William Makepeace Thackeray
British novelist (1811-1863) · India · On the map · Writers · Died at 52
Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair, the 1847 novel that set Victorian England's vanity and hypocrisy under a surgical lamp - no hero, no moral comfort, just a society appraising itself in a mirror it didn't want to look into.
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Self Caricature by Thackeray
Thackeray portrayed by Eyre Crowe, 1845
Portrait of William Makepeace Thackeray, c. 1863
Thackeray's grave at Kensal Green Cemetery, London, photographed in 2014
Title-page to Vanity Fair, drawn by Thackeray, who furnished the illustrations for many of his own books
Anne Becher and William Makepeace Thackeray by George Chinnery, c. 1813
Etching of Thackeray, c. 1867About this person
Born in Calcutta in 1811, Thackeray was shipped to England at four after his father died, then gambled away his inheritance and watched two newspapers collapse beneath him. He turned to magazine work - Fraser's, Punch, The Times - filing satirical sketches under pseudonyms, savage little portraits of rogues and hypocrites that found an audience. Vanity Fair arrived in 1847, a panoramic takedown of British society that made his name and briefly put him second only to Dickens. His wife Isabella's mental illness ran parallel to his career; his later novels (Pendennis, The Newcomes) softened in tone, trading the early venom for something closer to melancholy. He edited the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, ran for Parliament and lost in 1857, ate and drank too much, stopped moving. A stroke killed him in 1863 at fifty-two.
