Hogarth's moral parables. An excellent study of allusive reflections of conventional moral patterns in novels and illustrations is J. Hillis

29. 30. 31. 32.

33 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

180

39.

Notes Miller's The Fiction of Realism: Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, and Cruikshank's Illustrations (Los Angeles: Wm. Andrews Clark Memorial Library, U. of California, 1971) pp. 1-69. Harvey, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators, pp. 95-9. The Examiner, 1 Sep. 1855, p. 548.

Chapter 4: History and India 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

Robert A. Colby, Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979) p. 347. Quoted by Robert Colby in Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity, p. 346, from an unpublished 'Autograph Notebook Used in Collecting Material for His Lectures on the Four Georges', in the library of the Philip H. and A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation, Philadelphia, p. 35. Lennard J. Davis, 'A Social History of Fact and Fiction: Authorial Disavowal in the Early English Novel', in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) pp. 120-48. Jane Millgate, 'History Versus Fiction: Thackeray's Response to Macaulay', Costerus (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1974) pp. 43-58. On Thackeray's authorial stance here, see Juliet McMaster, Thackeray: The Major Novels (University of Toronto Press, 1971) pp. 12-22. Dickens's obituary for Thackeray, Cornhill Magazine, Vol. IX, pp. 129-31. Linda Hutcheon, 'Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History', in Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis (eds), Intertextuality and Contemporary American fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) p. 19. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) p.123. Ibid, p. 121. Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) p. 128. Juliet McMaster, 'Thackeray's Things: Time's Local Habitation', in Richard A. Levine (ed.), The Victorian Experience: The Novelists (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976) p. 54. For Thackeray's appreciation of the Englishwoman's experience of India, see Marian Fowler, Below the Peacock Fan: First Ladies of the Raj (Markham, Ont.: Penguin Books Canada, 1988) p. 5. Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955) p. 67. See also Ray's The Buried Life: A Study of the Relation Between Thackeray's Fiction and his Personal History (London: Oxford University Press, 1952). Henry James, 'London Notes', Harper's Weekly, Vol. XLI (27 Mar. 1897) p. 315. The whole piece, largely a review of Lord Roberts's Forty-one Years in India, is apropos. He calls Roberts's career 'a fine paragraph in a tremendous text'.

Notes 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

181

Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846, p.67. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, Everyman's Library (London: Dent, 1907) Vol. I, p. 479. Ibid. In chapter 7 of The Eustace Diamonds (1873) for example, There was forward just then a question as to whether the Sawab of Mygawb should have twenty millions of rupees paid to him and placed upon a throne, or whether he should be kept in prison all his life. The British world generally could not be made to interest itself about the Sawab'. Greystock pleads in the House with passionate skill, but 'On neither side did the hearers care much for the Sawab's claims, but they felt that Greystock was making good his own claims to some future reward from his party'. World's Classics edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1930, 1968) pp. 24, 60. E. L. Woodward, in The Age of Reform, 1815-1870, Oxford History of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938, 1946) sees attitudes already changing in 1813 when, as Warren Hastings left the House, 'the members rose to their feet and stood bareheaded. This gesture was not merely an act of reparation; it was a sign that English opinion was beginning to take a pride in the work done by the subjects of the Crown and servants of the Company in India' (p. 386). Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980) p. 120. Thackeray, Letters, Vol. m, p.438n. See Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: the Uses of Adversity, pp. 162-3. W. H. Carey, The Good Old Days of Honourable John Company (Simla: Argus Press, 1882-87) pp. 167-8. Carey describes the causes, style and scale of the financial disaster in terms consonant with Thackeray's account of the Bundelcund Bank: 'In 1830-34 a great crash came on the Merchants of Calcutta, who lived as princes - but with other people's money. This had been occasioned solely by the mode in which the great Calcutta agency houses had been transacting business for the previous ten or fifteen years, in other words, since the charter of 1814. The rage for speculation or inordinate gains, on the part of the directors, and too eager or confident cupidity of their constituents, over-trading, improvident enterprize, extravagant miscalculations and excessive expense in living, were no doubt the cause of the failures.... In the beginning of 1830 the firm of Palmer and Co., one of the "princely merchant firms" of Calcutta, came to grief, and had to be wound up in the Bankruptcy court. This was the prelude to the fall of several other trading houses then existing, and which failed from over-speculation in the purchase of indigo and other country produce; and the failure of these houses ruined many families which had been living in affluence and luxury. Messrs. Palmer and Co. failed in 1830, with liabilities of £5,000,000; in 1832, Alexander and Co., £3,440,000; in 1833, Mackintosh and

182

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

Notes Co., £2,700,000; Colvin and Co., £1,120,000; Fergusson and Co., £3,562,000; in 1834, Cruttenden and Co., £1,350,000; making a total of £17,172,000' (pp. 167-8). See W.C.T. King, History of the London Discount Market (London: Cass, 1936; repr.1972) p.39ff. Letters, n, 103-4, and Fraser's Magazine, April (1843) pp. 399-400. Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, pp. 159-60. See Hayden White's analysis of the modern artistic hostility to history, much of it stemming from Nietzsche, in 'The Burden of History', Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univei jity Press, 1978) pp. 27-50. He discusses Nietzsche's critique of history and of memory in relation to history in chapter 9 of Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) pp. 331-74. See my article, 'The Pygmalion Motif in The Newcomes', NineteenthCentury Fiction, 29(1975) pp. 22-39.

Chapter 5: France of the Citizen King 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

See Roger Magraw, France 1815-1914: The Bourgeois Century (London: Fontana, 1983, repr. 1988) p. 63. Ibid, p. 49. Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians in 1835, 2vols (London: Bentley, 1836) vol. I, pp. 60-1. Ibid, pp. 151-3. Ibid, vol. II, pp. 42-3. Ibid, vol. n, pp. 370. The looting of Egyptian art and monuments was a flourishing enterprise in the 1840s, even by those, like Moncton Milnes, who deplored it. See John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion (Oxford University Press, 1987) pp. 5-6. Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (New York: Scribners, 1925) p.136. In her enthusiasm for philosophers, chemists, natural historians, etc., the Duchesse also 'made a laboratory in her hotel, and rehearsed poisons like Madame de Brinvilliers' (p. 412). Look, here's my pipe and there's my flint;/And when la Tulipe makes the dark journey/May you be the only one in the regiment/ With the pipe of your dear lover.

Chapter 6: London and the Significance of Topography 1. 2. 3. 4.

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, George Birbeck Hill (ed.) rev. by L. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934-50) vol. m, p.178. William Cobbett, Rural Rides, Everyman's edition, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1912) vol. I, p. 65. Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 4th paragraph. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: J. Murray,

Notes

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

183

1926); G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936; ed. George Kitson Clark, London: Oxford University Press, 1977) pp. 21-2. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, R. H. Super (ed.) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965) p. 186. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, Everyman's edition (London: Dent, 1912) p. 140. Alec R. Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) p. 37. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 101 and passim. R. V. Cassill in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction: Instructor's Handbook for the Complete and Shorter Editions (New York: Norton, 1977) p. 100. See Christopher Hibbert and Ben Weinreb, The London Encyclopaedia (London: Macmillan, 1983) p. 270, which also quotes Barham's Ingoldsby Legends (1840) on the subject: 'Mr David had since had a "serious call"/He never drinks ale, wine, or spirits at all,/ And they say he is going to Exeter Hall/To make a grand speech/ And to preach and to teach/People that they can't brew their malt liquor too small.' Trollope gets some ideas from Thackeray's Lady Whittlesea's for The Eustace Diamonds where Mr. Emilius, formerly a Jew, draws great congregations to his church in Mayfair - see chapter 66. The imagery and wording of this chapter opening is so close to that of the earlier passage from Heads of the People as to suggest Thackeray cannibalised it in writing The Newcomes. Francis Sheppard, London 1808-1870: The Infernal Wen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) p. 106. Plate six of Hogarth's 'A Rake's Progress', showing gamblers so intent on their games they don't notice the room is on fire nor the watchmen breaking in, has been taken to represent an allusion to a fire in White's in 1733, but the room is nondescript and the dog in the picture has 'Covent Garden' on his collar. See Joseph Burke and Colin Caldwell (eds) Hogarth: The Complete Engravings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968) plate 159 and commentary. Quoted from the Marquess of Downshire by Christopher Hibbert and Ben Weinreb in The London Encyclopxdia, p. 122. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, Everyman's edition (London: Dent, 1906) p. 79. Letters, IV, p. 115. John Timbs, Curiosities of London (London: Hotten, 1867) p. 488. For example, 'Mrs Battle's Opinion on Whist', 'Grace Before Meat', and 'A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig'. On a related subject see also chapter 3, 'Commodities', in John Carey's, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (London: Faber and Faber, 1977). Robert Colby, Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity: An Author and His Public (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979) pp. 37-72. Westminster Review, October 1831, pp. 433-4.1 am indebted to Juliet McMaster for the Westminster's comment. Kathleen Tillotson notices

184

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

Notes the same fetish of shop names in Trollope's burlesque, 'Crinoline and Macassar', in The Three Clerks. See Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) p. 86. Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978) p. 176. The possibility that Thackeray is referring to the British and Foreign Institute, Hanover Square, founded in 1843 by James Silk Buckingham, is less likely because of the name, the date, and its short life. It lasted four years and was parodied by Punch as the 'British and Foreign Destitute'. See Juliet McMaster, Thackeray: The Major Novels (University of Toronto Press, 1971) pp. 6-8. George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, Gordon S. Haight (ed.) 7vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-6) vol. n, p. 349. Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955) pp. 394-5.

Chapter 7: 1. 2. 3.

Newspapers

Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader (University of Chicago Press, 1957) p. 330. Letters, m, 428. Others were the Morning Advertiser, belonging to the licensed victuallers, and the British Press, belonging to the booksellers. See Alexander Andrews, The History of British Journalism, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1859) vol. II, p. 62.

Chapter 8: Names 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

K. C. Phillipps, The Language of Thackeray (London: Deutsch, 1978). Ibid, pp. 176-8. Carlyle had scornfully used the name Bobus Higgins, 'Sausagemaker on the great scale', as representative of the ignorant electorate in Past and Present (1843): 'What can the incorruptiblest Bobuses elect, if it be not some Bobissimus, should they find such' (vol. I, ch. 5). In the chapter, 'On Ribbons', in Roundabout Papers, Thackeray mentions 'Bobus, citizen and soap-boiler'. Lackland was also the name applied by Henry II to his youngest son, eventually King John. Thackeray used it in Rebecca and Rowena. Phillipps, The Language of Thackeray, p. 179. Robert Burns, The Works of Robert Burns, Professor Wilson (ed.) (London: 1868) vol.1, p. 40, n. See also Forbes Macgregor (ed.) Macgregor's Mixture (Edinburgh: Wright 1976, 1981) pp. 30-1.

Index Discussions of Thackeray's novels, and of characters in them that receive more than passing mention, are indexed separately under titles and names. References to works by other writers are indexed under the writers' names. Italicised page numbers indicate sustained discussion. Addison, Joseph The Spectator: Sir Roger de Coverley, the Col. as, 54, 113, 118 Adventures of Philip, The, 155 Aesop's Fables, 8, 11, 13, 79 Agassiz, Jean, 13 Ainsworth, William Harrison The Lancashire Witches, 64 Alfred, King, fashion for in painting, 93, 102 Allen, Sir William The Murder of David Rizzio, 96 Allusion, definition of, 2 relationship of texts in, 11-13, 44-5, 61-3, 135; marked and unmarked quotations, 20-1; as signifiers of social status, 21; classical, summary, 42; histrionic, 77; political implications, 122-6 Altick, Richard The Shows of London, 152 Angouleme, Marie Therese, Duchesse d', 129 Arabian Nights, The, 48, 52, 78, 79, 83-6 Argaum, Battle of, 110, 113 Ariadne, 11, 47, 127 Armitage, Edward The Battle of Meeanea, 97 Arnold, Matthew Culture and Anarchy, 136 Aspasia, 126 Assaye, Battle of, 113; dive's painting of, 97-8, 118 Astley's amphitheatre, 71, 74; Battle of Waterloo, 152-3

Atticus, 37 Auber, Daniel Fra Diavolo, 65-9, 83 Dieu et la Bayadere, music for, 68 La Muette de Portici, 73 Ballantine, Serjeant William Some Experiences of a Barrister's Life, 147 Ballhatchet, Kenneth Race, Sex and Class under the Raj, 26, 114-15 Balzac, Honore de, 124, 128, 138, 156-8 Gobseck, 148 Baour-Lormian, Pierre, 128 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 81 Barwell, Richard, 110 Baucis and Philemon, 36 Bayham, Fred, 21, 99-100; and grandiloquent quotation, 21 Beardsley, Aubrey, 103 Beauharnais, Josephine de, 129 Beaumarchais, Pierre Le Barbier de Seville, 70 Le Manage de Figaro, 70 Bellini, Vincenzo, 73 Belsize, 'Jack', later Lord Highgate, 19; and T?lack care', 30; and Marriage a la Mode, 104 Benedict, Sir Julius, 154 Ben-Porat, Ziva, 172 Berry, Caroline, duchesse de, 129 Bhartpour, Battle of, 110, 113 Bible, 5,43ff., 52, 61 Bishop, Sir Henry Rowley, 75

185

186

Index

Blackstone, Sir William Commentaries on the Laws of England, 163 Bloom, Harold, on allusion, 2 Bluebeard, 80-1, 83; Thackeray's long interest in, 177 n68 Boadicea, in painting, 94 Book of Snobs, 3, 108, 136 Boswell, James, 56, 147 Bothwell, James Hepburn, 4th earl of, 125 Boucher, Francois, 88, 126, 129 Bowyer's Historic Gallery, Robert, 93^ Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, 93 Braham, John, 69 Brent, Mark, 75 Brent, Jack, 75 Brinvilliers, Marie, Marquise de, 131 Brown, Ford Madox, 89 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Aurora Leigh, 3 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship', 17-18 Brummel, George ('Beau'), 146 Bunyan, John The Pilgrim's Progress, 5, 44, 52 Burke, Joseph, 183 Burke's Peerage, 163 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 89 Burns, Robert 'Scotch Drink', 170 Bush, Geoffrey, 176 Byron, George Gordon, 18 Don Juan, 21 Caesar, Julius, 25 Caldwell, Colin, 183 Caracalla, 40 Caracci, Lodovico, 88, 99 Caravaggio, Michelangelo da, 88, 99 Carey, John, 66-7 Carey, W.H. The Good Old Days of Honourable John Company, 117; on Indian bank crashes, including Palmer and Cruttenden, 181 n24

Carlist wars, 129 Carlyle, Thomas, 12-13, 107, 136 Sartor Resartus, 12-13 The French Revolution, 122 Past and Present, Bobus Higgins, 184 n3 Carmichael-Smyth, Henry, 110, 116 Cassil, R.V., 183 Castelreagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, 74 Cato the elder, 'Delenda est Carthago', 35, 125-6 Cattermole, George, 88 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de Don Quixote, 4, 53-4, 61; Sancho Panza, 53; Col. Newcome as Don, 53-4, 113, 115, 118 Chambord, Henri Charles Ferdinand Marie Dieudonne, due de Bordeaux, comte de, 129 Chanson de Roland Roland and Oliver, 19 Charles II, 21 Charles X, 129 Charlotte, Queen, 6 Charterhouse School, 27 Chateaubriand, Francois Rene, Vicomte de, 123, 128 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 89 Chesterton, G.K., 43, 53 Chinnery, George Oriental Heads, 110 Cicero, 2, 37 Cincinnati, Society of the, 40 Cincinnatus, 40 city, evocation of, 156-8 Clarke, Mary Ann, 68 Clarke, M.L., 27 Classical Education in Britain, 1500-1900, 36 Clapham Sect, 15, 135-7; represented as Methodists, 56, 137 Claude Lorrain, 21, 88 Clive, Robert, 112-13 closure, 10 Cobbett, William, 134

Index 'Codlingsby', Louis Philippe in, 121 Colby, Robert A., 54-5, 66-7, 150 Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity, 53, 89 Colman, George The Clandestine Marriage, 16 Congress of Vienna, 129 Congreve, William, 18 Constable, John, 92 Cooper, James Fenimore, 61 The Red Rover, 64 Cope, Charles, 93 Corneille, Pierre, 126, 128 Medee, 37, 126 Le Cid, 130 Cotgrave, Rindle, on allusion, 2 Cowper, William, 18 'Boadicea', 21, 29 Crawley, Rawdon (Vanity Fair), 4 Crebillon (/z/s), Prosper, 128 Creusa, 126 Crowe, Eyre, 93 Cruikshank, George, 82 Curzon, George Nathaniel, Marquis, 115 Cuyp, Aalbert, 88 Dalton, John The Life of Saint Teresa, Written by Herself, 6 Dante Alighieri, 61, 89 Darwin, Charles, 146 Daumier, Honore, 120 David, Jacques Louis, 100 Davis, Lennard }., 107 Debraux, Emile Fanfan la tulipe, 131 Delaroche, Paul, 88, 129 Dembowski, Peter, 175 Diane de Gabies, 37, 102 Dibdin, Charles Tom Bowling', 75 Dickens, Charles, 5, 43, 64, 98, 108, 156 Sketches by Boz, 'Meditations in Monmouth Street', 156 Pickwick, 164 Oliver Twist, 64

187

The Old Curiosity Shop, 152 Martin Chuzzlewit, 156 David Copperfield, Dora, 38 Bleak House, 146, 156 Little Dorrit, Mrs Clennam in, 136 Our Mutual Friend, 156 'Frauds on the Fairies', 82 Diderot, Denis, 128 Dieu et la Bayadere, 68 Disraeli, Benjamin, 61, 140 Dobbin, Major William (Vanity Fair), 10 Donizetti, Gaetano, 73 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 134 Doyle, Richard, as model for J.J. Ridley, 74, 100; illustrations for Ruskin's The King of the Golden River, 100 headletters by: Good Samaritan (ch77), 45; Horsemen approaching Star and Garter (ch51), 62; Knight and damsel on horse (ch 58), 19; Macbeth and a witch (ch52), 23-4, 80; Old clothes pedlar (ch 1), 9, 78; Prince Henry and Falstaff, a Mohock, Lord Warwick and the Prince Regent (ch 10), 223; Shepherd, shepherdess and Cupid (ch47), 14; Sherrick and puppet of Honeyman (ch44), 88 The Old Love Again', echoing Marriage a la Mode, 104 Rummun Loll at Maria Newcome's, 114 Dryden, John, 18 'Alexander's Feast', 20 translation of Horace (Odes III, xxix), 34

Dubufe, Claude, 88, 129 Dumas, Alexandre, pere, 123, 128 La Tour de Nesle, 124 East India Company, 111, 118 Eastlake, Sir Charles, R.A., 88, 140 Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth, 27-8

188

Index

Ecclesiastes, 5, 12, 44, 51-2, 57, 79, 135, 148 Egan, Pierce Boxiana, 23 Anecdotes of the Turf, 23 Li/e m London, 23 Egg, Augustus, 93 Eliot, George (Marian Evans), 7,157 Ella, John, 154 Ellis, S.M., 176 English Humourists, The, 27, 107 Eton Latin Grammar, 26 Etty, William, 92, 161 Euclid, 25, 26 Evans, Grose, 178 Evans's supper rooms, 4 Examiner, The, on The Newcomes and Hogarth, 104 Faed, Thomas, 93 fairy tale, 79-S2, 83, 177 n68 Farintosh, Marquis of, his names a compound of allusions to Scottish history and Scotch whisky, 169-71 Fat Contributor Papers, The, on Athens, 26 Fielding, Henry Joseph Andrews, 55 Tom Jones, 23, 55, 116 Fille du Danube, La, 68 Findlay, L.M., 173 Florae, Paul de, and Scott, 5, 60-1; character construction, 130-3 French and English idiom, 230 Forbes of Culloden, distiller, 170 Fortheringay, the (Pendennis), 77 four Georges, The, 107 Fowler, Marian, 180 Francis II, 125 Franconi, Antoine, 71 Fraser's Magazine, 105, 117 French language, 130 Frith, William, 74, 93 My Autobiography and Reminiscences, on Sass's Academy, 92; fads in painting, 101 Frohsdorf, Court at, 129

Froude, James Anthony, 107 Frye, Northrop, 6 Fuseli, Henry, 88 Gandish, 91-5 Garrick, David, 77 Gay, John The Beggar's Opera, 10, 71 George III, 6 George IV, 'Florizel', 68 Gerard, Francois, 88, 129 Gessler, 69 Gibbon, Edward, 4-5 Autobiography, 56 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 5, 56 Gissing, George, 156 Giulio Romano, 88 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 'Der Gott und die Bajadere', 68 Goodall, Frederick, 93 Goldsmith, Oliver, 18 The Vicar ofWakefield, 20, 21, 55; fad in painting, 100-1 Gore, Catherine, 61, 64; namedropping, 151-2 Gothic revival, and Honey man's chapel, 73 Grisi, Carlotta, 74 Gudin, Jean, 129 Hamilcar Barca, 40 Hamilton, Emma, Lady, 140 Handel, George Frederick Artaxerxes, 71 Hannay, James A Brief Memoir of the Late Mr. Thackeray, 27 Satire and Satirists, 27 Hannibal, 41 Harlow, George, 88 Hasdrubal, 41 Harvey, John, 104, 179 Hastings, Francis Rawdon-, 1st Marquis of, 110 Hay don, Benjamin, 88, 95-6 Haywood, Eliza The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, 57-8

Index Heads of the People, 140-1 Hemans, Felicia, 81 Henry Esmond, 56, 106 Herodotus, 36 History of Greece, on Gyges and Candaules, 161 Hibbert, Christopher, and Ben Weinreb, 183 history, truth and fiction in, 20710 historical painting, 92-200 Hogarth, William, 88, 203-5; convention of moral progress, 234-6 Industry and Idleness, 103; the virtuous apprentice, 134-5,138 Marriage a la mode, 103 Homer, 25, 61, 89 The Iliad, 36 The Odyssey, 11-12, 31-2, 36-7; Calypso, 12, 127; Ulysses, 12, 47; sirens, 34 Honeyman, Charles, 6, 72-3, 139 Hood, Thomas, 18 The Bridge of Sighs', 19 Horace, 25 ff., 52; Odes, 29-35 Ars Poetica, 31; siren figure, 33 Horsley, John, 93 Hughes, Arthur, 100 Hugo, Victor, 123-4, 128 Hernani, 124 Marie Tudor, 124 Hume, David, 4 History of England, illustrations for, 93 Hunt, Holman, 89 Hunt, William Henry, 4, 88, 100 Hutcheon, Linda, 180 Incledon, Charles, 20, 75 intertextuality, 4, 44, 54, 77 Ivry, Due d', characterised by French literature, 222—4; politics, 129 Ivry, Duchesse d', 5, 224-6, 129 James, G.P.R., 61-3 Darnley, 96 Rizzio, 96

189

James, Henry, 1, 7, 99, 111, 157, 181 The Tree of Knowledge', 138 Janin, Jules-Gabriel, 128 Jason, 126 Jenkyns, Richard The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 36 Johnson, Dr Samuel, 2, 18; views on Fielding, 56; on credit due to dramatic fiction; on London, 134 Epitaph for Goldsmith, 21 Joyce, James Finnegans Wake, 9, 79 July Revolution, 4, 120-3 Juvenal, 25, 52 Satires, 29 Keats, John, 24-26, 89 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 15 'Ode to Psyche', 15 'Lamia', 16 Kellet, E.F., Literary Quotation and Allusions, 28 Kenney, James Raising the Wind, Jeremy Diddler, 77 Kew, Lady, and slang, 6-7; as witch, 23-4 Kew, Frank, Earl of, 16, 23 King, W.C.T., 182 Knox, John, 125 Kock, Paul de, 128 Kotzin, Michael C, 72 Kristeva, Julia, 54 LaCapra, Dominick, 109 La Fontaine, Jean de, 76 Fables, 8, 79 Lamartine, Alphonse, 123, 128 Lamb, Charles, 148 Lancret, Nicholas, 88, 129 Landon, Letitia (L.E.L.), 81 Landseer, Sir Edwin, 4, 88, 92, 93; and rotting lion, 98 Laswari, Battle of, 110, 113 Law, Joe K., 66, 69, 71, 74

190

Index

Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 80, 88, 95 Leland, John, 94 Le Sage, Alain Rene Gil Bias, 21, 101 Lever, Charles, 61 Lewis, M.G. The Bravo of Venice, 61, 100 Lille, Abbe de, 128-9 Livy, 40 History of Rome, 41 Loll, Rummun, 114-15 London, 134ff.; conflated with Rome, 143; auction rooms, 150-1; barracks, 154-5; churches, 139-40; clubs, 1456; districts, 139-^12; exhibitions, 95-7; institutions, 95, 153, 184, n23; pubs, taverns, restaurants, and bohemian resorts, 145-8; shops, 148-9; shows, 152-3 London Illustrated News, 97 Lorris, Guillaume de, and Jean de Meung Romance of the Rose, 15 Loofbourow, John, 2 Louis-Philippe, King of the French, 4, 220-1 Lucy, Charles, 93 Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 61 The Last Days of Pompeii, 41, 64 Maas, Jeremy Victorian Painters, 93 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 107 'Clive', 113 Macaulay, Zachary, 136 Maclise, Daniel, 93 The Death of Nelson, 97 The Meeting of Wellington and Blucher, 97 Magraw, Roger, 182 Mahony, Frances (Father Prout), 74 Mahratta war, 2nd, 110 Maine, Sir Henry, 163 Mario, Guiseppe (Don Giovanni de Candia), 74 Marivaux, Pierre, 54

Marsyas, 40 Martin, John, 92 Mary Queen of Scots, 61, 87, 93; fashion for in painting, 96, 102, 125; Duchesse d'lvry identifies with, 125 Mayhew, Henry London Labour and the London Poor, 75 McMaster, Juliet, 13, 46, 109-10 Menippean satire, 13 Medea, 5, 12, 37, 87, 126 Meyer, Herman, 2 Meyerbeer, Giacomo Robert le Diable, 67, 68 Michelangelo, 8 Mill, James History of British India, 111, 113 Miller, J. Hillis, 179-180 Millgate, Jane, 180 Milton, John, 18, 97 Comus, 12 Minto, Sir Gilbert Elliot-MurrayKynynmound, 1st Earl of, 110 Moliere (Jean Baptiste Poquelin), 128 Tartuffe, 76 Moore, Thomas, 18 Lalla Rookh, 111; Bendemeer's Stream, 20 More, Hannah, 55-6 Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, 56 Morgan, Sydney, 124 Morghen, Raffaello, 88 Morning Chronicle, The, 105 Morton, Thomas Speed the Plough, Mrs Grundy, 76 Moschelles, Ignaz, 154 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Le Nozze di Figaro, 70 Don Giovanni, 'Madamina, il catalogo e questo', 71; 'Batti, batti', 73 Musset, Alfred de, 123, 129 Nairne, Carolina 'The Laird o'Cockpen', 75

191

Index names, topographical, 265; religious, 166; musicians', 166; implicit moral comment in, 167-9, 171; multiple cheese, chicken and whisky jokes, 169-71 National Academy, 3 Newbery, Elizabeth, 178 Nerva, 40 Newcome Barnes, as Macbeth, 24; as Bluebeard, 81; wedding and divorce, 161-2 Colonel, 21; as Don Quixote, 4, 53-4, 115; views on literature, 26, 18-19; as singer, 20; 'in him' to be foolish, 116 Clive, 14-15, 79-80, 84-5, 97100, 140-2 Ethel, 14-15; identified with

Diana and the Diane de Gabies, 37-40, 102-3, 122; and intelligence in women, 38-9; as Salome or Judith, 103; and Comus, 11-12 newspapers, 159 ff.; listed, 160; and status, 163; fictional, 1634; The Bengal Hurkaru, 98, 162; Morning Post, 159-60; The Times, 161; Galignani's, 162; Pall Mall Gazette, 163 New Testament, 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 118 Nitchie, Elizabeth, 174 Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, 3; on enthusiasm for classics, 26 Novels by Eminent Hands, 61-4, 151-2 Nursery rhymes, 82-3

Oberon, 21 Olmsted, John C, 179 Ong, Walter ]., on writer's audience, 3

Orme, Robert A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, 111-12 Osborne, George (Vanity Fair), 4

Osborne, George Alexander, 154 Ovid, 25

Epistulae ex Ponto, 26 Metamorphoses, 35 Owen, Sir Richard, 13

Mylodon, 146 Megatherium, 146 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 89 Oxford movement, 72 Pall Mall Gazette, 21, 96-8 parable, 5 Paris Sketch Book, The, 120-2, 124 Parker, Horatio, 75 Peele, George The Aged Man at Arms', 21 Pemble, John, 172, 182 Pendennis, 33, 163; preface, on Tom Jones, 23, 56 Pendennis, Major, 90 Percy, Michael, 75 Perrault, Charles, 76, 81 Red Riding Hood, 8, 79 Perugino (Pietro Vannucci), 88 Peter of Alcantara, St., 6, 80 Petronius, 25 Satyricon, 36; Trimalchio's feasts, 143 Phaedra (Phedre), 5, 37, 87, 126 Philipon, Charles, 120 Phillipps, K.C., The Language of Thackeray, 7, 48, 165, 167 Phryne, 126 Piombo, Sebastian del, 88 Plassey, Battle of, 112 Plato, 25 Pliny the younger, 25, 40

Epistolae, 41 Pomare IV, Queen, 132 Pope, Alexander, 18 'Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot', 20 Porter, Jane

The Scottish Chiefs, 58, 61 Thaddeus of Warsaw, 61 Prescott, William, 107 Pulleyn, Lady Clara, 19 Punch, 100, 112 Punch's Pocket Book for 1847, 150

192

Index

Rabelais, 2 Racine, Jean, 126, 128 Phedre, 37 Ranke, Leopold von, 109 Raphael, 88 Rawlins, Jack P., 10, 46 Ray, Gordon N., 1, 7, 27, 111, 117, 157-8 readerships, Thackeray's, 3-4 public school classicists 25-9, 34-5; religiously knowledgeable, 52; readers of novels, 52 ff.; theatre-goers, 64 ff.; versed in children's lore, 78ff.; followers of art, 87ff., 91; Anglo-Indian, 106 if.; and recent history of France, 120 ff. Rebecca and Rowena, 58, 78, 107 Recamier, Juliette, 129 religion and commerce, 234-7 Reni, Guido, 88 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 21, 80, 88 Rhodes, William Barnes Bombastes Furioso, 77 Ribera, Jose (Spagnoletto), 88 Richardson, Samuel, 107 Sir Charles Grandison; Col. as Sir Charles, 54-7, 118 Riffaterre, Michael, 54 Rizzio, David, 125 Roberts, David, 140 Robinson, Mrs. Mary, Terdita', 68 Rome, analogies with Victorian England, 27-8, 36 Rose and the Ring, The, 78 Ross, Sir William, 140 Rossetti, William Michael, 100 Rossini, Gioacchino William Tell, 70 Babiere di Siviglia, 70 Roundabout Papers 'De Juventute', 23 'On a Lazy, Idle Boy', 52, 58, 61 Rowe, Nicholas The Fair Penitent, Lothario, 77 Royal Academy, 3 Rubens, Peter Paul, 3, 60, 88

Russell, Lord John, 120 Russell, Dr. John, 27 Said, Edward, 112 St. Meri, 126 Saintsbury, George, 121 Sallust, 40 Sand, George, 128 Stenio from Lelia, 4, 125 Sartoris, Adelaide Kemble, 71 Sass, Henry, original for Gandish, 91-2 Sassoferato, 88 Scheffer, Ary, 88, 129 Schiller, Friedrich William Tell, 69-70 Maria Stuart, 125 schools, classics acquired in, 25-9, 34-6 Scott, Sir Walter, 18, 55-61, 93, 100, 107; inspiration for painters, 96-7 The Abbot, 96; Mary Queen of Scots, 61,125; Julian Avenel, 61 The Bride of Lammermoor, Caleb Balderstone, 5, 60; Edgar Ravenswood, 5, 60; Dick Tinto, 60 Ivanhoe, Rebecca and Rowena, 58 Monastery, The, 61, 125 Quentin Durward, 3, 60 Rokeby, 60 Rob Roy, 21, 97, 170 'Bonnets of Bonny Dundee', 75 'Jock o' Hazeldean', 75 Sedley, Amelia (Vanity Fair), 10, 58 Sedley, Jos (Vanity Fair), 73, 144 Seneca, 25 Seringapatam, seige of, 113 Shakespeare, William, 52, 61, 74, 76, 97 As You Like It, Mrs Mackenzie as toad with jewel, 25 Richard III, 21 Hamlet, 21-2 Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, 22; Prince Henry's (and Lord Kew's) moral evolution, 22-3

Index Macbeth, 22; Barnes and Lady Kew, 24-5 The Merchant of Venice, 22 A Midsummer Night's Dream, 22 Much Ado About Nothing, 22 Othello, 22, 81 The Taming of the Shrew, 22 Twelfth Night, 22 Sharp, Rebecca (Vanity Fair), 58 Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion, 10 Shee, Sir Martin Archer, 95 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 89, 140 Sheppard, Francis, 183 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley The Critic, Don Ferolo Whiskerandos, the Colonel as, 76 The Rivals, Mrs Malaprop, 76 The School for Scandal, Charles Surface, 76 Smailes, Helen, 179 Snyders, Frans, 88 Society of Artists, 93 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 153 songs, 74-6 Southey, Robert The Curse ofKehama, 111 Spenser, Edmund, 61, 97 Stae'l, Madame de Corinne, and travelogue, 3 Stephen, James, 136 Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, 136, 163 Stephen, Leslie, 136 Sterne, Laurence, 1, 2, 158 Stetz, Margaret Diane, 89-91, 100 Stevens, Joan, 179 Stocqueler, J.H. The British Officer: His Positions, Duties, Emoluments and Privileges, 53 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 48; antislavery address to, at Strafford House, 6, 84 Uncle Tom's Cabin, 6

193

Strong, Roy Restoring the Past: British History and the Victorian Painter, 91-2, 96 Stubbs, George, 99 Sue, Eugene, 5 Sweeney, Patricia R., 179 Sylphide, La, 67 Taglioni, Maria, 67-8 Taine, Hippolyte, 13 Tallien, Theresa Cabarrus, 129 Tawney, R.H., 135 Taylor, Jane, 81 Taylor, Tom Life of Hay don, 95 Tell, William, 69-70 Temperance Society, 139 Temperley, Nicholas, 176 Tennyson, Alfred, 16-28, 118; his legs in Court costume, 173 The Ballad of Oriana', 17 In Memoriam, 16 'Locksley Hall', 17-18, 99 'The Lord of Burleigh', 17 'Mariana', 17 'Oenone', 16 Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830), 16 Poems (1832), 16 'Ulysses', 16 'Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue', 17, 148 Thackeray, Harriet, 136 Thackeray, William Makepeace reaction to women's support of Mrs Stowe, 6; as natural historian of society, 6; characteristic reflexivity 10-13, 43, 58, 78, 107-9, 119; ambivalence about love of classics, 26-7; as Horatian, 27Jf.; views on intelligent women, 38-9; identification with Sir Charles Grandison, 56; and Scott, 58; devotion to theatre, 66; singing at The Deanery', 74; plays Fusbos in Bombastes Furioso, 77; AngloIndian background, 110-13;

194

Index

Thackeray, William Makepeace (cont.) loss of fortune in Indian bank crash, 116; knowledge of banking and experience as bill-discounter, 117 Theresa, Saint, 80 Thomson, Duncan, 179 Thomson, James Tancred and Sigismunda, 48, 77 Thornton, Henry, 136 Thucydides, 36 Tillotson, Geoffrey, 178 Tillotson, Kathleen, 183-4 Timbs, John Curiosities of London, 147 time, 155-6 Titania, 21 Titian, 21, 88 Titmarsh, Michael Angelo, 105,121 travel literature, 3, 41-2 Trollope, Anthony, 113, 163, 171; on indifference to Indian subjects, 181 n!9 Trollope, Frances Paris and the Parisians in 1835, 123-4; Thackeray on, 124 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 88, 89, 92 Van Dyck, Sir Anthony, 21, 88 Vanity Fair, 4, 10, 33, 43-4, 58, 77, 78, 108, 109, 113, 155, 157 Varietes, The, 126 Velasquez, Diego, 3, 60, 88 Venus de Milo, 122, 149, 178 Vernet, Horace, 88, 129 Veronese, Paul, 88 Vidler, Alec R. The Church in an Age of Revolution, 137 Virgil, 25, 61 Aeneid, The, 28, 35 Georgics, The, 35, 61 Ward, Matthew, 93 Warrington, George, 20, 21

Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 14, 54 Watts, Isaac, 81 Weber, Carl Maria von Oberon, 74 Weiss, Barbara, 174 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 97-8, 110, 113-14 West, Benjamin, 93 Alfred Divides his Loaf with a Pilgrim, 93 William de Albanac Presents his three Daughters to Alfred, 94 Westall, Richard The Boyhood of King Alfred, 93 Westminster Review, 151 Wharton, Edith, 129 Wheeler, Michael The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction, 2 White, Hayden, 109 Whittington, Dick, 135, 138 Wieland, Christoph Martin Oberon, 74 Wilberforce, William, 136 A Practical View of Christianity, 56 Wilde, Oscar, 103 Wilkie, Sir David, 92 Alfred in the Neatherd's Cottage, 93 Wilson, Forrest, 172 Wilt, Judith, 58 Winner, Viola Hopkins, 179 Wood, Sir Charles, 27 Woodward, E.L., 181 Wordsworth, William, 18, 53 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality', 20, 21 York, Frederick, Duke of, 68 Young, G.M., 134, on fusion of religious and business ethics, 134-7 Zola, Emile, 156-7 Therese Raquin, 157