It’s the birthday of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), best known for his novel Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1847-48), which takes its title from the “centre of human corruption” in Pilgrim’s Progress (John Bunyan). The novel has been adapted a number of times for the stage, television, and movies; a new miniseries by Amazon and the UK’s ITV is supposed to come out this year.

Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India, where his father worked for the East India Company. Thackeray was just a few years old when his father died and he was sent to live in England. His mother stayed behind for several years and married a man she’d loved years earlier. Thackeray studied at Charterhouse, a school for poor but academically-inclined youth. I’m not sure whether it was a boarding school but it was every bit as good as a boarding school, since Thackeray managed to be miserable there. He went on to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then Middle Temple, London.

In 1832, Thackeray came of age and inherited £20,000 from his father. According to measuringworth.com, that translates to £1,766,000 today, which converts to over $2,000,000. Did Thackeray avoid losing his fortune to gambling and bad investments? He did not. (See Baudelaire, April 9, 2018.) Thackeray eventually began to make good as a journalist.

Thackeray had married an Irish girl in 1836 and they had three daughters, one of whom died in infancy. Thackeray’s wife suffered from mental illness from 1840 on, and he essentially lived as a widower in London (while she lived in the country) and raised their two daughters. He made his reputation as an author with the serial publication of Vanity Fair. He wrote several more novels and embarked on lecture tours and was considered “the only possible rival to Dickens” (britannica.com).

It is not known whether Thackeray was constantly interrupted in his work by requests from his children for toast with jam, but I’m betting he was, based solely on my own personal experience today.

Thackeray had health issues, but his death at the age of 53 on Christmas Eve day came as a shock to his family and his readers. His friend and rival Charles Dickens delivered a moving eulogy at Thackeray’s funeral and recalled times when Thackeray would show up at Dickens’ place out of the blue to say he’d been moved by some passage from a book and just had to talk about it with his friend.

Discuss your favorite book with a friend on this fine Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.