Author: W M Thackeray
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY was born at Calcutta in 1811. A family story tells how he was named Makepeace after an ancestor who had been a protestant martyr under Queen Mary. In those days English children did not stay very long in India with their parents because the hot weather was bad for them, and when he was six years old William was sent to school in England. On the way there his ship stopped at St Helena, and Thackeray later jokingly told how his servant took him to see Napoleon in imprisonment, 'eating three sheep a day, and all the little children he could catch'. The boy went to several schools, and then attended Charterhouse in London from 1822 to 1828. He was not particularly good at lessons, but the other boys liked him. Next he went for a few terms to Trinity College, Cambridge, but left there because he did not think he was learning enough that was worth while. For the next few years he found it very difficult to decide what profession to follow. In 1831 he started reading for the bar at the Middle Temple, but he soon gave that up. Next he spent three years in Paris studying art, but he never became really successful, although he did afterwards illustrate some of his own books. He lost most of his money in 1833 and married Isabella Shawe three years later and started to work hard as a journalist. He attracted attention as a satirist when he began writing for Punch and his contributions were later collected and published as The Book of Snobs. Soon afterwards he published his great novel Vanity Fair and followed this with Pendennis, Esmond, and The Newcomers. In 1853 he took his two daughters to Rome, and while they were there he wrote The Rose and the Ring. He was very fond of his own family and liked all children. When he was editor of The Cornhill magazine he was in fact too kind-hearted to be efficient. He always delayed as long as he could telling writers that their work was not good enough to print. Although he had made such a slow start in the early days, by the time he died in 1863 Thackeray had achieved permanent fame as a satirical novelist.
