BOOKS.
THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION OF THACKERAY.
THE word " biographical " in the above title is to be taken as referring to the books in the new edition of Thackeray's works, not to their author. Mr. Thackeray left such strict directions that no biography of him was ever to be written, that the most his daughter can give the world is a Life of his works. She tells us what was thought of the book, which of the author's early impressions supplied this or that incident, where it was written, and what the writer was doing at the time. From the preface to the first volume of the new edition, Vanity Fair, the reader may gain delightful side-lights on the novelist's life, together with a charming glimpse of a part of the social life of those days, a glimpse, indeed, which no one could have given us so well as the author of Old Kensington. For in Old Kensington the novelist and his daughters finally settled down. And Old Kensington was well worth living in. Whilst no further away from Mayfair than is New Kensington, it was a very great deal nearer the country. Forty years ago there were many green lanes left in which a country ramble could be taken,—" Love Lane " and such like country names were still prevalent. Tired Londoners could then take walks for refreshment and country air among fields now covered by the western extremity of the Cromwell Road. Who would nowa- days choose that dreary and interminable thoroughfare as the scene of a refreshing ramble ? The country has gone west- ward, but No. 13 Young Street, of which there is a picture in the preface, still remains the same,—externally at least._ In this house, with its two quaint countrified bow-windows, we are given to understand that Vanity Fair was written and drawn. For the pictures are an essential part ; who can properly realise Becky who has not watched her calm slumbers at Brussels when the army had just marched to action, seen her carrying the scuttle of coal to her brother- in-law's bedroom herself, or at the end of her career con- fronting Dobbin and his wife at the fancy fair? Who, again, knows Joe who has not seen him with outstretched arms winding wool for Becky, or repenting in bed-gown and nightcap the excesses of Vauxhall and who can really make a friend of Peggy O'Dowd who has not seen the eplendid figure she cut at the Brussels Opera House, or the faithful anxious face with which she brushed her " Mike's" helmet before Waterloo ? And where, oh, where, would be Glorvina but for the picture of her, obviously in the new pink satin frock about which Dobbin received the caution to " moind his of"? But alas, though Messrs. Smith and Elder have given use most generous six-shillings' worth, for most of the above pictures the present writer has been obliged to look into a copy of Vanity Fair published in 1848 by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, which contains all the pictures,— all and three more. Mrs. Ritchie was, of course, right to adhere to the text as revised by the author, but a certain interest attaches now to two pages and three funny little woodcuts contained in the above-mentioned old copy, at the beginning of chap. 6, and omitted in subsequent editions. The text is an expansion of the idea of what would have happened if the " pitch " of the novel had been screwed up to a terrific height, or if all the characters had been raised many steps in the Peerage. The omitted portion begins : —" Fancy this chapter having been headed THE NIGHT ATTACH." The three little woodcuts represent respectively a masked highwayman presenting a brace of pistols at the head of an exceedingly fat kneeling lady, the Marquis of Osborne sending a three-cornered note to the Lady Amelia, and the same noble lady's reception of the note at the hands of her femme de chambre, Mdlle. Anastasie. Perhaps
• Vanity Fair. With an Introduction by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, London; Smitb, Elder, and Co.
the chapter is all the better for the leaving out of so long a digression,—but the little pictures are very funny.
Sir Thomas Browne tells us that even in his day it was 41 too late to be ambitions,"—and certainly since the publica- tion of Vanity Fair it has been too late to write a novel satirising the world, the flesh, and the devil, for Mr. Thackeray in these pages has said all that there is to say upon the subject. He creates for us the whole modern world of the middle classes and society, and holds it up as a mirror in which the world may see itself. For in essentials nothing is changed since Mr. Thackeray wrote. Where he would have used italics, the world to-day uses large capitals, and that is about as far as the difference has gone. With the increase in the size of society, and with the popularisation of the society paper, the world has become more vulgar in expression ; more vulgar in idea and mind it would be impossible to be. In society daring the London season—people still drive their nightly round just as Becky did; some of the young ladies, not all, are still " blonde, timid, and in pink,— the mothers grand, beautiful, sumptuous, solemn, and in diamonds." It might even be possible to find a modern representative of Becky herself, passing, as she did, through " some of the very greatest and tallest " doorways in the metropolis. Fashion herself has moved her place of abode very little, and we still await the time when Belgrave Square shall " be as desolate as Baker Street or Tadmor in the wilderness." Society will never really change. It will, and does, alter its shibboleths every year, but its fundamental rules and customs are founded deep down on the rock-bed of human vanity and selfishness, and will not change till the coming of the Millennium,—and till that day Vanity Fair will remain a faithful portrait of the world it represents. There is something Shakespearian in its simplicity and in the way in which the author goes deep down to first principles in his human comedy. Indeed, it may be said, without exaggeration, that Mr. Thackeray did for the upper middle and " society" classes what Shakespeare did for the provincial Englishman. Just as Dogberry and good Masters Shallow and Dull are the same to-day as they were two hundred years ago, so Lady Southdown and Miss Crawley and a score of others are still to be found among us, with only their dress changed from that of forty years ago. And doubtless two hundred years hence they will be as true to their type as they are to-day. For work which survives the changes of fashion in forty years will survive anything. It is recent fashion which is absurd, and the hoops of the eighteenth century are picturesque, while the huge bustle which every one wore ten years ago would nowadays look merely ridiculous.
It is, of course, very easy to criticise Vanity Fair as a novel. It bears its faults on the surface. It is only too obvious that the book was written without plan, or even perhaps with a plan which was changed as the author went on, Take the character of Dobbin, for instance ? Can any one believe that he was intended at the beginning to be as fine a fellow as he subsequently turned out P Pictorially his evolu- tion is really impossible. The Dobbin who is shown us on the fatal Vauxhall evening, standing by a charming little figure of Amelia, could never by any possibility have turned into, for instance, the Dobbin whom we are shown as "Major Sugarplums." And so in the story. After the beginning where Dobbin certainly shows himself exceedingly clumsy and stupid, his stupidity becomes a mere legend. The reader is always being told that Dobbin is clumsy, but neither words nor actions bear this out. There is, of course, the delightful incident in which Miss Osborne, think- ing at a ball that he is going to make love to her, nearly faints on his arm, "had he not by opportunely treading on her toes brought the young lady back to self-control." But beyond this no instance of clumsiness is given, for this is not the adjective to apply to the incident of Dobbin waking up Jos at 2 a.m. on the morning of Waterloo to say good-bye. It seems fairly clear that after the first few chapters Mr. Thackeray changed his mind about Dobbin, and while determining to make him the preuz chevalier we all know, still kept by a sort of habit to the adjectives which he had need at first. Rawdon Crawley, again, is made to turn out much less of a blackguard than was at first intended. In fact, perhaps only Becky is thoroughly and entirely consistent all through the book. Not for one moment does she falter in her worship of advancement and success. Cool, brilliant, good-tempered, she trips over every obstacle in her path, and her defeat at last is only due to one of those extraordinary accidents to which the best-laid plans are always exposed, and against which no foresight can provide. The world of literature will never see her like again ; she is a type of which only pale reproductions can be given now. The same thing indeed may be said of the whole noveL In fact, it is almost absurd to call Vanity Fair merely a noveL It is the book of society. It is a literature in itself. All lovers of the book must owe a debt of gratitude to those who in the present edition have given them so good an excuse for re-reading it; nor will any of them escape a feeling of profound regret when once more they close the book on the familiar sentence, " Come, children, let ne shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."
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