William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta, British India, in 1811. His father and mother both worked for the East India Company, although his father died just a couple years after Thackeray’s birth, causing his mother to send Thackeray back to England. In England, Thackeray attended an elite boarding school called Charterhouse that he disliked so much that he would later write about a fictional school called “Slaughterhouse.” He later studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Having received a large inheritance from his father, Thackeray dabbled in painting until he lost most of his money gambling and investing in newspapers. In Paris, he met the Irish Isabella Gethin Shawe, whom he would later marry. Isabella had little money, and so Thackeray turned to writing to writing to support her and their children. He began writing criticism and eventually started serializing his first novel-length work, Catherine, with The Luck of Barry Lyndon coming soon after it. In 1840, Thackeray’s wife became depressed after the birth of their third child and was institutionalized. After a stint writing harshly anti-Irish pieces for the magazine Punch, where he argued against giving Irish Catholics aid during the Great Famine, he eventually started writing Vanity Fair, which was published in serial installments, also in Punch. Vanity Fair greatly raised Thackeray’s reputation, and while his subsequent novels were also well-received at the time, he remains best known today for Vanity Fair, as well as for The Luck of Barry Lydon, in part due to Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film adaptation of the work. Thackery’s health suffered in the 1850s, which his doctors blamed on too much alcohol and chili peppers. He died unexpectedly of a stroke in 1863 at age 52.