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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges," William Makepeace Thackeray intricately weaves a tapestry of 18th-century English life, characterized by his signature blend of satire and vivid characterizations. "Henry Esmond" is a historical novel that delves into the complexities of loyalty and identity during the tumultuous period leading up to the Jacobite rebellion, told through the eyes of an engaging, introspective protagonist. Meanwhile, "The English Humourists" and "The Four Georges" offer perceptive essays that explore the lives of notable figures, blending personal anecdotes with historical critique, exemplifying Thackeray's keen observational wit and literary prowess. Together, these works reflect a rich cultural commentary on British society, politics, and the foibles of human nature. William Makepeace Thackeray, a pivotal figure in Victorian literature, emerged from a background that fostered an early appreciation for storytelling and satire. His experience living through socio-political upheavals and his education at the University of Cambridge provide a backdrop to his writing, as he navigates the complexities of human relationships and societal norms with both humor and gravitas. Thackeray's keen insight into the human condition, coupled with his personal struggles, notably informed his portrayal of the ironies of life in his narratives. For readers captivated by historical fiction marked by rich character development and incisive social commentary, Thackeray's work offers an unparalleled window into the past. "Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges" is not only a profound exploration of history and satire but also an engaging reflection on human nature, making it a perennial recommendation for enthusiasts of classic literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection brings together William Makepeace Thackeray’s sustained engagement with the long eighteenth century across three complementary modes: imaginative fiction, literary portraiture, and social history. By uniting The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, and The Four Georges, the volume presents a coherent panorama of the period’s politics, letters, and manners as seen through a Victorian master of irony. The purpose is not to offer a miscellany but to illuminate a single artistic project: tracing character, power, and public life from the intimate sphere of family and memory to the broader stage of writers, courts, and kings.
The collection comprises multiple text types. Henry Esmond is a historical novel structured as a retrospective memoir and arranged into books and chapters, with a preface that frames the family narrative. The English Humourists gathers public lectures subsequently cast as essays, offering biographical sketches and critical judgments of major eighteenth‑century authors. The Four Georges assembles lectures on the Hanoverian monarchs, augmented by sections signaled here as The Poems and Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court and Town Life, which deepen its cultural portrait. Together, these forms—novel, essays, lectures, sketches, and occasional verse—demonstrate Thackeray’s range as storyteller, critic, and historian.
Henry Esmond is a historical novel narrated in the first person by Henry Esmond, an English gentleman whose life entwines with the Castlewood family during the turbulent years surrounding dynastic change and continental war. Cast as a memoir, it employs a carefully modulated, archaizing prose that evokes the period it depicts. The narrative moves from youth and education to soldiering and public affairs, weaving personal affections with national events. Thackeray’s method privileges moral and emotional nuance over melodrama, presenting a world of loyalty, gratitude, ambition, and restraint while situating private experience within the pressures of religion, inheritance, and power.
The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century consists of literary portraits originally delivered as public lectures and later published in essay form. Thackeray considers figures such as Swift, Congreve, Addison, Steele, Prior, Gay, Pope, Hogarth, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith, treating them as both artists and moral agents shaped by their times. The approach blends biography, close reading, and social observation. Without pedantic apparatus, he assesses style, temperament, patronage, and the market for letters. The result is a series of reflective studies that connect an author’s character to their satire and sentiment, revealing how literature mediates between manners and conscience.
The Four Georges examines the reigns and courts of George I through George IV, tracing the entanglements of monarchy, politics, taste, and publicity. Originating as lectures, the pieces read as essays in cultural history: portraits of sovereigns and their circles alongside the nation’s shifting social fabric. Within this section, The Poems and Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court and Town Life extend the thematic reach beyond biography to atmosphere, custom, and tone. Thackeray’s focus is less on constitutional minutiae than on character and example—how rulers and courtiers embody, encourage, or distort the values of their age, and how the public responds.
Across these works, the unifying subject is the eighteenth century as a crucible for modern life: party conflict, the rise of the press, commercial society, and the negotiation of private virtue under public scrutiny. Thackeray returns to recurrent concerns—honor and gratitude, vanity and ambition, patronage and independence, wit and moral feeling. In Henry Esmond these pressures shape a single household and its fortunes; in the lectures they shape writers, readers, and rulers. The collection thus maps how personal character meets public circumstance, suggesting that history is lived through temperament, and that society judges—and is judged by—the tone it fosters.
Thackeray’s stylistic hallmarks bind the volume. He favors irony that does not cancel sympathy, and satire that refrains from cruelty. The novel adopts an eighteenth‑century cadence without pastiche for its own sake, while the essays speak in a conversational, reflective voice that invites judgment but resists dogma. Throughout, he balances moral reserve with humane curiosity, lingering over mixed motives rather than offering tidy exempla. Portraiture, whether of a soldier, a wit, or a king, is achieved through telling social detail—dress, habit, patronage, print—so that character emerges from context and small choices rather than from declamation.
Read as a whole, the collection shows Thackeray moving between roles—novelist, critic, historian—without surrendering a core ethical stance. He is sensitive to the seductions of power, wary of flattery, and attentive to the ways status and fashion distort judgment. At the same time, he takes pleasure in conversation, books, and the civilities that make life bearable. The significance lies in this doubleness: a skeptical eye and a warm heart. The volume remains valuable because it models an engaged criticism of society that is neither censorious nor credulous, and a historical imagination that animates institutions through individual lives.
In Henry Esmond, the first‑person memoir allows for self‑scrutiny and limited knowledge, encouraging readers to weigh profession against action. The narrator’s tone is modest, scrupulous, and conscious of obligation, turning episodes of education, military service, and household allegiance into tests of principle. In the lectures, Thackeray’s persona is that of a gentleman essayist who delights in style yet insists upon fairness. He seeks to understand instead of to prosecute. This shared ethical sensibility connects private memory to public judgment: the same habits of attention that animate a family chronicle inform his assessments of authors and monarchs.
The volume’s architecture helps readers perceive this continuity. The novel proceeds in three books from youth and schooling through campaigns and later reckonings, with an initial preface that situates the Esmonds. The English Humourists organizes its subjects by individual figures, each considered within the literary marketplace and social milieu. The Four Georges advances through successive reigns, accompanied by poems and sketches that amplify atmosphere and manners. While each part can stand alone, together they furnish a broad narrative arc—from personal formation to literary culture to national leadership—inviting comparison across forms and sharpening awareness of recurring motives and pressures.
Historically, Thackeray engages concrete events and milieus while avoiding pedantry. The novel incorporates military campaigns and political anxieties as lived experience rather than background decoration. The critical portraits attend to patronage systems, periodicals, drama, satire, and the commerce of letters. The monarchical studies dwell on court influence, urban life, and the shaping of public taste. Throughout, social observation grounds moral inference. The method is to let manners illuminate ethics: ceremonies, entertainments, quarrels, and publications become evidence of character. This approach grants the collection both immediacy and reach, enabling readers to infer durable patterns from particular scenes and lives.
The present edition therefore offers more than a juxtaposition of celebrated works; it presents a single inquiry conducted through diverse means. It shows how fiction can embody history, how criticism can refine sympathy, and how social narrative can test ideals against practice. In bringing together Henry Esmond, The English Humourists, and The Four Georges, the collection underscores Thackeray’s conviction that literature and life mirror one another, and that the measure of both lies in candor, proportion, and humane insight. Readers meet a novelist alert to frailty, a lecturer attentive to temper, and a historian concerned with example and responsibility.
Author Biography
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) was a leading Victorian novelist and satirist, best known for Vanity Fair. He wrote panoramic fictions exposing snobbery, hypocrisy, and the ambiguities of ambition in British society. A gifted illustrator as well as a writer, he combined caricature with a conversational narrator to create works that bridged Augustan satire and the nineteenth‑century realist novel. Alongside contemporaries such as Charles Dickens, he helped define the possibilities of serial fiction, shaping public taste through magazines and theatrical lectures. His oeuvre ranges from historical narrative to campus and city novels, from journalism to essays, unified by moral scrutiny and comic disenchantment.
Born in Calcutta to British parents, Thackeray was sent to England for schooling in childhood. He attended Charterhouse School and later entered Trinity College, Cambridge, leaving without a degree. Drawn to art and letters rather than a conventional profession, he studied drawing on the Continent and briefly read law in London. Early exposure to eighteenth‑century writers—particularly Fielding, Swift, Addison, and Steele—helped shape his style; he later celebrated this tradition in public lectures. He admired visual satirists like William Hogarth, whose moralized scenes informed Thackeray’s eye for social detail. These literary and artistic influences fused into a distinctive blend of narrative realism and satirical illustration.
During the 1830s and early 1840s, Thackeray earned his living as a journalist and critic, writing for periodicals such as Fraser’s Magazine and, later, Punch. He often adopted playful pseudonyms—notably Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Savage Fitz‑Boodle—which allowed stylistic experiments in travel sketches, reviews, and tales. He illustrated much of his own work. Notable early fictions include Catherine, a sardonic response to criminal romance, and The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a picaresque memoir that scrutinizes opportunism. His serial essays The Book of Snobs, issued in Punch in the mid‑1840s, helped popularize the modern sense of snob and sharpened the social critique that would animate his mature novels.
His breakthrough came with Vanity Fair, serialized in the late 1840s and published as a novel soon afterward. Subtitled A Novel without a Hero, it offered a capacious portrait of British life around the Napoleonic era, narrated with wit and irony and supported by the author’s own illustrations. The work won immediate attention for its breadth of social observation and unsentimental tone. Thackeray followed with Pendennis, tracing a young man’s formation and the world of journalism, and The History of Henry Esmond, a historical novel acclaimed for its pastiche of eighteenth‑century prose. Together these works consolidated his reputation as Dickens’s principal rival in the Victorian marketplace.
The 1850s were his most sustained period of novel‑writing and public lecturing. The Newcomes extended his social canvas through the fortunes of a family across generations, while The Virginians revisited characters linked to Henry Esmond in a transatlantic historical setting. As a lecturer, Thackeray presented The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century and The Four Georges in Britain and North America, bringing literary history to large audiences and refining his sense of lineage. In 1860 he became the founding editor of the Cornhill Magazine, a high‑circulation monthly that popularized quality serial fiction and essays, further embedding him at the center of Victorian print culture.
Thackeray’s art is marked by moral skepticism, humane irony, and an insistence on social truthfulness. He distrusted melodrama and sentimental absolutes, preferring to trace motives across class and gender with a steady, amused gaze. His narrators often address readers directly, cultivating complicity while exposing pretension and cant. Illustrations—cartoons, ornamental initials, visual jokes—support this commentary, expanding tone and texture. He admired the eighteenth‑century ideal of the satirist as moral anatomist, yet he also advanced the Victorian realist project through careful attention to money, manners, and institutions. This blend of comedy and disillusioned clarity distinguishes his work from contemporaries and underpins its continuing interpretive richness.
In the early 1860s, while editing Cornhill, he issued late fiction and essays, including The Adventures of Philip and the Roundabout Papers, which mixed anecdote, criticism, and urban observation. Persistent health troubles curtailed his output, and he died in London in the mid‑1860s. He was mourned as a central voice of his age and has been commemorated in Westminster Abbey. Today, Thackeray’s novels remain widely studied for their formal innovations, social vision, and mastery of tone. Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Henry Esmond, and related works continue to shape discussions of realism, satire, and the ethics of storytelling, and they endure in classrooms and adaptations.
Historical Context
William Makepeace Thackeray approached the late Stuart and Georgian past from a distinctly mid-Victorian vantage. Between 1851 and 1857 he fashioned, in a novel, lectures, sketches, and poems, a continuous inquiry into character, manners, and power from the Revolution of 1688 to the death of George IV in 1830. Henry Esmond (1852) experiments with historical voice; The English Humourists (lectured 1851–1852) and The Four Georges (lectured 1855–1857) refine his public moral criticism. Serial culture, the booming London press, and transatlantic lecturing circuits—he toured the United States in 1852–1853—enabled this project. His method joined archival curiosity to a conversational style learned in Fraser’s, Punch, and the lecture room.
The Restoration settlement and its unravelings frame the world he evokes. After 1660, the restored Stuarts revived court display, but sectarian wounds and fears of arbitrary power persisted. The short reign of James II (1685–1688), his Catholic policies, and the flight to Saint-Germain sharpened debates about allegiance. The Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 brought William III and Mary II, the Bill of Rights, and a Protestant succession conditional on parliamentary consent. Country houses, boroughs, Inns of Court, and universities became theatres of loyalty and memory. In such spaces allegiances were inherited, negotiated, or betrayed—questions that animate both the imagined gentry and the public figures Thackeray surveys.
Religion structured identity, advancement, and suspicion. The Toleration Act of 1689 eased Protestant dissent, yet the Test Acts still excluded Catholics and many Nonconformists from office. High Church and Low Church tensions produced storms like the Sacheverell affair in 1710, when Dr Henry Sacheverell’s sermon sparked riots and Tory resurgence. Jesuit education, clandestine chapels, and recusant networks persisted under surveillance. Anglican Latitudinarians preached moderation, while evangelical currents later stirred under George III. Clergy, patrons, and parish life shaped print and politics, and confessional loyalties crossed family, party, and regiment. Thackeray’s characters and lecturers alike move within this thicket of creed, conscience, and expediency.
War abroad reordered society at home. The Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) mobilized men, money, and opinion at unprecedented scale. John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, won Blenheim in 1704, Ramillies in 1706, and Oudenarde in 1708; the bloody Malplaquet followed in 1709. The Vigo Bay expedition of 1702 and Flanders campaigns placed officers, chaplains, sutlers, and newswriters in the same web of logistics and rumor. Joseph Addison’s The Campaign praised Marlborough in 1704, knitting poetry to politics. Military service offered honor and ruin, while veterans, pensions, and impostures shadowed peace—conditions that the novel, the lectures, and court sketches all anatomize.
Party crystallization gave the era its acrid flavor. Whigs and Tories, though fluid, hardened around war, church, and commerce. Robert Harley and Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, orchestrated the Tory revival of 1710; Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham personified court faction. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) ended the war and realigned patrons and pamphleteers. Queen Anne died on 1 August 1714, and the Hanoverian succession installed George I, provoking Jacobite hopes and the rising of 1715. The duel between patronage and principle continued under George II and George III. Thackeray’s portraits return to these oscillations, showing how public masks and private interests coexisted in salons, offices, and streets.
The relaxation of prior censorship in 1695 transformed English letters. Coffeehouses at Will’s, Button’s, and St James’s became editorial rooms for a burgeoning public sphere. Richard Steele’s Tatler (1709–1711) and The Spectator (1711–1712, 1714), co-edited with Joseph Addison, defined urban sociability with moral essays, club scenes, and character sketches. Paternoster Row’s publishers, subscription lists, and circulating libraries expanded reach. Book trade lawsuits, reprints in Dublin, and news from the Gazette and Post Boy fused politics with gossip. This print ecology grounds Thackeray’s attention to prose style, epistolary habits, and the gentle tyranny of taste: he writes as heir, judge, and mimic of eighteenth-century urbanity.
Augustan satire refined the art of moral aggression. Jonathan Swift, from A Tale of a Tub to Gulliver’s Travels, wielded irony as a weapon against pedantry and corruption; Alexander Pope’s couplets and The Dunciad policed cultural pretension; John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) masked high robbery as low farce. William Congreve and Addison kept alive a classical decorum that Steele applied to daily vice. The Scriblerians combined learned parody with party polemic. Thackeray’s lectures examine not merely wit but character—how humor marks courage or cruelty—and his fiction dramatizes how elegant ridicule and private malice travel together through drawing rooms, coffeehouses, barracks, and the backstairs of power.
Visual narrative and the rise of the novel broadened the moral canvas. William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1732), Marriage A-la-Mode (1743–1745), and Gin Lane (1751) offered sequential satire of urban vice. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) mapped mobility, imposture, and law; Fielding also founded the Bow Street magistracy in 1749. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) exploded form with digression, while Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766) restored domestic tenderness. Thackeray draws on this pictorial and narrative inheritance to balance cynicism with compassion, staging the hazards of sensibility amid the traps of patronage, litigation, debt, and print notoriety.
London’s fabric organized temptation and ceremony. St James’s Palace and Whitehall housed levees and intrigues; Kensington and Kew displayed royal domesticity. The Strand, Covent Garden, and the Temple mediated law, theater, and journalism. Pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and later Ranelagh orchestrated music, flirtation, and spectacle. Clubs such as White’s, Brooks’s, and St James’s mixed gaming with politics. Dueling culture persisted, notorious in the 1712 clash that killed Lord Mohun and the Duke of Hamilton at Hyde Park. Scandal sheets and lampoons multiplied reputations and ruined them. Thackeray’s scenes of salons, masquerades, and card tables register the rhythms by which fashion governed honor.
The Hanoverian court redefined British monarchy. George I (r. 1714–1727) arrived from Hanover, speaking little English and relying on ministers; Sir Robert Walpole’s ascendancy from 1721 shaped cabinet stability and fiscal management. George II (r. 1727–1760) fought at Dettingen in 1743, the last British monarch to lead troops in battle. Under George III (r. 1760–1820), imperial crises unfolded: the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. The Regency (1811–1820) and George IV’s reign (1820–1830) married splendor to scandal, from Carlton House to Nash’s Regent Street. Thackeray surveys these reigns to test sovereignty’s moral temperature against ministers, favorites, and public opinion.
A financial and consumer revolution underwrote eighteenth-century life. The Bank of England (1694), funded debt, and a thriving stock market in Exchange Alley normalized speculation; the South Sea Bubble of 1720 exposed the delirium of paper wealth. Advertisements, lotteries, and new commodities—tea, coffee, chocolate, tobacco, porcelain, printed cottons—reorganized desire. The gin craze of the 1730s drew Hogarth’s condemnation and prompted the Gin Acts of 1736 and 1751. Enclosure and agricultural improvement enriched some and displaced others. Thackeray’s interest in fortunes won at play, office, or marriage, and in the hunger that drives wit into service, reflects these shifting means of advancement and ruin.
Law and censorship formed the perimeter of satire and scandal. Prepublication licensing lapsed in 1695, but seditious libel remained a potent weapon. Newspaper stamp duties in 1712 taxed opinion; the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 curbed theatrical politics. John Wilkes’s battles over The North Briton No. 45 in the 1760s tied press freedom to parliamentary privilege. Habeas corpus, general warrants, and the treatment of treason sharpened debates from the Sacheverell trial to the 1790s. Dueling straddled legality and honor. Thackeray’s critical imagination thrives within these constraints, attentive to how law both exhibits and masks violence, and how public shame disciplines private vice and public men.
An expanding empire complicates the domestic tale. The Atlantic economy—sugar from the Caribbean, slaves trafficked by the Royal African Company, tobacco from Virginia—funded fortunes and moral evasions. The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739) bled into the War of the Austrian Succession; the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) delivered India and Canada, with Robert Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757 emblematic of a new imperial style. Colonial assemblies, pamphleteers, and merchants entered metropolitan argument, culminating in the American Revolution of 1776. Swift’s Irish polemics and Goldsmith’s London poise display internal empire tensions. Thackeray reads court taste, city vice, and provincial ambition against this imperial horizon.
Family, marriage, and gender structured both property and feeling. Entail, primogeniture, and marriage settlements governed estates; guardianship and wardship negotiated youth, dowry, and consent. Female education, salons, and the Bluestocking circle around Elizabeth Montagu encouraged polite learning; courtesans and actresses occupied glittering margins. Divorce required a parliamentary act until the 1850s, leaving separation and scandal as tools of leverage. Reputation moved through letters, portraits, and rumor. Thackeray’s plots and portraits trace the education of desire within these legal and social forms, weighing coquetry against constancy, maternal authority against patronage, and the hazards of marrying money in a world that priced everything.
Science, medicine, and material culture color the period’s texture. The Royal Society sustained prestige from Newton’s generation to mid-century. Smallpox ravaged families; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu promoted inoculation in 1721 after learning Ottoman practice. London’s hospitals multiplied—the Foundling Hospital opened in 1739 with Hogarth’s help—alongside barber-surgeons and apothecaries. Wigs, powder, and French fashions signaled rank; tea tables rehearsed civility. Portraiture fixed identity, from Kneller to Hyacinthe Rigaud, whose grand manner at Versailles shaped Anglo-French taste. Travel to Paris and Flanders connected officers, exiles, and connoisseurs. Thackeray’s scenes of illness, recovery, and self-fashioning depend on these material habits and the rituals of care and display.
Britishness itself was under construction. The Act of Union of 1707 fused England and Scotland into Great Britain; Jacobite risings in 1715 and 1745 dramatized contested loyalties and Highland integration. In Ireland, Penal Laws sustained a Protestant Ascendancy while economic and literary ties bound Dublin to London. The navy’s growth made sea power central to identity, from Greenwich Hospital’s memorial culture to Trafalgar in 1805. Festivals, sermons, and print forged a national story through victory and panic. Thackeray’s cross-generational canvas—gentry halls, court apartments, coffeehouses, camps—examines how that story coexisted with private griefs, opportunisms, and the perennial English mix of swagger and remorse.
Thackeray’s historical practice blends scruple with play. He fashioned pastiche eighteenth-century prose, sifted letters, memoirs, and newspapers, and cultivated a persona that could flatter and rebuke. The lectures delivered in London, Edinburgh, Boston, and New York turned literary history into public theater; Henry Esmond tried the subtler art of lived voice. Dates such as 1702, 1704, 1713, and 1714 are not mere decorations but hinges in a moral chronicle. Across the oeuvre, reputation is a currency, humor a test of soul, and kings are measured by their households. Written in the 1850s, the work remains a Victorian meditation on England’s long apprenticeship to liberty.
Synopsis (Selection)
Introduction
Frames the collection by situating Thackeray’s historical novel and two nonfiction lecture series within his larger interest in character, manners, and the moral color of past ages.
The History Of Henry Esmond, Esq. (overall)
A first-person historical novel in which Henry Esmond recounts his upbringing with the Castlewood family, his involvement with Jacobite politics, and his soldier’s life under Marlborough amid the upheavals from James II to the Hanoverian succession.
Preface. The Esmonds Of Virginia
A genealogical and editorial frame that presents Esmond’s manuscript and links the English story to a later Virginia branch of the family.
Book I. The Early Youth Of Henry Esmond
Esmond’s childhood at Castlewood and schooling under Catholic tutelage shape his loyalties as the household is swept into plots surrounding King James II, leading to estrangements, Cambridge interludes, and a crisis that propels him to London.
Book II. Contains Mr. Esmond's Military Life
Released from confinement, Esmond takes the Queen’s pay and serves from Vigo Bay to Flanders, moving between camp and coffeehouse, soldiering under Marlborough while negotiating questions of honor, birth, and allegiance.
Book III. Containing The End Of Mr. Esmond's Adventures In England
Returning to London and court, Esmond navigates literary circles, tangled affections within the Castlewood family, and high-stakes schemes at the close of Queen Anne’s reign as the 1714 succession approaches.
Appendix (Henry Esmond)
Supplementary historical notes and documents that anchor the fiction in the period’s events and personages.
The English Humourists Of The Eighteenth Century (overall)
A series of public lectures surveying leading eighteenth‑century writers and artists, reading their lives and works for what they reveal about wit, sentiment, and the morals of their time.
Lecture The First. Swift
Assesses Swift’s scathing satire and civic indignation alongside his austerity and personal contradictions.
Lecture The Second. Congreve And Addison
Contrasts Congreve’s brilliant but amoral Restoration comedy with Addison’s urbane, instructive prose as makers of polite taste.
Lecture The Third. Steele
Highlights Steele’s warm, reforming journalism and humane sentiment, noting his virtues and foibles.
Lecture The Fourth. Prior, Gay, And Pope
Surveys courtly and popular verse from Prior and Gay to Pope’s polished mock‑heroics, weighing artifice, ambition, and social bite.
Lecture The Fifth. Hogarth, Smollett, And Fielding
Traces moral comedy from Hogarth’s pictorial satire to Smollett’s picaresque vigor and Fielding’s broad, humane realism.
Lecture The Sixth. Sterne And Goldsmith
Explores sensibility and humor in Sterne’s experimental pathos and Goldsmith’s gentle, restorative comedy.
The Georges (Sketches Of Manners, Morals, Court And Town Life) — overall
Popular lectures sketching Britain under the first four Hanoverian kings, blending royal portraiture with commentary on court morals, politics, and everyday social life.
The Poems
Occasional verses accompanying the lectures, used to underscore mood, character, and satirical points.
George The First
Portrays the reserved, foreign-born monarch, the Whig ascendancy, and a guarded court tone amid dynastic insecurity.
George The Second
Depicts a soldier‑king’s era of Walpole and Dettingen, family quarrels, and a maturing public sphere.
George The Third
Examines a domestically virtuous yet embattled reign set against imperial crises and sweeping social change.
George The Fourth
Profiles the extravagant Regent‑turned‑king, contrasting dazzling style and patronage with scandal and moral fatigue.
Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges
Introduction.
We know exceedingly little of the genesis and progress of Esmond. “It did not seem to be a part of our lives as Pendennis was,” says Lady Ritchie, though she wrote part of it to dictation. She “only heard Esmond spoken of very rarely”. Perhaps its state was not the less gracious. The Milton girls found Paradise Lost a very considerable part of their lives—and were not the happier.
But its parallels are respectable. The greatest things have a way of coming “all so still” into the world. We wrangle—that is, those of us who are not content simply not to know—about the composition of Homer, the purpose of the Divina Commedia, the probable plan of the Canterbury Tales, the Ur-Hamlet. Nobody put preliminary advertisements in the papers, you see, about these things: there was a discreditable neglect of the first requirements of the public. So it is with Esmond. There is, I thought, a reference to it in the Brookfield letters; but in several searches I cannot find it. To his mother he speaks of the book as “grand and melancholy”, and to Lady Stanley as of “cut-throat melancholy”. It is said to have been sold for a thousand pounds—the same sum that Master Shallow lent Falstaff on probably inferior security. Those who knew thought well of it—which is not wholly surprising.
It is still, perhaps, in possession of a success rather of esteem than of affection. A company of young men and maidens to whom it was not long ago submitted pronounced [pg x] it (with one or two exceptions) inferior as a work of humour. The hitting of little Harry in the eye with a potato was, they admitted, humorous, but hardly anything else. As representing another generation and another point of view, the faithful Dr. John Brown did not wholly like it—Esmond's marriage with Rachel, after his love for Beatrix, being apparently “the fly in the ointment” to him. Even the author could only plead “there's a deal of pains in it that goes for nothing”, as he says in one of his rare published references to the subject: but he was wrong. Undoubtedly the mere taking of pains will not do; but that is when they are taken in not the right manner, by not the right person, on not the right subject. Here everything was right, and accordingly it “went for” everything. A greater novel than Esmond I do not know; and I do not know many greater books. It may be “melancholy”, and none the worse for that: it is “grand”.
For though there may not be much humour of the potato-throwing sort in Esmond, it will, perhaps, be found that in no book of Thackeray's, or of any one else's, is that deeper and higher humour which takes all life for its province—which is the humour of humanity—more absolutely pervading. And it may be found likewise, at least by some, that in no book is there to be found such a constant intertwist of the passion which, in all humanity's higher representatives, goes with humour hand in hand—a loving yet a mutually critical pair. Of the extraordinarily difficult form of autobiography I do not know such another masterly presentment; nor is it very difficult to recognize the means by which this mastery is attained, though Heaven knows it is not easy to understand the skill with which they are applied. The success is, in fact, the result of that curious “doubleness”—amounting, in fact, here to something like triplicity—which distinguishes Thackeray's attitude and handling. Thus Henry Esmond, who is on the whole, I should say, the most like him of all his characters [pg xi] (though of course “romanced” a little), is himself and “the other fellow”, and also, as it were, human criticism of both. At times we have a tolerably unsophisticated account of his actions, or it may be even his thoughts; at another his thoughts and actions as they present themselves, or might present themselves, to another mind: and yet at other times a reasoned view of them, as it were that of an impartial historian. The mixed form of narrative and mono-drama lends itself to this as nothing else could: and so does the author's well-known, much discussed, and sometimes heartily abused habit of parabasis or soliloquy to the audience. Of this nothing has yet been directly said, and anything that is said would have to be repeated as to every novel: so that we may as well keep it for the last or a late example, The Virginians or Philip. But its efficacy in this peculiar kind of double or treble handling is almost indisputable, even by those who may dispute its legitimacy as a constantly applied method.
One result, however, it has, as regards the hero-spokesman, which is curious. I believe thoroughly in Henry Esmond—he is to me one of the most real of illustrious Henrys as well of Thackeray's characters—but his reality is of a rather different kind from that of most of his fellows. It is somewhat more abstract, more typical, more generalized than the reality of English heroes usually is. He is not in the least shadowy or allegoric: but still he is somehow “Esmondity” as well as Esmond—the melancholy rather than a melancholy, clearsighted, aloofminded man. His heart and his head act to each other as their governing powers, passion and humour, have been sketched as acting above. He is a man never likely to be very successful, famous, or fortunate in the world; not what is generally called a happy man; yet enjoying constant glows and glimmers of a cloudy happiness which he would hardly exchange for any other light. The late Professor Masson—himself no posture-monger or man of megrims, but one of genial [pg xii] temper and steady sense—described Thackeray as “a man apart”; and so is the Marquis of Esmond. Yet Thackeray was a very real man; and so is the Marquis too.
The element of abstraction disappears, or rather retires into the background, when we pass to Beatrix. She also has the Ewigweibliche in her—as much of it as any, or almost any, of Shakespeare's women, and therefore more than anybody else's. But she is very much more than a type—she is Beatrix Esmond in flesh and blood, and damask and diamond, born “for the destruction of mankind” and fortunately for the delight of them, or some of them, as well. Beatrix is beyond eulogy. “Cease! cease to sing her praise!” is really the only motto, though perhaps something more may be said when we come to the terrible pendant which only Thackeray has had the courage and the skill to draw, with truth and without a disgusting result. If she had died when Esmond closes I doubt whether, in the Wood of Fair Ladies, even Cleopatra would have dared to summon her to her side, lest the comparison should not be favourable enough to herself, and the throne have to be shared.
But, as usual with Thackeray, you must not look to the hero and heroine too exclusively, even when there is such a heroine as this. For is there not here another heroine—cause of the dubieties of the Doctor Fidelis as above cited? As to that it may perhaps be pointed out to the extreme sentimentalists that, after all, Harry had been in love with the mother, as well as with the daughter, all along. If they consider this an aggravation, it cannot be helped: but, except from the extreme point of view of Miss Marianne Dashwood in her earlier stage, it ought rather to be considered a palliative. And if they say further that the thing is made worse still by the fact that Harry was himself Rachel's second love, and that she did not exactly wait to be a widow before she fell in love with him—why, there is, again, nothing for it but to confess that it is very [pg xiii] shocking—and excessively human. Indeed, the fact is that Rachel is as human as Beatrix, though in a different way. You may not only love her less, but—in a different sense of contrast from that of the Roman poet—like her a little less. But you cannot, if you have any knowledge of human nature, call her unnatural. And really I do not know that the third lady of the family, Isabel Marchioness of Esmond, though there is less written about her, is not as real and almost as wonderful as the other two. She is not so fairly treated, however, poor thing! for we have her Bernstein period without her Beatrix one.
As for my Lords Castlewood—Thomas, and Francis père et fils—their creator has not taken so much trouble with them; but they are never “out”. The least of a piece, I think, is Rachel's too fortunate or too unfortunate husband. The people who regard Ibsen's great triumph in the Doll's House as consisting in the conduct of the husband as to the incriminating documents, ought to admire Thackeray's management of the temporary loss of Rachel's beauty. They are certainly both touches of the baser side of human nature ingeniously worked in. But the question is, What, in this wonderful book, is not ingeniously worked in—character or incident, description or speech?
If the champions of “Unity” were wise, they would take Esmond as a battle-horse, for it is certain that, great as are its parts, the whole is greater than almost any one of them—which is certainly not the case with Pendennis. And it is further certain that, of these parts, the personages of the hero and the heroine stand out commandingly, which is certainly not the case with Pendennis, again. The unity, however, is of a peculiar kind: and differs from the ordinary non-classical “Unity of Interest” which Thackeray almost invariably exhibits. It is rather a Unity of Temper, which is also present (as the all-pervading motto Vanitas Vanitatum almost necessitates) in all the books, but here reaches a transcendence not elsewhere [pg xiv] attained. The brooding spirit of Ecclesiastes here covers, as it were, with the shadow of one of its wings the joys and sorrows, the failures and successes of a private family and their friends, with the other the fates of England and Europe; the fortunes of Marlborough and of Swift on their way from dictatorship, in each case, to dotage and death; the big wars and the notable literary triumphs as well as the hopeless passions or acquiescent losses. It is thus an instance—and the greatest—of that revival of the historical novel which was taking place, and in which the novel of Scott1—simpler, though not so very simple as is sometimes thought—is being dashed with a far heavier dose of the novel-element as opposed to the romance, yet without abandonment of the romance-quality proper. Of these novel-romance scenes, as they may be called, the famous mock-duel at the end is of course the greatest. But that where the Duke of Hamilton has to acknowledge the Marquis of Esmond, and where Beatrix gives the kiss of Beatrix, is almost as great: and there are many others. It is possible that this very transcendence accounts to some extent for the somewhat lukewarm admiration which it has received. The usual devotee of the novel of analysis dislikes the historic, and has taught himself to consider it childish; the common lover of romance (not the better kind) feels himself hampered by the character-study, as Émile de Girardin's subscribers felt themselves hampered by Gautier's style. All the happier those who can make the best of both dispensations!
Nothing, however, has yet been said of one of the most [pg xv] salient characteristics of Esmond—one, perhaps, which has had as much to do with the love of its lovers and the qualified esteem of those who do not quite love it, as anything else. This is, of course, the attempt, certainly a very audacious one, at once to give the very form and pressure of the time of the story—sometimes in actual diction—and yet to suffuse it with a modern thought and colour which most certainly were not of the time. The boldness and the peril of this attempt are both quite indisputable; and the peril itself is, in a way, double. There is the malcontent who will say “This may be all very fine: but I don't like it. It bothers and teases me. I do not want to be talked to in the language of Addison and Steele”. And there will be the possibly less ingenuous but more obtrusive malcontent who will say that it ought never to have been done, or that it is not, as it is, done well. With the first, who probably exists “in squadrons and gross bands”, argument is, of course, impossible. He may be taught better if he is caught young, but that is all: and certainly the last thing that any honest lover of literature would wish would be to make him say that he likes a thing when he does not. That may be left to those who preach and follow the fashions of the moment. Nor, perhaps, is there very much to do with those who say that the double attempt is not successful—except to disable their judgement. But as for the doctrine that this attempt deserves to fail, and must fail—that it is wrong in itself—there one may take up the cudgels with some confidence.
So far from there being anything illegitimate in this attempt to bring one period before the eyes of another in its habit as it lived, and speaking as it spoke, but to allow those eyes themselves to move as they move and see as they see—it is merely the triumph and the justification of the whole method of prose fiction in general, and of the historical novel in particular. For that historical novel is itself the result of the growth of the historic sense [pg xvi] acting upon the demand for fiction. So long as people made no attempt to understand things and thoughts different from those around and within them; so long as, like the men of the Middle Ages, they blandly threw everything into their own image, or, like those of the Renaissance to some extent and the Augustan period still more, regarded other ages at worst with contempt, and at best with indulgence as childish—the historical novel could not come into being, and did not. It only became possible when history began to be seriously studied as something more than a chronicle of external events. When it had thus been made possible, it was a perfectly legitimate experiment to carry the process still further; not merely to discuss or moralize, but to represent the period as it was, without forfeiting the privilege of regarding it from a point of view which it had not itself reached. The process of Thackeray is really only an unfolding, and carrying further into application, of the method of Shakespeare. Partly his date, partly his genius, partly his dramatic necessities, obliged Shakespeare to combine his treatment—to make his godlike Romans at once Roman and Elizabethan, and men of all time, and men of no time at all. Thackeray, with the conveniences of the novel and the demands of his audience, dichotomizes the presentation while observing a certain unity in the fictitious person, now of Henry Esmond, now of William Makepeace Thackeray himself. If anybody does not like the result, there is nothing to be said. But there are those who regard it as one of the furthest explorations that we yet possess of human genius—one of the most extraordinary achievements of that higher imagination which Coleridge liked to call esenoplastic.2 That a man should have the faculty of reproducing contemporary or general life is wonderful; [pg xvii] that he should have the faculty of reproducing past life is wonderful still more. But that he should thus revive the past and preserve the present—command and provide at once theatre and company, audience and performance—this is the highest wizardry of all. And this, as it seems to me, is what Thackeray had attempted, and more, what he has done, in the History of Henry Esmond.3
He could not have done it without the “pains” to which he refers in the saying quoted above; but these pains, as usual, bore fruit more than once. It has been thought desirable to include in the present volume the two main after-crops,4The English Humourists and The Four Georges. Exactly how early Thackeray's attention was drawn to the eighteenth century it would, in the necessarily incomplete state of our biographical information about him, be very difficult to say. We have pointed out that the connexion was pretty well established as early as Catherine. But it was evidently founded upon that peculiar congeniality, freshened and enlivened with a proper dose of difference, which is the most certain source and the purest maintainer of love in life and literature.
At the same time, the two sets of lectures are differentiated from the novel not so much by their form—for Thackeray as a lecturer had very little that smacked of the platform, and as a novelist he had a great deal that smacked of the satiric conversation-scene—as by their purport. Esmond, though partly critical, is mainly and in far the greater part [pg xviii] creative. The Lectures, though partly creative—resurrective, at any rate—are professedly and substantially critical. Now, a good deal has been said already of Thackeray's qualities and defects as a critic: and it has been pointed out that, in consequence of his peculiar impulsiveness, his strong likes and dislikes, his satiric-romantic temperament, and perhaps certain deficiencies in all-round literary and historical learning, his critical light was apt to be rather uncertain, and his critical deductions by no means things from which there should be no appeal. But The English Humourists is by far the most important “place” for this criticism in the literary department; and The Four Georges (with The Book of Snobs to some extent supplementing it) is the chief place for his criticism of society, personality, and the like. Moreover, both have been, and are, violently attacked by those who do not like him. So that, for more reasons than one or two, both works deserve faithful critical handling themselves.
It is always best to disperse Maleger and his myrmidons before exploring the beauties of the House of Alma: so we may take the objections to the Humourists first. They are chiefly concerned with the handling of Swift and (in a less degree) of Sterne. Now, it is quite certain that we have here, in the first case at any rate, to confess, though by no means to avoid. It is an instance of that excessive “taking sides” with or against his characters which has been noticed, and will be noticed, again and again. Nor is the reason of this in the least difficult to perceive. It is very doubtful whether Thackeray's own estimate of average humanity was much higher than Swift's: nor is it quite certain that the affection which Swift professed and (from more than one instance) seems to have really felt for Dick, Tom, and Harry, in particular, as opposed to mankind at large, was very much less sincere than Thackeray's own for individuals. But the temperament of the one deepened and aggravated his general understanding [pg xix] of mankind into a furious misanthropy; while the temperament of the other softened his into a general pardon. In the same way, Swift's very love and friendship were dangerous and harsh-faced, while Thackeray's were sunny and caressing. But there can be very little doubt that Thackeray himself, when the “Shadow of Vanity” was heaviest on him, felt the danger of actual misanthropy, and thus revolted from its victim with a kind of terror; while his nature could not help feeling a similar revulsion from Swift's harsh ways. That to all this revulsion he gives undue force of expression need not be denied: but then, it must be remembered that he does not allow it to affect his literary judgement. I do not believe that any one now living has a greater admiration for Swift than I have: and all that I can say is that I know no estimate of his genius anywhere more adequate than Thackeray's. As for Sterne, I do not intend to say much. If you will thrust your personality into your literature, as Sterne constantly does, you must take the chances of your personality as well as of your literature. You practically expose both to the judgement of the public. And if anybody chooses to take up the cudgels for Sterne's personality I shall hand them over to him and take no part on one side or another in that bout. To his genius, once more, I do not think Thackeray at all unjust.
The fact is, however, that as is usual with persons of genius, but even more than as usual, the defects and the qualities are so intimately connected that you cannot have one without the other—you must pay the price of the other for the one. All I can say is that such another live piece of English criticism of English literature as this I do not know anywhere. What is alive is very seldom perfect: to get perfection you must go to epitaphs. But, once more, though I could pick plenty of small holes in the details of the actual critical dicta, I know no picture of the division of literature here concerned from which [pg xx] a fairly intelligent person will derive a better impression of the facts than from this. Addison may be a little depressed, and Steele a little exalted: but it is necessary to remember that by Macaulay, whose estimate then practically held the field, Steele had been most unduly depressed and Addison rather unduly exalted. You may go about among our critics on the brightest day with the largest lantern and find nothing more brilliant itself than the “Congreve” article, where the spice of injustice will, again, deceive nobody but a fool. The vividness of the “Addison and Steele” presentation is miraculous. He redresses Johnson on Prior as he had redressed Macaulay on Steele; and he is not unjust, as we might have feared that he would be, to Pope. “Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding” is another miracle of appreciation: and I should like to ask the objectors to “sentimentality” by what other means than an intense sympathy (from which it is impossible to exclude something that may be called sentimental) such a study as that of Goldsmith could have been produced? Now Goldsmith is one of the most difficult persons in the whole range of literature to treat, from the motley of his merits and his weaknesses. Yet Thackeray has achieved the adventure here. In short, throughout the book, he is invaluable as a critic, if not impeccable in criticism. His faults, and the causes of them, are obvious, separable, negligible: his merits (the chief of them, as usual, the constant shower of happy and illuminative phrase) as rare in quality as they are abundant in quantity.
The lectures on The English Humourists must have been composed very much pari passu with Esmond; they were being delivered while it was being finished, and it was published just as the author was setting off to re-deliver them in America. The Four Georges were not regularly taken in hand till some years later, when The Newcomes was finished or finishing, and when fresh material was wanted [pg xxiii] for the second American trip. But there exists a very remarkable scenario of them—as it may be almost called—a full decade older, in the shape of a satura of verse and prose contributed to Punch on October 11, 1845; which has accordingly been kept back from its original associates to be inserted here. All things considered, it gives the lines which are followed in the later lectures with remarkable precision: and it is not at all improbable that Thackeray actually, though not of necessity consciously, took it for head-notes.
No book of his has been so violently attacked both at the time of its appearance and since. Nor—for, as the reader must have seen long ago, the present writer, though proud to be called a Thackerayan stalwart, is not a Thackerayan “know-nothing”, a “Thackeray-right-or-wrong” man—is there any that exposes itself more to attack. From the strictly literary side, indeed, it has the advantage of The Book of Snobs: for it is nowhere unequal, and exhibits its author's unmatched power of historical-artistic imagination or reconstruction in almost the highest degree possible. But in other respects it certainly does show the omission “to erect a sconce on Drumsnab”. There was (it has already been hinted at in connexion with the Eastern Journey) a curious innocence about Thackeray. It may be that, like the Hind,
but the absence of fear with him implied an apparent ignoring of danger, which is a danger in itself. Nobody who has even passed Responsions in the study of his literary and moral character will suspect him for one moment of having pandered to American prejudice by prating to it, as a tit-bit and primeur, scandal about this or that King George. But it was quite evident from the first, and ought to have been evident to the author long beforehand, that the enemy might think, and would say so. [pg xxiv] In fact, putting considerations of mere expediency aside, I think myself that he had much better not have done it. As for the justice of the general verdict, it is no doubt affected throughout by Thackeray's political incapacity, whatever side he might have taken, and by that quaint theoretical republicanism, with a good deal of pure Toryism mixed, which he attributes to some of his characters, and no doubt, in a kind of rather confused speculative way, held himself. He certainly puts George III's ability too low, and as certainly he indulges in the case of George IV in one of these curious outbursts—a Hetze of unreasoning, frantic, “stop-thief!” and “mad-dog!” persecution—to which he was liable. “Gorgius” may not have been a hero or a proper moral man: he was certainly “a most expensive Herr”, and by no means a pattern husband. But recent and by no means Pharisaical expositions have exhibited his wife as almost infinitely not better than she should be; the allegations of treachery to private friends are, on the whole, Not Proven: if he deserted the Whigs, it was no more than some of these very Whigs very shortly afterwards did to their country: he played the difficult part of Regent and the not very easy one of King by no means ill; he was, by common and even reluctant consent, an extremely pleasant host and companion; and he liked Jane Austen's novels. There have been a good many princes—and a good many demagogues too—of whom as much good could not be said.
Admitting excess in these details, and “inconvenience” in the circumstances of the original representation, there remains, as it seems to me, a more than sufficient balance to credit. That social-historic sense, accompanied with literary power of bodying forth its results, which we noticed as early as the opening of Catherine has, in the seventeen years' interval, fully and marvellously matured itself. The picture is not a mere mob of details: it is an orderly pageant of artistically composed material. It is possible; it is life-like; [pg xxv] the only question (and that is rather a minor one) is, “Is it true?”
Minor, I say, because the artistic value would remain if the historical were impaired. But I do not think it is. I shall bow to the authority of persons better acquainted with the eighteenth century than I am: but if some decades of familiarity with essayists and novelists and diarists and letter-writers may give one a scanty locus standi, I shall certainly give my testimony in favour of “Thackeray's Extract”. The true essence of the life that exhibits itself in fiction from Pamela and Joseph Andrews down to Pompey the Little and the Spiritual Quixote; in essay from the Tatler to the Mirror; in Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary and Horace Walpole; in Pope and Young and Green and Churchill and Cowper, in Boswell and Wraxall, in Mrs. Delany and Madame d'Arblay, seems to me to deserve warrant of excise and guarantee of analysis as it lies in these four little flaskets.
And, as has been done before, let me finish with an almost silent indication of the wonderful variety of this volume also. In one sense the subject of its constituents is the same. Yet in another it is treated with the widest and most infinite difference. Any one of the three treatments would be a masterpiece of single achievement; while the first of the three is, as it seems to me, the masterpiece of its entire class.5
[pg xxvii]THE MS. OF “ESMOND”
The MS. is contained in two volumes and was presented to Trinity College, Cambridge, by the author's daughter; it is now deposited in the College Library. Sir Leslie Stephen, in writing to the Librarian about it on June 11, 1889, says:—
“There are three separate handwritings. Thackeray's own small upright handwriting; that of his daughter, now Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, a rather large round handwriting; and that of an amanuensis whose name I do not know. The interest is mainly this, that it shows that Thackeray dictated a considerable part of the book; and, as Mrs. Ritchie tells me, he dictated it without having previously written anything. The copy was sent straight to press as it stands, with, as you will see, remarkably little alteration. As Esmond is generally considered to be his most perfect work in point of style, I think that this is a remarkable fact and adds considerably to the interest of the MS.”
The four facsimiles which follow, and which appear here by the very kind permission of Lady Ritchie and of the authorities of the College, have been slightly reduced to fit the pages.
[pg xxix][pg 001]
The History Of Henry Esmond, Esq.
THE HISTORY OF
HENRY ESMOND, ESQ.
A COLONEL IN THE SERVICE OF HER MAJESTY QUEEN ANNE
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF
Servetur ad imum Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet
[First edition in three volumes, 1852. Revised edition, 1858]
[pg 005]Dedication.
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
WILLIAM BINGHAM, LORD ASHBURTON
My Dear Lord,
The writer of a book which copies the manners and language of Queen Anne's time, must not omit the Dedication to the Patron; and I ask leave to inscribe this volume to your lordship, for the sake of the great kindness and friendship which I owe to you and yours.
My volume will reach you when the Author is on his voyage to a country where your name is as well known as here. Wherever I am, I shall gratefully regard you; and shall not be the less welcomed in America because I am
Your obliged friend and servant,
W. M. THACKERAY.
London, October 18, 1852.
Preface. The Esmonds Of Virginia
The estate of Castlewood, in Virginia, which was given to our ancestors by King Charles the First, as some return for the sacrifices made in his Majesty's cause by the Esmond family, lies in Westmoreland county, between the rivers Potomac and Rappahannoc, and was once as great as an English Principality, though in the early times its revenues were but small. Indeed, for near eighty years after our forefathers possessed them, our plantations were in the hands of factors, who enriched themselves one after another, though a few scores of hogsheads of tobacco were all the produce that, for long after the Restoration, our family received from their Virginian estates.
My dear and honoured father, Colonel Henry Esmond, whose history, written by himself, is contained in the accompanying volume, came to Virginia in the year 1718, built his house of Castlewood, and here permanently settled. After a long stormy life in England, he passed the remainder of his many years in peace and honour in this country; how beloved and respected by all his fellow citizens, how inexpressibly dear to his family, I need not say. His whole life was a benefit to all who were connected with him. He gave the best example, the best advice, the most bounteous hospitality to his friends; the tenderest care to his dependants; and bestowed on those of his immediate family such a blessing of fatherly love and protection, as can never be thought of, by us at least, without veneration and thankfulness; and my son's children, whether established here in our Republick, or at home in the always beloved mother country, from which our late quarrel hath separated us, may surely be proud to be descended from one who in all ways was so truly noble.
My dear mother died in 1736, soon after our return from England, whither my parents took me for my education;
