Thackeray

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 13 AUG. 2001

At 24, the age when Dickens established his reputation with Pickwick Papers, "Thackeray could only show," concedes Taylor (Trespass, etc.), a London-based novelist and critic, "a failed career as a newspaper proprietor, a folder full of indifferent sketches and some stray pieces of journalism." Yet early on, Taylor proposes "to demonstrate that he was the greatest English writer (writer, you note, not novelist) of the 19th century. And perhaps of all time." The claim evokes the novelist side of Taylor, who furnishes five fictional sources to enliven his biography (including a "lost" fragment of George Eliot's diary). Much of W.M. Thackeray's life (1811 1863) itself seems the stuff of Victorian fiction: origins in genteel Anglo-Indian society; bohemian dissipation in Paris; marriage to a beauty who is put away as insane for her persistent postpartum depression; ardent but unrequited passions thereafter; male bonding at the weekly Puncheditorial dinners. He produced a great novel in Vanity Fair, the success of which he could not repeat, then suffered a "slide into mediocrity" and sentimentality. Plagued by chronic illness, he toiled at hack writing to provide for his two daughters, and died too soon. Although Taylor's account is often poignant, it never sustains his sweeping initial adulation of Thackeray, whose creative powers came late and quickly waned. Where the biography succeeds is in evoking the texture of social upheaval in the English 1830s and '40s, the subtext of Thackeray's writings. Since the audience for any of Thackeray's novels, even his greatest, is now small, and the reader is left to reflect with melancholy upon a failed life, the market for Taylor's biography is likely to be limited to devotees of the Victorian literary milieu. 30 b&w illus. plus 40 drawings by Thackeray.