Few great writers have been as consistently candid as Thackeray about their appetite for cash. Soon after becoming editor of the hugely successful Cornhill Magazine in 1860, he expressed his delight in a letter to a friend, with characteristic vigour.
"We've got 2 hosses in our carriage now. The Magazine goes on increasing and how much do you think my next 12 months earnings & receipts will be if I work? 10,000£. Cockadoodleoodoodloodle!" In DJ Taylor's new biography of Thackeray, it is this continual hunger for cash that comes most vividly alive.
Taylor calls Thackeray "the greatest English writer (writer, you note, not novelist) of the nineteenth century". The parenthesis is the point, for Thackeray's talents are obscured by his sheer output. In the early years, much of this was in the form of humorous essays, travel writing, character sketches, squibs and parodies. (Indeed, Vanity Fair apart, Taylor seems to regret that his hero abandoned literary journalism for the door-stopping novels of his later years.) He wrote mostly for periodicals and lived off the week-by-week preoccupations of middle-class Victorian readers. Some of these pieces survive, like the Snobs of England series that he contributed to Punch (which did, after all, fix the word "snob" in our language). Most have failed to escape their times.
It is the sheer productivity that Taylor most admires, "a vast freelance output, which is even now partly beyond the grasp of the bibliographers".
He is right that Thackeray's novels are at their best when they tap the improvisational energies of the brilliant literary hack, spinning digressions to fit the required pages. Thackeray became this character because of early financial disasters. His father, who died when he was four, left him a sizeable inheritance acquired as a "Collector" in India. Thackeray lost almost all of it: some by gambling, most by the collapse of Indian banking houses. "Having no profession, he became by necessity an author", wrote Samuel Johnson sardonically of the high-minded hack Richard Savage. Thackeray had exactly this sense of authorship as a last resort, and kept imagining something better. Even after completing Vanity Fair he began the process - never pursued - of becoming a barrister, and he kept angling for some kind of public appointment. Anything rather than "quill-driving". Educated (rather poorly) at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, being a gentleman was one of his preoccupations. Being a professional writer was not gentlemanly enough.
Yet this uneasiness too seems to have given his early writing some of its energy, producing sharp little portraits of social climbing and precarious gentility for journals like Fraser's Magazine. It is also there in Vanity Fair , where "genteel" is invariably a sarcastic label for pretension, and the fair of vanities is also a fair of social insecurities. This "Novel without a Hero", as it was subtitled, made brilliant virtues of the pressures under which it placed its author. Produced in monthly instalments, with publishers who were ready to abandon it if sales flagged, it kept Thackeray to a speed of invention that any reader of the novel can still feel. Provisional endings and ironic changes of directions still work their darkly comic effects.
Vanity Fair made his name, and rightly still makes it. Yet it did not make him rich. He still needed money. He needed it for his expensive life-style: when he built himself a mansion in Kensington, he laid down ninety dozen bottles of claret and port in its capacious cellars. He needed it because he was obsessed with the idea of amassing enough capital to leave his daughters with comfortable incomes. And he needed it because money was the measure of achievement as a writer. He may have eventually made huge sums by the standards of the day (in the 1850s, a chance conversation with a vicar jolted him with the recognition that he earned as much in a week as this man in a year), but then it was never as much as Dickens.
The comparison with Dickens was Thackeray's continual reflex, and is a structural principle of this biography. To the Victorians, the contrast was like the opposition a century earlier between Richard son and Fielding. One of them (Richardson, Dickens) was sentimental, didactic and vulgar; the other (Fielding, Thackeray) was cynical, realistic and gentlemanly.
Thackeray called his novels a "protest" against those of Dickens: "if one set are true, the other must be false". Yet he knew that he kept coming off second-best.
If the ropey index to Taylor's biography were better it would have under "Dickens" entries like "T's attempts to emulate", "T's comparison of himself with", "T's envy of", and so on. A friend thought that he had "Dickens on the brain". It is absolutely characteristic that, at his moment of greatest achievement as a writer with the success of Vanity Fair , he should write to his mother that he was "all but at the top of the tree - indeed there if the truth be known & having a great fight up there with Dickens". It cannot have helped that his daughters, Annie and Minnie, even named their cats after characters in Dickens's novels.
Eventually Thackeray and Dickens, who had been friends, were to have a terrible public falling out. Thackeray's feelings were strong in large measure because he admired and was haunted by Dickens's novels. He is a sympathetic character in Taylor's retelling partly because he knows he will always be second to Dickens; the knowledge epitomises the sense of disappointment and melancholy that seems to characterise his life.
There were other, now notorious reasons, for this. Four years after their marriage, his wife Isabella had become depressed. Travelling by steamer to Ireland, she threw herself into the sea, and was kept afloat only by the air trapped in the flounces of her crinoline. She never regained her wits and remained permanently in private care. Thackeray was later to seek refuge in a hopeless, slightly ridiculous, passion for Jane Brookfield, his best friend's wife. Taylor retells these sad stories (truly, there is little to add to Gordon Ray's meticulous biography of the 1950s). Yet, as a jobbing writer himself, it is a different passion that he brings to life: the passion to turn writing into cash.
