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Rh failed her,&rdquo; in 1840, and he &ldquo;became as it were a widower to the end of his days&rdquo;; Mrs Thackeray did not die till 1892.

In 1837 Thackeray came to London, worked at various kinds of journalism, and became a regular contributor to Fraser's Magazine. In this in 1841 appeared The History of Mr Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond, a work filled with instances of the wit, humour, satire, pathos, which found a more ordered if not a fresher expression in his later and longer works. For freshness, indeed, and for a fine perception which enables the author to perform among other feats that of keeping up throughout the story the curious simplicity of its supposed narrator's character, The Great Hoggarty Diamond can scarcely be surpassed. The characters, from Lady Drum, Lady Fanny Rakes, Lady Jane and Edmund Preston, to Brough, Mrs and Miss Brough, Mrs Roundhand, Gus Hoskins, and, by no means least, Samuel Titmarsh's aunt, Mrs Hoggarty, with her store of &ldquo;Rosolio,&rdquo; are full of life; the book is crammed with honest fun; and for pure pathos, the death of the child, and the meeting of the husband and wife over the empty cradle, stands, if not alone in its own line, at least in the company of very few such scenes in English fiction. The Great Hoggarty Diamond, oddly enough, met with the fate that afterwards befell one of Lever's best stories which appeared in a periodical week by week &mdash; it had to be cut short at the bidding of the editor. In 1840 came out The Paris Sketch-Book, much of which had been written and published at an earlier date. The book contains among other things some curious divagations in criticism, along with some really fine critical work, and a very powerful sketch called &ldquo;A Gambler's Death.&rdquo; In 1838 Thackeray had begun, in Fraser, The Yellowplush Papers, with their strange touches of humour, satire, tragedy (in one scene, the closing one of the history of Mr Deuceace), and their sublimation of fantastic bad spelling (M'Arony for macaroni is one of the typical touches of this); and this was followed by Catherine, a strong story, and too disagreeable perhaps for its purpose, founded closely on the actual career of a criminal named Catherine Hayes, and intended to counteract the then growing practice of making ruffians and harlots prominent characters in fiction. Now, when Pendennis was coming out in serial form (1850), Miss Catherine Hayes, a singer of Irish birth and a famous prima donna (Sims Reeves described her as &ldquo;the sweetest Lucia [di Lammermoor] he had ever sung with&rdquo;) was much before the public. A reflective passage in a number of Pendennis referred indignantly and scornfully to Catherine Hayes, the criminal of old time, coupling her name with that of a then recently notorious murderer. It would appear that Thackeray had for the moment, oddly enough, omitted to think of Miss Catherine Hayes, the justly famed soprano, while certain Irish folk were obviously ignorant or oblivious of the history of Catherine Hayes the murderess. Anyhow, there was a great outcry in the Irish press, and Thackeray was beset by private letters of indignation from enthusiastic compatriots of the prima donna. In deference to susceptibilities innocently outraged Thackeray afterwards suppressed the passage which had given offence. The thing is worth mention if only because it explains the initial letter drawn by Thackeray for chap, xv., vol. ii., of Pendennis. The drawing is in itself highly comic, but must seem quite meaningless without the key.

There soon followed Fitz-Boodle's Confessions and Professions, including the series Men's Wives, already mentioned; and slightly before these, the Shabby Genteel Story, a work interrupted by Thackeray's domestic affliction and afterwards republished as an introduction to The Adventures of Philip, which took up the course of the original story many years after the supposed date of its catastrophe. In 1843 also came out the Irish Sketch-Book, and in 1844 appeared the account of the journey From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, in which was included the excellent poem of &ldquo;The White Squall.&rdquo; In 1844 there began in Fraser the Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, called in the magazine &ldquo;The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a Romance of the Last Century.&rdquo; &ldquo;Barry Lyndon&rdquo; has, with a very great difference in treatment, some resemblance to Smollett's &ldquo;Ferdinand,

Count Fathom&rdquo; &mdash; the hero, that is to say, is or becomes a most intolerable scoundrel, who is magnificently unconscious of his own iniquity. The form and pressure of the time depicted are caught with striking verisimilitude, and in the boyish career of Barry Lyndon there are fine touches of a wild chivalry, simplicity, generosity, which mingle naturally with those worse qualities that, under the influence of abominable training, afterwards corrupt his whole mind and career. The man is so infatuated with and so blind to his own roguery, he has so much dash and daring, and is on occasions so infamously treated, that it is not easy to look upon him as an entirely detestable villain until, towards the end of his course, he becomes wholly lost in brutish debauchery and cruelty. His latter career is founded on that of Andrew Robinson Stoney Bowes, who married the widow of John, 9th earl of Strathmore. There is also no doubt a touch of Casanova in Barry Lyndon's character. Thackeray became a contributor to Punch within the first year of its existence. John Leech, who was one of the earliest contributors, had been at Charterhouse with Thackeray and the two men were friends through life. Thackeray's first series contributed to Punch did not attain or indeed deserve signal success. He made his first hit with Jeames's Diary, begun in November 1845, and may be said to have established his reputation by the Snob Papers (1846), now better known as The Book of Snobs. These, besides greatly improving Thackeray's position, provoked much discussion of various kinds. Thackeray himself was naturally accused of being a snob. To this charge he had partly given an anticipatory answer (in the third chapter) in the statement that &ldquo;it is impossible, in our condition of society, not to be sometimes a Snob,&rdquo; and in giving the name of &ldquo;Mr Snob&rdquo; to the supposed historian of snobs throughout the series. Thackeray's connexion with Punch came practically to an end in 1851. The severance was due partly to differences in political opinion. His personal relations with the staff of Punch always remained cordial. Special mention may be made of one other contribution of his to the paper, &ldquo;Punch's Prize Novelists,&rdquo; containing some brilliant parodies of Edward Lytton Bulwer, Lever, Benjamin Disraeli (in &ldquo;Codlingsby,&rdquo; perhaps the most perfect of the series), and others. Among minor but admirable works of the same period are found A Legend of the Rhine (a burlesque of the great Dumas's Olhon l'Archer), brought out in George Cruikshank's Table Book, edited by Gilbert Abbott À Beckett, Cox's Diary (on which has been founded a well-known Dutch comedy, Janus Tulp), and The Fatal Boots. This is the most fitting moment for naming also Rebecca and Rowena, which towers, not only over Thackeray's other burlesques, excellent as they are, but over every other burlesque of the kind ever written. Its taste, its wit, its pathos, its humour, are unmatchable; and it contains some of the best songs of a particular kind ever written songs rivalled only by Peacock's best of the same sort. In 1846 was published, by Messrs Bradbury and Evans, the first of twenty-four numbers of Vanity Fair, the work which first placed Thackeray in his proper position before the public as a novelist and writer of the first rank. It was completed in 1848, when Thackeray was thirty-seven years old; and in the same year Abraham Hayward paid a tribute to the author's powers in the Edinburgh Review. It is probable that on Vanity Fair has been largely based the foolish cry, now heard less and less frequently, about Thackeray's cynicism, a cry which he himself, with his keen knowledge of men, foresaw and provided against, amply enough as one might have thought, at the end of the eighth chapter, in a passage which is perhaps the best commentary ever written on the author's method. He has explained how he wishes to describe men and women as they actually are, good, bad and indifferent, and to claim a privilege.