William Makepeace Thackeray

Born on July 18, 1811, in Calcutta, where his father, Richmond Thackeray, served as secretary to the Board of Revenue in the East India Company. Richmond died when William was four, and his mother, Anne Becher, soon married Major Henry Carmichael-Smyth. At six, Thackeray was sent to England for his education, a separation from his mother that left a lasting wound. He attended Charterhouse School , which he loathed and later satirized , and Trinity College, Cambridge, which he left without a degree after less than two years, having spent much of his time gambling. He traveled Europe, studied art in Paris, and squandered much of his inheritance on two failed newspapers. In 1836 he married Isabella Shawe; they had three daughters, but after the birth of the third in 1840, Isabella suffered a mental collapse from which she never recovered, spending the remaining fifty years of her life in care. Thackeray raised his daughters alone while writing furiously for Fraser’s Magazine, Punch, and other periodicals under various pseudonyms. Vanity Fair (1847–1848), serialized in twenty monthly parts, made his reputation: a panoramic, sardonic portrait of Regency society without a hero, dominated by the unforgettable Becky Sharp. The History of Pendennis (1848–1850) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852) confirmed his stature as Dickens’s chief rival, though their methods could hardly have differed more , where Dickens painted in broad strokes, Thackeray worked in irony, ambiguity, and moral gray. On the evening of December 23, 1863, Thackeray returned home from dining out and retired to bed. He was found dead the following morning, having suffered a stroke in the night. He was fifty-two.

In 1816, five years old, Thackeray sailed alone from Calcutta to England, sent away after his father's death. At St Helena the ship stopped, and a servant pointed to a man pacing a garden and said: 'That is Bonaparte. He eats three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands on.' Decades later, Thackeray still remembered the fright of it.