Thackeray constantly mixes up real with fictitious names in his descriptions. Some disguise was often necessary, and sometimes even compulsory. He could not be as explicit or as literal as Dickens, because most of his characters represented a very different class. The latter could draw in detail the house he selected as most appropriate for the occupation of Sairey Gamp, because the actual tenants were not likely to find him out, or, if they ever read his description, to quarrel with it. But many of the clients whom Thackeray had to provide with dwellings were great people, andcould only be placed in great neighbourhoods, where the houses are large, conspicuous, and easily distinguished. He either had to omit any descriptive detail, or to mask the actual place he had in mind by locating it in some street or square with a fanciful name. Any student of his works will have no difficulty, however, in finding Gaunt House, Gaunt Square, and Great Gaunt street, if he makes a personal search for them in Mayfair, though they are not indicated in any map or directory.
Mayfair (let me say for the benefit of my readers who are so unfortunate as not to knew London) is one of the three most fashionable neighbourhoods of the great metropolis, and of the three it is the most aristocratic and most ancient. It is, as nearly as possible, a square, about half a mile wide and three-quarters of a mile long, bounded at one end by Oxfordstreet, with its shops and plebeian traffic, at the other end by the most delightful of London streets, Piccadilly; at one side by Bond street, and at the other by Park Lane, the houses in which overlook the beautiful expanse of Hyde Park. The names of some of its streets have become synonymous with patrician pomp and the affluence of inheritance. It is the highest heaven of social aspiration, the most exalted object of worldly veneration. This is the house of the Duke of Hawksbury; this of the Earl of Tue-brook; that of Viscount Wallasey, and that of Lord Arthur Bebbington. It is preëminently the region of the “quality.” But let not the reader suppose that it is a region of exterior splendor, of spacious architecture, of brilliant appearance.
Belgravia is far grander to look at, and seems to possess greater riches, and to usethem more lavishly. Even Tyburnia, the neighborhood to the north of Hyde Park, is more suggestive of social eminence. Mayfair displays none of the signs of the rude enjoyment and proud assertiveness which spring from recent prosperity. It is old-fashioned, un-changing, and dull. It is little different from what it was at the beginning of the century, except that it is nearer decay, and that febrile irruptions of modern Queen Anne architecture occasionally vary the sombreness of its original style. The physiognomy of its houses expresses a sort of torpor, as if familiarity with honours were as wearisome as continuous association with misfortune. They have an air of funereal resignation. Many of the streets are short and narrow: many of the houses are dingy. The ornaments are of a sepulchral kind, such as urns over the door-ways, and funeral wreaths aboutthe porticoes. The blazoned heraldry of the hatchments has been nearly extinguished by the smoke. At some doors there are two incongruous obelisks, joined to the iron railing which screens the basement, and the portico is extended to the curb. But ornaments even as unsatisfactory as these are not common, and most of the houses, with high fronts of blackened brick and oblong windows, are unadorned, except by a few boxes of flowers on the sills. The lackeys, with crimson knee-breeches, white stockings, laced coats, buckled shoes, and powdered hair, blaze in this gloom with a pyrotechnic splendour. Occasionally, the uniform rows of smoky brick and pointed stucco houses are overshadowed by a larger mansion, shut within its own walls, and some of the streets enter spacious squares, where there are sooty trees and grass and chirping sparrows.
It is possible that Thackeray had no exact place in mind when he wrote of Gaunt House and Gaunt Square, but it is not likely. The creatures of his imagination were flesh and blood to him, too vital to be left without habitations. “All the world knows,” he says inVanity Fair, “that Gaunt House stands in Gaunt Square, out of which Great Gaunt street leads . . . Gaunt House occupies nearly a side of the square. The remaining three sides consist of mansions which have passed away into dowagerism. . . . It has a dreary look, nor is Lord Steyne’s palace less dreary. All to be seen of it is a vast wall in front, with rustic columns at the great gate.” Berkeley Square almost exactly corresponds with this description. Here are the gloomy mansions, looking out on grass and trees which seem to belong to a cemetery, andhere, immediately recognizable, is the palace, filling nearly a side of the square, and shut within high walls to hide what they inclose from the prying eyes of the passers, though the upper stories can be seen from the opposite side of the way. Here is the very gate, with heavy knockers, though the rustic columns of Thackeray’s text have been replaced by new ones of a different shape. We do not find in the middle of the square the statue of Lord Gaunt, “in a three-tailed wig, and otherwise habited like a Roman emperor,” but we can identify almost every other detail of the picture. Now, as this palace has long been occupied by a noble family, it would not be just for us to mention the name of the house, lest some undeserved reproach should thereby fall on the tenants; for, while Thackeray described the locality with such faithful elaborationit is not to be inferred that he drew the character of Lord Steyne from an actual person living in the neighbourhood; nothing indeed, could be less probable.
He also speaks of the square as Shiverley Square, and briefly mentions it in describing Becky’s drive to the house of Sir Pitt Crawley: “Having passed through Shiverley Square into Great Gaunt street, the carriage at length stopped at a tall, gloomy house, between two other tall, gloomy houses, each with a hatchment over the middle drawing-room window, as is the custom in Great Gaunt street, in which gloomy locality death seems to reign perpetual.”
Great Gaunt street is undoubtedly Hill street, which he mentions specifically in another place as the home of Lady Gaunt’s mother. Sometimes it was necessary for him to invent a name, and when he did sohe was peculiarly apt. Gaunt Square seems a more fitting and descriptive name than Berkeley Square, but he frequently varied the real with the fictitious name with playful caprice.
It was in another of these queer old streets in Mayfair that that wicked old fairy godmother, the Countess of Kew, lived, and there (in Queen street) Ethel Newcome visited her, and was instructed in the rigourous social code which unites fortune with fortune, or fortune with rank, and which is by no means limited to Mayfair or Belgravia, but finds expositors and adherents under the bluer skies of America. Ethel herself lived with her mother in Park Lane, the western boundary of Mayfair, and assuredly the most attractive part of the region. Park Lane has all of Hyde Park before its windows,—all the variegated and plentifully stocked flower-beds of theRing Road, the wide sweep of grassy playground, and the knots of patriarchal trees which give the Park one of its greatest charms. Unlike most of the region behind it is cheerful; or, if not exactly cheerful, it has not the mopish signs of withdrawal from all natural human interests which are seen in many of the houses in Gaunt Square and the tributary streets. Some of the houses are small, with oriel windows, and little balconies filled with flower-pots; some of them are palatial in size and decoration; but all of them are fashionable, and elderly bachelors are known to give incredibly large prices for the smallest possible quarters under the roof of the meanest of them. The exteriors are not of the sooty brick which characterizes Hill street, but of plaster, which is annually repainted in drab or cream colour at the beginning of each season. What with the flowers ofthe Park and the gardens which lie before some of the houses, Park Lane seems a fitting abode for those who are fortunate both in birth and in wealth; it is as patrician as any other part of Mayfair, and it relieves itself of the gloom which seems to be considered an inevitable accessory of respectability elsewhere.
In one of these houses—which one it is not easy to say, as Thackeray has given us no clue—Lady Ann Newcome lived, and at it Mrs. Hobson Newcome looked from afar with an envy which betrayed itself in her constant reiterations of her contentment with her own circumstances. Mrs. Hobson lived in Bryanston Square, a dingily verdant quadrangle north of Oxford street, near which Clive had a studio; and J. J. Ridley, Fred Bayham, Miss Cann, and the Rev. Charles Honeyman, lodged together in Walpole street, Mayfair. The Rev.Charles Honeyman’s chapel was close by, and before the story ofVanity Fairreached its end there was a charitable lady in the congregation who wrote hymns and called herself Lady Crawley, and from whom William Dobbin and Amelia Sedley, now united, shrunk as they passed her at the fancy fair, recognizing in that altered person the dreadful Becky.
In the eyes of the lover of Thackeray, no character of history or fiction has lent more interest to Mayfair than Becky, to which neighbourhood she came with her husband some two or three years after their return from Paris, establishing herself in “a very small, comfortable house in Curzon street,” and demonstrating to the world the useful and interesting art of living on nothing a year. There is more than one small house in Curzon street, but among them all Becky’s is unmistakable. It ison the south side of the street, near the western end, and only a few doors farther east than the house in which Lord Beaconsfield died. It is four stories and a half high, and is built of blackish brick like its neighbours, with painted sills and portico. Its extreme narrowness, compared with its height, especially distinguishes it: the front door, with drab pilasters and a moulded architrave, is just half its width, and only leaves room for one parlour window on the first floor. One can see over the railings into the basement and through the kitchen windows. Phantoms appear to us in all the windows—the ghost of Becky herself, dressed in a pink dress, her shapely arms and shoulders wrapped in gauze; her ringlets hanging about her neck; her feet peeping out of the crisp folds of silk—“the prettiest little feet in the prettiest little sandals in the finest silk stockingsin the world.” It was in this cozy little domicile that the arch little hypocrite entertained Lord Steyne, whose house in Gaunt Square is only a few hundred yards distant, and Rawdon fleeced young Southdown at cards. No one can help smiling at the remembrances that come upon him in looking at those basement windows. No one who has readVanity Fairis likely to forget the picture of the sensual marquis gazing into the kitchen and seeing no one there just before he knocks at the door, where he is met by Becky, who is as fresh as a rose from her dressing-table, and who excuses her pretended dishabille by saying that she has just come out of the kitchen, where she has been making pie, to which palpable lie the marquis gives an audacious affirmation by adding that he saw her there as he came in!
This little house was chosen for thatscene in which Thackeray’s genius rises to its highest point of dramatic intensity; and so many literary pilgrims come to peep at it that the tenants must be annoyed, though the policeman on the beat has become so accustomed to them that he no longer eyes them cornerwise or suspects them of burglarious intentions.
The places with which Thackeray was personally associated are more interesting, perhaps, than the scenes of his novels. In 1834, he lived in Albion street, near Hyde Park Gardens, and it was there that he, a young man of twenty-three, began to contribute toFraser’s Magazine. In 1837, then newly married, he lived in Great Coram street, close by the Foundling Hospital. As I have stated, he had chambers at No. 10, Crown Office Row, in the Temple, and at No. 88, St. James’s street, both of which buildings are now demolished. When he had become a successful author,he lived in Brompton and Kensington, and at the latter place, to which he was greatly attached, he died. He was at No. 36, Onslow Square, Brompton, when he unsuccessfully offered himself as member of Parliament for Oxford, and two years later, when he began to discover the thorns in the editorial cushion of theCornhill Magazine. Mr. James Hodder, his private secretary, has given us an interesting glimpse of him as he was while in Onslow Square:—
“Duty called me to his bed-chamber every morning, and as a general rule I found him up and ready to begin work, though he was sometimes in doubt and difficulty as to whether he should commence sitting, or standing, or walking, or lying down. Often he would light a cigar, and, after pacing the room for a few minutes, would put the unsmoked remnant on the mantel-piece and resume his work with increased cheerfulness, as ifhe gathered fresh inspiration from the gentle odours of the sublime tobacco.”
“Duty called me to his bed-chamber every morning, and as a general rule I found him up and ready to begin work, though he was sometimes in doubt and difficulty as to whether he should commence sitting, or standing, or walking, or lying down. Often he would light a cigar, and, after pacing the room for a few minutes, would put the unsmoked remnant on the mantel-piece and resume his work with increased cheerfulness, as ifhe gathered fresh inspiration from the gentle odours of the sublime tobacco.”
Little wonder that he liked Kensington. It is the pleasantest of the many pleasant London suburbs. Though it is not four miles from Charing Cross, to which it is knitted by continuous streets and houses, it is like a thriving country town, old-fashioned, but prosperous, with shops as brilliant and as well stocked as those of Regent street, and with many evidences of antiquity, but none of decay. There are lofty new buildings and old ones, behind the modernized fronts of which you can see leaded dormer windows, angular chimney-pots, and bowed-down roofs of red tiles. There are many weather-worn but splendid mansions shut within their own high walls, and some in less sequestered gardens. The place is famous for its fine old trees and open spaces of verdure. Holland House ishere, and the palace in which Queen Victoria was born, with the beautiful and deeply wooded gardens adjoining Hyde Park. The inhabitants of the old suburb have had many illustrious persons among them; and Thackeray is one of those best and most affectionately remembered.
His tall, commanding figure was often seen in the old High street, moving along erect, with a firm, stately tread, though his dress was somewhat careless and loose-fitting; his large, candid face was serious and almost severe as he walked on engaged in meditation, but, being awakened from his reverie by the voice of a friend, a glad smile quickly overspread it and illuminated it. He had many friends among his neighbors, and often sat down to dinner with them. He attended regularly the nine o’clock services in the old parish church on Sunday mornings.
From 1847 to 1853, Thackeray lived in the bay-windowed house known as the “Cottage,” at No. 13 (now No. 16) Young street, and in itVanity Fair,Esmond, andPendenniswere written. There are few houses in the great city which possess a more brilliant record than this. Most of his work was done in a second-story room, overlooking an open space of gardens and orchards; and the gentleman who at present occupies the house has placed an entablature under the window commemorating the genius that has consecrated it. Between the dates, 1847 and 1853, the initials W. M. T. are grouped in a monogram in the centre of the entablature, and in the border the names ofVanity Fair,Esmond, andPendennis, are inscribed. Just across the street Miss Thackeray (Mrs. Ritchie) now lives, in full view of her old home, and in her charming novelOldKensington, she affectionately calls Young street “dear old street!” There is no doubt that the happiest years of Thackeray’s life were spent in the old, bow-windowed cottage.[99]
I have talked with many persons who knew him intimately, and under various circumstances. All speak of him in one way,—of his gentleness, his kindliness, his sincerity, and his generosity. “That man had the heart of a woman!” fervidly said one who was his next-door neighbour for several years. This gentleman, Dr. J. J.Merriman, whose family have lived in Kensington Square since 1794, possesses a number of valuable souvenirs of the great author, including some unpublished letters, in one of which Thackeray regrets that he has not seen the doctor for some time, and characteristically adds: “I wishVanity Fairwere not so big or we performers in it so busy; then we might see each other and shake hands once in a year or so.” On one occasion the doctor begged him to write his name in a copy ofVanity Fairwhich Thackeray had given him, and the latter not only did this, but made an exquisite little drawing on the title-page, than which the book could not have a more suggestive or appropriate frontispiece. A little boy and girl are seated on the ground, one blowing bubbles and the other hugging a doll, while behind them looms up the portentous mile-stone of life.
The “dear old street,” as Miss Thackeray calls it, ends in Kensington Square, which is full of old houses, to each of which some historic interest belongs. The square was built in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and in one of the old houses Lady Castlewood, Beatrice, and Colonel Esmond lived, and there sheltered the reckless and unscrupulous Pretender.[101]
In 1853, Thackeray left Kensington and went to live in Onslow Square, Brompton; but he came back to the old court suburb in 1861, and occupied the fine new house which he had built for himself in the Palace Gardens. It is the second house on the west side of the street, a substantial mansion of red brick, adjoining a much morepicturesque and older house covered with ivy; and it was here that he died suddenly on December 24, 1863, in the room at the south-east corner of the second story. The last time that I saw it, an auctioneer’s flag was hung out, and the broker’s men were playing billiards in the lofty northern extension which Thackeray built for a library, and in which he wroteDenis Duval.
Thackeray was buried in Kensal Green cemetery in the north-west of London, and was followed to the grave by Dickens, Browning, Millais, Trollope, and many who knew the goodness of the soul that had been called away. Kensal Green is as unattractive as a burial ground could be. It is like a prison-yard, with few trees, and inclosed by high brick walls. But its numerous tenantry include many who have worked faithfully and well in literature andart; and surrounded by the memorials of these is one of the simplest tombstones in the place, inscribed with two dates and the name of William Makepeace Thackeray.
[5]Mr. R. R. Bowker.
[15]The school was founded by Thomas Sutton, a rich merchant, in 1611. The buildings which are mostly of the 16th Century, had been used until the Reformation, as a monastery of Carthusian monks. “Charterhouse” is a corruption of Chartreuse, and the scholars still call themselves Carthusians.
[19]Several relics of Thackeray are preserved in the new school at Godalming, including some pen and ink sketches made by him, and five volumes containing all the existing MS. ofThe Newcomes. The MS. is written partly in his own hand, partly in the hand of Miss Anne Thackeray (now Mrs. Ritchie), and partly in another hand. Several stones on which some of the old scholars, including Thackeray, carved their names, have also been removed from the old school in London to the new one.
[29]One day, while the great novel ofThe Newcomeswas in course of publication, Lowell, who was then in London, met Thackeray in the street. The novelist was serious in manner, and his looks and voice told of weariness and affliction. He saw the kindly inquiry in the poet’s eyes, and said, “Come into Evans’s, and I’ll tell you all about it.I have killed the Colonel!” So they walked in, and took a table in a remote corner, and then Thackeray, drawing the fresh sheets of MS. from his breast pocket, read through that exquisitely touching chapter, which records the death of Colonel Newcome. When he came to the finalAdsum, the tears which had been swelling his lids for some time, trickled down his face, and the last word was almost an inarticulate sob.—F. H. Underwood, inHarper’s Magazine.
[42]Mr. Edmund Yates states in his interestingMemoirs of a Man of the World, that the Cider Cellars, next to the stage door of the Adelphi, was the prototype of the Back Kitchen, immortalized inPendennis. The Cave of Harmony, frequently mentioned by Thackeray, was sketched from Evans’s, in Covent Garden.
[72]“One day, many years ago, I saw him chaffing on the sidewalk in London, in front of the Athenæum Club, with a monstrous-sized, ‘copiously ebriose’ cabman, and I judged from the driver’s ludicrously careful way of landing the coin deep down in his breeches-pocket, that Thackeray had given him a very unusual fare. ‘Who is your fat friend?’ I asked, crossing over to shake hands with him. ‘O! that indomitable youth is an old crony of mine,’ he replied; and then, quoting Falstaff, ‘a goodly portly man, i’ faith, and a corpulent, of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage.’ It was themannerof saying this, then and there, in the London street, the cabman moving slowly off on his sorry vehicle, with one eye (an eye dewy with gin and water, and a tear of gratitude, perhaps) on Thackeray, and the great man himself so jovial and so full of kindness!”—Yesterdays with Authors.J. T. Fields.
[99]“I once made a pilgrimage with Thackeray (at my request, of course, the visits were planned) to the various houses where his books had been written; and I remember, when we came to Young street, Kensington, he said, with mock gravity, ‘Down on your knees, you rogue, for hereVanity Fairwas penned! And I will go down with you, for I have a high opinion of that little production myself.’”—Yesterdays with Authors.J. T. Fields.
[101]Kensington Square has had many celebrated inhabitants, including Talleyrand, Joseph Addison, the Duchess of Mazarin, and Archbishop Herring.