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Updated: May 12, 2025
Thackeray, in one of his letters to the Baxter family, alluded to the long journey he was about to undertake in order to travel from his hotel to a certain famous house up in the country at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street. That was the Coventry Waddell house, on land where the Brick Presbyterian Church now stands.
Thackeray smiled at Miss Jane Porter's picture of Wallace, going into war weeping with a cambric pocket-handkerchief; but her attitude was more English and not less accurate. For her idealization was, if anything, nearer the truth than Thackeray's own notion of a mediævalism of hypocritical hogs-in-armour.
"Lionel Lieutenant Thackeray. Please O please! tell me he is not dead." Her voice broke; he saw her slender body convulsed with racking emotions. Kneeling, Lanyard made a hasty and superficial examination, necessarily no more under the conditions. "His heart beats," he announced "he breathes. I do not think him seriously injured." He made as if to get up.
One of the very sweetest, gentlest characters in literature is Colonel Newcome. The stepfather of Thackeray, Major Carmichael Smyth, was made to stand for the portrait of the lovable Colonel; and when that all-round athlete, F. Hopkinson Smith, gave us that other lovable old Colonel he paid high tribute to "The Newcomes."
I need not lengthen the list; these evocations follow one upon another, and as quickly as Thackeray passes into a new circle he makes us feel and know what it was like to live there and belong to it. The typical look of the place is in his mind, the sense of its habitual life, the savour of the hours that lapse there.
When Thackeray, in the thirties, turned to newspaper writing, he did so for practical reasons: he needed money, and he used such talents as were his as a writer, knowing that the chances were better than in art, which he had before pursued.
Side by side with such chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude, Maine and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance, slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose the flat, ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research. What lumps of raw fact are flung at our heads!
A drama with real characters, and the spectator at liberty to go behind the scenes and look upon and talk with the kings and queens between the acts; to examine the scenery, to handle the properties, to study the "make up" of the imposing personages of full-dress histories; to deal with them all as Thackeray has done with the Grand Monarque in one of his caustic sketches, this would be as exciting, one might suppose, as to sit through a play one knows by heart at Drury Lane or the Theatre Francais, and might furnish occupation enough to the curious idler who was only in search of entertainment.
The French word for gipsy is bohemien, and from this we have the English word Bohemian. When we say a person is "a Bohemian," we mean that he lives in the way he really likes, and does not care whether other people think he is quite respectable or not. It was the novelist Thackeray who first used the word Bohemian in this sense.
Thackeray used to come over to Paris to get a good dinner now and then. I have tried his favorite restaurant here, the cuisine of which is famous far beyond the banks of the Seine; but I think if he, hearty trencher-man that he was, had lived in Paris, he would have gone to London for a dinner oftener than he came here.
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