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William Thackeray: a Study of His Technique and Style

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William Thackeray: a Study of His Technique and Style International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 7, No. 1; January 2017 William Thackeray: A Study of His Technique and Style Dr. Ibrahim Abdel - Latif Shalabi Assistant Professor Department of English University of Hail Saudi Arabia Abstract This paper seeks to shed light on the technique and style of Thackeray’s major novels Vanity Fair (1848), Pendennis (1848–1850), The History of Henry Esmond (1852), and The New comes (1855). The paper discusses the merits of each of the above mentioned work and concludes that each novel has its unique style, plot and characters. Keywords: Plot, Characters, Brevity, Satire and reform, Contemporaries. Introduction Eighteenth century as we all know was remarkable for its emphasis on commonsense, reason and brevity. A typical and inevitable product of these tendencies was the satire as a form of literature. First, a handmaid of party polemic and personal recriminations gradually took the shape of social reprobation. The gall and the sting of Swift steadily passed through the gentler undertones of Addison censure on to the relativity diluted albeit calculated blows aimed at the follies and foibles of the times in the hands of Fielding. For a correct and balanced estimate of Thackeray as a novelist, we have to pick up the thread where Fielding left it. The latter had made an important advance on the road to fictional perfection by giving the novel a definite purpose “by using it as the vehicle for Satire and reform, chastising with a special zeal self-seekers and hypocrites” (Watt). In the hands of Dickens, the center of attention shifted from mere satire to the creation of a great gallery of characters who lived and moved and had their eccentric begins against the background of Victorian London. The mention of Dickens brings us to the consideration of a very persistent and not too far-fetched comparisons between him and Dickens for the two are usually bracketed together by literary historians as well as by literary critics. The tendency to pair together two important writers is partially explainable by the fact that it helps to throw into relief the characteristics and qualities of one of them when laid beside those of the other. A close study of these two contemporaries leaves one in no doubt as to their relatively general dissimilarity in most of the matters of consequence, and saves the fact of their contemporaneousness from which sprang some common ground between them, e.g., the identity of their moral values, “sterling, domestic, unspiritual of the Victorian middle class for which they both wrote” (D. Cecil). The difference between the ranges of the two becomes evident when we come to grips with the world which each one of them has created in his novels. In the case of Dickens, we have rather an astonishingly varied and rich compass within which are included all sorts of characters of varying professions, individual eccentricities and mannerisms; most of them playing secondary roles only to strengthen the actions of the central figure. These characters are largely the product of a fertile imagination reared into the prismatic medium of their author’s creative genius. Although not unconvincing, they are not real either. The chief difference between Dickens and Thackeray was that of their temperaments. Dickens had the precious gift of observation but lacked reflective power. In fact, thought has no place in his artistic creation. It is imagination that does the trick with him. This made him emotional and imaginative, even romantic. Thackeray was just the reverse of it. He was both a realist and a moralist. His observation did not end in itself. Rather, it became the raw material for his higher faculty of reflection. The latter informed him of the sham deceptions, vanities, intrigues, snobberies so universally present in his own day. Influenced by Fielding and Swift, he turned into a satirist. 21 ISSN 2220-8488 (Print), 2221-0989 (Online) ©Center for Promoting Ideas, USA www.ijhssnet.com Unlike Dickens who caricatured and burlesqued, mocked and ridiculed, Thackeray exposed and unmasked the moral weaklings which he found everywhere. In the words of Rickett “Thackeray satirized social conventions, Dickens national weaknesses. Pretense and snobbery felt the lash of the one, hypocrisy and cruelty the rage of the other”. Both Thackeray and Dickens deal with the middle classes although while the former deals largely with their apex the latter with the base. It is to the credit of Dickens that he brought to bear upon his comparatively unromantic subjects a truly romantic temperament. His imaginative power highly qualified him for this romantic treatment. In the case of Thackeray there was a strange mental confusion almost a kind of spiritual crisis. Constitutionally romantic he became more and more divorced from his inner self and in the end developed a realism which in itself bears most eloquent testimony to his repressed romanticism. The tragedy of his personal life including that caused by the insanity of his wife made him an escapist from the world of his own inner feelings and deeper emotions. Embittered and disappointed with life - particularly its romantic aspects, he turned against that which he could not live up to. Coupled with the revelations of his clear-sighted intelligence, this disappointment and bitterness led him into the sensing of the presence in the world of spiritual mediocrity on a large scale. This saddened his outlook. His curiosity for truth yielded to him a sad panorama of life. This yearning for the better and woe at the real brought him, may be in spite of himself, very near that truly romantic mood of which a certain melancholy and discontent are so familiar strains. Had he taken seriously to poetry, he should have displayed a mood akin to Shelley. This inner and basic trait of romanticism in the personality of Thackeray became more and more perceptible in his later works. This is understandable when we encounter the fact that with the mellowing of years Thackeray’s judgment also ripened, and towards the second half of his career he came to recognize the essential one-sidedness of his subjects. Here it may not be out of place to point out that his initial alienation from romance was partly produced by the excesses of the romanticists and partly by his mistaken judgment that reality was essentially opposed to romance. In fact, the success of Dickens had undoubtedly given cause to him for second thoughts. In order to get the better of him, he turned to realism and this, as we have already seen, to him meant hostility to romance. This accounts for “the preponderance through the first half of his career of what was hard and unlovely” (Hugh Walker). “But,” as the same critic points out, “gradually as time went on, he recovered his balance. He discovered that romance was not so much false and one-sided and partial and that its opposite might be equally one-sided and at same time less beautiful. The kindlier judgment and the more genial views which pervade his later works indicate his mature conviction that the chivalrous knight and the greedy noble were equally real.” Thackeray’s Popular Plots Thackeray’s plots usually revolve round the same themes like struggle between selfishness, vanity, deception and instinctive goodness, honesty and humility. In practical, all his books with the possible exception of Henry Esmond, his themes sag. The reader meets with many pages where the unconcealed fatigued and weariness of the author’s pen tires him. But it is rarely that there are no recoveries. Nearly always his “mood” returns, his fancy kindles up, his fatigue and melancholy retire and once again he is pleasant, refreshing and interesting. He is also in the habit of introducing sub-plots, a plot within a plot, in his stories. The center of tension shifts from one to the other adding to the impression of the multiplicity of characters and situations. However, through all these runs a common unifying influence, that of the author himself. Thackeray’s Characters Coming to Thackeray’s characters, several interesting facts are revealed to us. Dickens had created a huge army of characters giving each individuality of its own. His interest lay chiefly in the traits in which one character differed from the other. Thackeray also produced a large number of characters but he made them all co-sharers in a common fund of general characteristics. According to David Cecil “Thackeray is interested not in the variety but in the species; not in men but man”. This while it gave his characters a common denominator of what he regarded as universal aspects of human character, on the other hand it made them more firm and life like in their impression upon the reader’s mind because of the sure grasp of their author on those interests and motives which activate them all alike. The guiding impulse of Thackeray in the writing of his novels as we have seen was directed towards the exposing of the sham and the deceptions of his age. His characters too, became completely conditioned by the necessities of this impulse. 22 International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 7, No. 1; January 2017 Within the time work of the world he wanted to criticize he created only such of the characters who were worthy of his preconceived criticism. The range of his characters, therefore, is in correspondence with the limitations of his general design. Unlike Dickens whose characters are mainly grotesque exaggeration of real life, those of Thackeray are within the range of their very much life like and possess a symmetry born of a common perspective and moral vision.
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