to Young Street, Kensington, he said, with mock gravity, Down on your knees, you_rogue, for here Vanity Fair was penned! And I will go down with you, for I have a high opinion of that little production myself."" Thackeray's school friend, J. F. B., whom we have already quoted, says, “Some years before the publication of Vanity Fair he told me, whilst passing passing a day with me in the country, that he had a novel in his desk, which, if published, would sell, he thought, to about seven hundred copies. Could this have been Vanity Fair? I rather think it must have been."

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This is unlikely, since Thackeray's habit of work was not one of much foresight, and he was more likely to begin a serial issue, when he had not gone far in actual composition, than prudently to finish a novel before he began to publish. He told Miss Kate Perry that after ransacking his brain for a name for his novel, it came upon him unawares, in the middle of the night, as if a voice had whispered, Vanity Fair." He said, "I jumped out of bed and ran three times round my room, uttering as I went, Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair.' His familiarity with Bunyan may easily have suggested the name. Several years afterward, when he was at Oxford with the intention of lecturing, he was obliged to obtain a license from the authorities and presented himself to the deputy-chancellor. "Pray what can I do to serve you, sir?" enquired the deputy.

6

"My name is Thackeray."

"So I see by this card.

"I seek permission to lecture within the precincts."

"Ah! you are a lecturer. What subjects do you undertake, religious or political?"

"Neither; I am a literary man." "Have you written anything?"

"Yes, I am the author of Vanity Fair."

"I presume a dissenter; and has that anything to do with John Bunyan's book?"

"Not exactly. I have also written Pendennis." "Never heard of these works, but no doubt they are proper books."

Thackeray may be said to have set the example in English literature of inventing characters who become the dramatis persona, not of some single book, but of the novelist's world. Doubtless he learned this, as so much else, from Balzac, but it is a good deal more than a novelist's trick; it illustrates the very quality of his mind. These persons who played in the little theatre which Thackeray built were realities to him, and his business was not to pull the strings of a lot of puppets, but to set in motion a number of characters who constructed their own plots and never, until they died by the necessity of the plot, ceased to be possible performers. They came and went; they were not virtues and vices in human garb, but men and women whose very voices could be heard by their interested creator. Since any one of Thackeray's novels was less the development of some leading theme than the field of action for certain human beings, whose natural circumstance was carefully studied, it was easy, it was indeed necessary, that if the period was not changed, and the general circumstance remained the same, the same characters would reappear. Hence they were his companions, and his belief in them was not a forcible act of the imagination, but a quiet assumption of their existence.

"I am going to-day," he writes in July, 1848, from

Brussels, "to the Hôtel de la Terrasse, where Becky used to live, and shall pass by Captain Osborn's lodgings, where I recollect meeting him and his little wife, who has married again, somebody told me; but it is always the way with these grandes passions, Mrs. Dobbins, or some such name, she is now; always an over-rated woman, I thought. How curious it is! I believe perfectly in all those people, and feel quite an interest in the inn in which they lived."

Mr. Hannay, who made his acquaintance at this time, says that Thackeray once pointed out to him the very house in Russell Square where his imaginary Sedleys lived; and Mr. Rideing, in his pleasant little sketch, Thackeray's London, has no difficulty in tracing the several characters in Vanity Fair to their haunts in Curzon Street, Gaunt Square (Berkeley Square), and elsewhere. "Miss Thackeray," he says, "has told a friend of the writer's how, in her walks with her father, he would point out the very houses in which they [his characters] lived. These are but superficial illustrations of the reality of Thackeray's creations to him. His whole attitude toward his writings bears testimony to the sincerity of his dealings with himself and his power. Mr. Hannay truthfully says: "The man and the books were equally real and true; and it was natural that he should speak without hesitation of his books, if you wished it;" and in further illustration the same writer adds: "When we congratulated him, many years ago, on the touch in Vanity Fair in which Becky admires' her husband when he is giving Lord Steyne the chastisement which ruins her for life, 'Well,' he said, 'when I wrote the sentence I slapped my fist on the table and said, 'That is a touch of genius.'

6

Mr. John Esten Cooke, in An Hour with Thackeray, contributed to Appletons' Journal, September, 1879, reports an interesting conversation which he had with the novelist, and shows the unstudied, negligée manner in which he could speak of his own writings. "I like Becky,' said Thackeray. "Sometimes I think I have myself some of her tastes. I like what are called Bohemians, and fellows of that sort. I have seen all sorts of society, — dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, authors and actors and painters, and, taken altogether, I think I like painters the best, and Bohemians generally. They are more natural and unconventional; they wear their hair on their shoulders if they wish, and dress picturesquely and carelessly. You see how I made Becky prefer them, and that sort of life, to all the fine society she moved in. Perhaps you remember where she comes down in the world, toward the end of the book, and associates with people of all sorts, Bohemian and the rest, in their garrets?'

"I remember very well.'

"I like that part of the book. I think that part is well done.'

"As you speak of Becky Sharp, Mr. Thackeray,' I said, there is one mystery about her which I should like to have cleared up.'

"What is that?'

"Nearly at the end of the book there is a picture of Jo Sedley in his night-dress, seated—a sick old man-in his chamber, and behind the curtain is Becky, glaring and ghastly, grasping a dagger.' "I remember.'

"Beneath the picture is the single word Clytem

nestra.'

"Yes.'

"Did Becky kill him, Mr. Thackeray?'

"This question seemed to afford the person to whom it was addressed material for profound reflection. He smoked meditatively, appeared to be engaged in endeavoring to arrive at the solution of some problem, and then, with a secretive expression, and a slow smile dawning on his face, replied, "I don't know.' A desultory conversation ensued on the subject of Becky Sharp, for whom, in spite of her depravity, it seemed very plain that Mr. Thackeray had a secret liking, at least an amused thy, due to the pluck and perseverance with which she pursued the object she had in view.' "We believe that he never thoroughly hated Becky Sharp,' says Mr. Shirley Brooks, "except when she kept her boy in the kitchen, kissed him before company, and slapped his face outside the door."

sympa

Vanity Fair, as we have said, was issued in monthly numbers, the first dated January 1, 1847, and numbers 19 and 20 in a double part, July, 1848. The title in full on these numbers was Vanity Fair: Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society. The wrappers were yellow, to distinguish them probably from the green always used by Dickens, and bore an illustration by the author not reproduced in the body of the work. In the earliest copies a woodcut of the Marquis of Steyne appeared, which afterward was suppressed.

It has been said more than once that the manuscript was declined by at least one magazine, and that he sent it out with much anxiety and misgivings on its monthly trial. The firm of Bradbury & Evans, who had lately bought Punch, in which Thackeray was a constant contributor, had the business management, and an acceleration to the popu