Thackeray’s drawings at Houghton Library The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Lonoff de Cuevas, Sue. 2011. Thackeray’s drawings at Houghton Library. Harvard Library Bulletin 21 (4): 13-38. Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37363360 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Tackeray’s Drawings at Houghton Library Sue Lonof de Cuevas hen Charlotte Brontë’s editor asked her to illustrate a new edition of Jane Eyre, she turned him down. She lacked the skill to do it herself, she explained, and hiring someone else would be unwise because her characters, “mostly unattractive to look at,” should not be subjected to the idealization that “common-place illustrators” practiced. For her, the sole and supreme exception was William Makepeace Tackeray: How he can render with a few black lines and dots, shades of expression so fne, so real; traits of character so minute, so subtle, so difcult to seize and fx—I cannot tell; I can only wonder and admire. Tackeray may not be a painter, but he is a wizard of a draughtsman; touched with his pencil, paper lives.1 In 1848, when she made this assessment, she was still writing as Currer Bell and distancing herself from the literary eminence that Tackeray had sought for eleven grinding years. His richly illustrated Vanity Fair was still coming out in serial installments; yet already, in the judgment of more readers than Brontë, it had set him in the highest rank of English novelists. “Tere is no use denying the matter or blinking it now,” Tackeray wrote to his mother that January. “I am become a sort of great man in my way—all but at the top of the tree: indeed there if the truth were known and having a great fght up there with Dickens.” 2 Tackeray would occupy the literary heights until well into the twentieth century, and not just for Vanity Fair. Te novels that followed his greatest triumph—Pendennis, Te History of Henry Esmond, Te Newcomes, Te Virginians, Te Adventures of Philip, Denis Duval, Lovel the Widower—continued to attract loyal readers, and four included his own illustrations.3 He was also celebrated for the shorter writings that preceded and succeeded Vanity Fair: contributions to Punch, Te Book of Snobs, Te Paris Sketchbook, Te English Humourists, and Te Four Georges, to name only a few. For most of these 1 Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, March 11, 1848, Te Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995–2004), 2:41. 2 William Makepeace Tackeray to Anne Carmichael-Smyth, January 7, 1848, Te Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Tackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945), 2:333 (hereafer cited as Letters). 3 Tey were Pendennis, Te Virginians, Lovel the Widower, and the unfnished Denis Duval. too, he prepared illustrations. In pen-and-ink, pencil, and occasionally color, they range from a few def lines of caricature to the fnely detailed drawings from which copperplates or lithographs were made. Some were intended for publication, others served as preliminary sketches. Beyond the drawings that accompany his writings are those to which the text is subordinate—printed as folios, prepared for friends, inserted in his letters, or dashed of for his own amusement. Te twenty examples considered here represent a tiny fraction of a trove that merits more sustained attention. Tackeray was not only one of the most celebrated writers of his period. He was a multifaceted Victorian, wide-ranging in his interests, witty and urbane, a clubman yet also a devoted single parent long before that term became current. Beyond illustrating aspects of his work and life: his drawings can be read as stories in themselves, as keys to his connections with the people he loved, and as comments on the mores of his era. Te earliest Tackeray drawing in Harvard’s archives is in an album assembled by Blanche Paxton, the daughter of the architect of the Crystal Palace (see fgure 3).4 Although this pencil sketch is undated, the caption narrows the possibilities. Tackeray was born in Calcutta, but like most sons of the Anglo-Indian gentry, he was sent back to England for schooling and therefore separated from his mother between the ages of fve and nine. Since she drew “Te House and grounds” and he drew the fgures, this collaborative drawing must have been made afer her return from India on July 5, 1820. Te summery dresses, the tea served on the lawn, and Paxton’s note that he was then “a small boy” suggest that he made it before going back to school or, if not in 1820, soon afer. Te features of the child at the center of the drawing are too generic to attribute with confdence. Still, young William was chubby, like the boy in the sketch, and a watercolor painting of the Tackeray family, made by George Chinnery when the boy was three, shows a curl in the middle of his forehead. If the sketch is autobiographical, the woman to his lef would be his mother, Anne Carmichael-Smyth, who was known for dressing splendidly; the other boy could be his cousin, Richmond Shakespear, who had sailed with him to England in 1816; and the little girl would be his orphaned cousin, Mary Graham.5 In any case, the action mocks the usual decorum of lawn parties. Te woman extends a warning hand to stop the young pugilist from duking it out with the boy on his right, who is restrained by what appears to be a leash. Te holder of the leash 4 Harry Elkins Widener Collection, HEW 8.6.2 F (10). 5 Tackeray’s mother, Anne Becher, married Richmond Tackeray in 1810. He died in 1815. Eighteen months later, she married Henry Carmichael-Smyth, the frst love whom her mother had earlier prevented her from marrying. Unless otherwise noted, biographical details throughout this article come from Gordon N. Ray, Tackeray: Te Uses of Adversity 1811–1846 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955) and Tackeray: Te Age of Wisdom, 1847–1863 (rpt. New York: Octagon, 1972) (hereafer cited as Adversity and Wisdom). 14 Tackeray’s Drawings at Houghton Library Figure 3. Tackeray. Childhood drawing of his family and house. Pencil, circa 1820. 19 x 23.5 cm. fHEW 8.6.2 (10). Harry Elkins Widener Collection. extends his free hand toward a man who points a rude fnger at the woman pouring tea, while the little girl sucks her thumb. “His drawing is wonderful,” his mother wrote afer seeing him again in England.6 He had sent her samples when she was in India—the earliest, of a horse and rider, penciled ffeen days before his sixth birthday—and clearly, during those years of separation, sketching became for him a primary means of self-expression and creativity. As his daughter Annie observed “He liked to draw, not so much the things he saw as the things he thought about: knights with heraldic shields, soldiers, brigands, dragons, and demons; his school-books were all ornamented with funny fanciful designs, his papers were covered with them.” 7 But if Tackeray was assiduous at drawing, he balked at studying when it became tedious. From the local school at Chiswick he transferred to Charterhouse and then entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he chose to take an honours degree. He 6 Anne Tackeray Ritchie, “Te Boyhood of Tackeray,” St. Nicholas 17 (December 1889): 107. 7 Ibid., 107–108. Sue Lonof de Cuevas 15 soon became diverted, however, and so confrmed the judgment of his Chiswick schoolmaster: “He sees things in a minute which others plod over for hours, but his idleness is almost unconquerable.” 8 Two etchings from this period, hand-colored in copies given to Harvard, lampoon an undergraduate’s progress (see fgure 4).9 In the one captioned “First Term,” a student leans over a book of mathematics,10 his eyelids heavy with fatigue. Te furniture in his bare-walled room is limited to the strictly necessary: straight-back chair, writing desk, tea table, bookcase. In “Second Term,” the evidence of the student’s dissipation abounds. Dressed like a dandy and pufng on a pipe, he sprawls on a sofa, his slippered foot narrowly missing the wine glass next to the decanter to his right. To his lef, a fre blazes; carpeting and heavy curtains increase his creature comforts. Above the mantel is a painting of what seems to be a female nude; behind him is a statue of another nude whose arms make an efort at modesty. As discreet as these nudes now seem, for Tackeray they are an exception. Ray, his leading biographer, notes that he “liked to talk and write bawdy to congenial company.” 11 But if any risqué drawings accompanied those writings, they have gone permanently missing. By the time he quit Trinity in 1830, he was on his way to becoming a worldling, a term he would later use for Becky Sharp. Even as a student, he made several trips to Paris in which gambling and carousing vied with visits to the Louvre and the theater. Afer leaving university, he traveled to Germany, where he took a steamer up the Rhine and then settled in Weimar for six months before returning to London to take up the study of law.