Thackeray gambled away a fortune, then gave 'snob' its modern meaning
As a small boy sailing from India, William Makepeace Thackeray had the captive Napoleon pointed out to him on Saint Helena. He grew into a six-foot-three satirist who lost his inheritance to gambling and failed newspapers, wrote for his life, and became the only Victorian novelist ranked beside Dickens in his day.
Born in Calcutta in 1811, where his father worked for the East India Company, Thackeray was shipped to England at four after his father died. He loathed Charterhouse School, later mocking it in fiction as Slaughterhouse, and left Cambridge in 1830 without much academic enthusiasm. Travels took him to Weimar, where he met Goethe. On turning 21 he came into money and burned through it on cards, two short-lived newspapers and the failure of two Indian banks. He tried painting in Paris, a skill that survived mainly in the illustrations for his own books.
Marriage in 1836 forced him to earn a living. He poured out sketches, reviews and art criticism for Fraser's Magazine and The Times, often behind comic pen names such as Michael Angelo Titmarsh. For Punch, where he wrote from 1843 to 1854, he produced The Snob Papers, the pieces that fixed the modern sense of the word snob. His record there has a dark side: as the magazine's so-called Irish expert, he was responsible for its hostile portrayals of the Irish during the Great Famine.
Home life collapsed after 1840, when his wife Isabella sank into a mental illness from which she never recovered; she spent years in care and outlived him by three decades. Fame came with Vanity Fair, serialised from January 1847, whose schemer Becky Sharp showed his soft spot for roguish climbers. Soon the aristocrats he skewered were courting him. Pendennis and The Newcomes followed in a gentler key, and on American lecture tours audiences loved his relaxed style, hands in pockets as if chatting by a fire.
Politics went less well: standing as a Liberal for Oxford in 1857, he lost by 1,005 votes to 1,070. He edited the new Cornhill Magazine from 1860 but disliked the job. Heavy eating and drinking, and a fondness for spicy peppers, wrecked his health. A stroke killed him at 52 in December 1863, and about 7,000 people came to his funeral.
Source: William Makepeace Thackeray
