Thackeray's Vanity Fair and The Newcomes

Thackeray's Vanity Fair and The Newcomes Juliet McMaster (bio) In my schooldays—and that was in Nairobi, Kenya, where I was born and bred—I was torn between my love of literature and my love of art. Reading was a passion, but so was drawing, and I worked at both to the extent of my ability, with exacting coaching and exams. My mother was a granddaughter of the notable Victorian painter James Clarke Hook, RA (1819–1907), and her father and uncle and sister and some of her brothers were practising artists too. Doing art was part of the family culture. When I got into Oxford, though (no cinch for women in those days), to "read" English, that settled the priorities. Literature was to be my profession, art my hobby. But I continued to snatch art training when I could—a term at art school before Oxford, specializing in sculpture, a summer vac as an art student in Paris. And at Mount Holyoke College, in the US, I took advantage of a chance to submit a design for a gargoyle on Washington Cathedral, then a building under construction, and it was accepted and eventually carved up there by the cathedral masons. [End Page 185] Come graduate school—and by now I was in Canada, at the University of Alberta—I faced the important decision of a choice of dissertation topic. In those days (the 1960s), literary studies were largely author-oriented, not theme-oriented, far less theory-oriented. So I looked at authors. The Oxford course in English had plenty of Old English and Middle English and Shakespeare, but it stopped at 1837. (The Victorians and Moderns, I suppose, were deemed leisure reading.) So I chose graduate courses in the later periods and took a course on Dickens with one Professor R.D. McMaster. Reading around, I wrote an essay on David Copperfield and Thackeray's Pendennis, both somewhat autobiographical novels. And I took to Thackeray. Thackeray, I learned, was a writer who wanted to be an artist. He was a kindred spirit! He illustrated his own novels. I had read Vanity Fair as a teenager, but I was delighted to discover the illustrated edition. The Becky Sharp of his pictures, with her simultaneous smile and scowl—she's both attractive and dangerous—became iconic for me. I loved the vignettes that accompany his chapter initials, succinct comic summaries of each chapter's content; I enjoyed his self-portrait as a worried jester, the tailpiece to chapter 9, and made a ceramic version of it (fig. 1). I liked Thackeray the man, too, as I got to know him through his letters and Gordon Ray's monumental biography. I traced him through Punch and pounced on the many little self-portraits, with his spectacles and broken nose. He was a big man but self-effacing. He was ironic and satirical, but a sucker for little kids; highly successful in his day but plagued by self-doubt. I even managed to dream about him once. In it, I was all of a tremble at the approaching final oral, and he kindly patted my hand and said I'd be all right. I was. Thackeray didn't illustrate The Newcomes, his great panoramic analysis of Victorian society—he handed that job over to his Punch colleague Dicky Doyle. But I took to that novel too, for the hero Clive Newcome is a would-be artist, Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1a. William Makepeace Thackeray, tailpiece to chapter 9 of Vanity Fair (1848); ceramic mug. Courtesy of author. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1b. William Makepeace Thackeray, tailpiece to chapter 9 of Vanity Fair (1848); ceramic mug. Courtesy of author. [End Page 186] and the novel follows him in his studies at Gandish's (read Sass's) Academy and on his travels as an art student to Rome. The narrator lingers over "the simplicity of the student's life there, … the delightful nature of the occupation in which he is engaged" (426). Artists of the day folded The Newcomes to their hearts: F.G. Stephens wrote about it in the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ...

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