The History of Henry Esmond, Esq.: A Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Queen Anne

566 Pages·2009·2.22 MB·English

by  Thackeray

THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND
W M T was born in 1811. He was educated at
ILLIAM AKEPEACE HACKERAY
Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, and studied art and law at
The Middle Temple. He then turned to journalism. In London, Thackeray
wrote for many periodicals, principally for Fraser’s Magazine for which
he wrote a social satire The Yellow Plush Correspondence. This appeared
in book form in 1841. Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s masterpiece, was
published in monthly parts, 1847–8. His other novels include The Luck of
Barry Lyndon (1844), later revised as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.
(1856), and The History of Pendennis (1848–50). He also published many
volumes of Miscellanies of both prose and verse. The Four Georges:
Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court and Country Life first appeared in the
Cornhill Magazine in 1860. His 1851 lectures, The English Humourists of
the Eighteenth Century, were published in 1853. Thackeray died suddenly
in 1863, having suffered from heart trouble for some time.
J S , who has edited Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds
OHN UTHERLAND
and Phineas Finn for Penguins, was Reader in English at University
College, London, until 1984 and is now a Professor of English at the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. His other publications
include Fiction and the Fiction Industry, Best Sellers: Popular Fiction of the
1970s, The Longman Companion to English Literature and Mrs Humphry
Ward.
M G received his M.A. degree from the University of Sussex
ICHAEL REENFIELD
in 1966, and is now an Assistant Lecturer in English at the University of
Singapore.
William Thackeray
THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND
Edited by John Sutherland and
Michael Greenfield,
with an Introduction and Notes
by John Sutherland
Penguin Books
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd,
Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England First published 1852
Published in the Penguin English Library 1970
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1985, 1987
Introduction and notes copyright © John Sutherland, 1970
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
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purchaser ISBN: 9781101493885
CONTENTS
Introduction by John Sutherland
A Note on Thackeray as Historian
A Note on the Text
A Note on the Manuscript
Bibliographical Note
Family Tree of the Esmonds
THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND
Notes
INTRODUCTION
I its own day Henry Esmond commanded superlatives. With the air of a
N
man stating the incontrovertible Trollope asserts, in An Autobiography,
that Thackeray is the foremost novelist, and elsewhere that Henry
Esmond is his best novel, the master’s masterpiece. The more modest
assertion that Henry Esmond was the best historical novel ever written
was a nineteenth-century commonplace so widespread that it sometimes
seems like a ritual genuflexion. It was not, of course, the first of its kind,
and those who praised it so extravagantly tended to see it as a literary
consummation, ‘The crown and flower of the historical novel’ as
Saintsbury called it. Curiosity can trace the ancestry of Thackeray’s
novel back to the moment in 1813 when Walter Scott, then a well-
known poet, turned up a long-lost manuscript while rummaging in a
desk for fishing tackle. It was a sample of historical fiction, an attempt to
spice antiquarian erudition with Gothic romance. The publishers had not
thought well of it and Scott had turned to other things, but now he felt
like diversifying his talent into prose narrative, so the work was
refurbished and concluded with the usual prodigious speed. The result
was Waverley and a revolution which tilted the whole field of literary
endeavour towards the novel. The esteem of the historical novel has
never stood higher than it did in that second decade of the nineteenth
century; then it must have seemed the most exciting development in
fiction since Richardson started Pamela corresponding with her parents.
A century later, after a brief Stevensonian flowering, it had sunk below
the level of respectable critical view into the limbo of ‘Romance’ to join
there its déclassé genre-cousins, ‘the cowboy’, ‘the love-story’, ‘the
thriller’. In order to appreciate Henry Esmond the modern reader has to
recover a certain open-mindedness about the historical romance, to
suspend, as it were, a verdict which literary history has brought, and
accept with Trollope that ‘great historical novel’ is not a paradox.
Writing within the memory of Scott’s greatness almost all the
nineteenth-century novelists we respect tried their hand at the historical
form. Often they went harder at the task than at their work-a-day fiction,
as if to achieve something special. One thinks of the legendary labours of
Victorian fiction; George Eliot beginning Romola, as she said, a young
woman and emerging from her research ‘an old woman’, the barrow
load of books at Dickens’s front door waiting to be digested into The Tale
of Two Cities, the acres of historical fact which Charles Reade scissors-
and-pasted into The Cloister and The Hearth. Henry Esmond has a place in
the list. Since Thackeray’s acknowledged flaw was idleness, a tendency
to pull the same strings on the same old puppets, his pride in Henry
Esmond was correspondingly the greater for the unusual pains which had
gone into it. It had cost him he said ‘as much trouble as Macaulay’s
History’. In later life he called it his ‘careful novel’. An unaccustomed
preparatory effort was writing it entire before publication; it is the only
one of his full-length novels produced of a piece in the traditional three
volumes at a guinea and a half, and not in monthly or magazine
numbers, and is thus of all his works the one that most positively severs
a degrading connexion with hand-to-mouth journalism. More
importantly it was revised before and not during its issue, allowing
Thackeray to reserve the virtuosity which elsewhere goes into
extemporizing and the ‘life and death struggle’ with the unwritten
instalment. Consequently Henry Esmond has structure in an architectural
sense, not simply ‘Roundabout’ extension. The groundwork had been
laid by his Lectures on the eighteenth-century English Humourists the
year before. These were primarily money-spinners (the easiest money,
Thackeray said, he had ever earned), but they equipped him uniquely
well for his novel. They were also the link between Esmond and a life’s
ambition to write a History of Queen Anne’s reign.
The novel was written part among his family, part in the British
Museum and part ‘on club notepaper’ at the Athenaeum to which he had
been elected in 1851. The tripartition matches the accents heard in the
narration, those of a gentleman, a scholar and a defender of English
domestic values. Eyre Crowe, his secretary, has left us a picture of the
great man at work, for whom every facility was made available: a
private part of the Museum, and a partitioned section of the club library
where he would dictate ‘not sotto voce’. It is not merely fanciful to claim
that we can hear the voice in Henry Esmond more clearly than elsewhere,
and the man who steps down to talk with us in this novel is not Vanity
Fair’s ‘brother of the story telling trade’ but Esmond, Colonel of the
Queen’s Service and reluctant Marquis, the most patrician narrator
Thackeray, who always ventriloquized his novels, attempted outside
burlesque. Tactically dignity is vital to the novel’s immunization against
satires on vulgar historical fiction which Thackeray himself had been
foremost in devising. None the less from the Author of The Book of Snobs
it was, perhaps, risky and he had had doubts about Esmond being a
‘prig’, but it worked; ‘Never could I have believed,’ wrote Landor when
the book was published, ‘that Thackeray, great as his abilities are, could
have written so noble a story as Esmond!’ ‘Grand’ is Saintsbury’s epithet.
The work was, in short, a claim on literary fame; Thackeray had arrived
and this was his ‘card’; he would, he hoped, ‘stand or fall by Esmond’.
Henry Esmond was written between autumn 1851 and summer 1852.
Then Thackeray was personally at the height of his powers and publicly
at the top of the tree fighting it out with Dickens. Publishers solicited
him. George Smith waited with ‘a thousand pounds in his pocket’ for the
new novel (in fact, Thackeray received £1,200 for the first 2,500-copy
edition from the successful Smith, Elder and Co.). With Vanity Fair he
had established a moral authority, based to some extent on a
misanthropy which worried him, for which the less satiric Boz might
well have exchanged his greater sales. Charlotte Brontë, in an
embarrassingly psalmodic preface to Jane Eyre, had hailed him as the
‘social regenerator’ of the age, ‘whose words are not framed to tickle
delicate ears: who to my thinking comes before the great ones of society,
much as the son of Imlah came before the throned kings of Judah and
Israel’. The bad time to come, when Thackeray could be unthinkingly
dismissed as a penny-a-liner made good, was still a decade off – in 1862,
for example, without apparently intending insolence The Westminster
could talk of his ‘fame’ being ‘a large balance at the bankers’. But in
1852 Thackeray had great unrealized capacities, and Henry Esmond is a
measure of the novelist he might have been.
The veneration for the historical novel, of which Henry Esmond is so
supreme an example, can easiest be accounted for in two words – ‘Scott’
and ‘Carlyle’. Scott had achieved a remarkable double, he had
inaugurated a tradition of popular fiction and yet had retained for
himself the status of a gentleman. To achieve large sales with dignity
remained the dual prize in fiction throughout most of the century, and it
was the combination of wide readership with high respectability that
gave the nineteenth-century novelists the sense that their profession was,
as Thackeray put it, ‘as serious as the Parson’s own’. Carlyle, on the
other hand, historicized the thought of his age. History he urged,
evangelically, was society’s ‘letter of instruction…. Only he who
understands what has been, can know what should be and will be’ (On
History Again, 1833). Fascinated by crisis, Carlyle offered the vision of
history’s tides culminating in revolution, of societies ‘shooting Niagara’,
and the salvationary image of the Hero stemming and turning the
courses of history into destiny. Like the novel, history was a best-seller;
the first two volumes of Macaulay’s History of England sold thirteen
thousand in the first four months, vying with its contemporaries Dombey
and Son and Vanity Fair. Indeed, when he wanted to make capital for his
daughters rather than income Thackeray himself turned to history with
his public lectures on the Humourists and the Georges.
Although the twin popularities of history and the novel, and a great
example created the vogue for it, the course of the post-Scott historical
novel is littered with ruins and cheapened by poor imitations. The
context of Henry Esmond, which Thackeray is conscious of throughout, is
debased literature. Most successful of the run of imitators were those
who emulated Scott at a self-consciously inferior level – the ‘teeming
father of romance’, G. P. R. James who turned the craft into an industry
with his hundred or more historical romances, or Harrison Ainsworth
who sensationalized the form with an admixture of violence and
glamorous crime. Those like Bulwer Lytton, George Eliot or Charles
Kingsley who tried to do something great in the historical novel had
farther to fall, and fell. To himself Scott observed with Aguecheek’s
complacency that they might do it with better grace, but he did it more
naturally. Had he lived to see Henry Esmond he would have discovered a
novel as ‘natural’ as his own, partly because like Scott, Thackeray was
steeped in the past, but primarily because Thackeray had arrived at his
own sophisticated and heterodox aesthetic of historical fiction.
A principal difficulty was in finding the right blend of romance and
historical erudition, uniting, as it were, Mrs Radcliffe and the Rev. Jonas
Dryasdust. It is a specific instance of fiction’s larger struggle to integrate
what Wilde called inartistic ‘truth’ and artistic ‘lying’, but more acute
since ‘historical fiction’, pedantically considered, means ‘factual fiction’.
The problem was one which Thackeray had isolated well before he came
to write Henry Esmond. Thackeray is, incidentally, a great critic, and
certainly one of the best where the historical novel is concerned. This
stature is not always recognized because his finest criticism is embodied
in burlesque and parodic strata in his novels, where we find the critical
intelligence working within rather than outside the stuff of fiction. The
theoretic Preface to Henry Esmond is to be found in the series of
burlesque novelettes by ‘Eminent Hands’ which Punch published in 1847.
Since Thackeray here works out the practice of the historical novel by
comic exaggeration of vulgarity and naivety, the effect is more of an
‘etiquette’ than an aesthetic. But this corresponds with what we find to
be the tone of the later novel, a ‘well-mannered’ avoidance of the faux
pas which others have committed. One such is the tendency to become
tied up in circumstantial historical detail, rendering the work either like
a prose museum or a melodrama of fustian, pasteboard and costume
spuriousness. In this extract from Barbazure (ostensibly a spoof on G. P.
R. James) the prose is as overloaded with outlandish nouns as the horse
is with accoutrements:
The warrior who bestrode the noble beast was in sooth worthy of the steed which bore him. Both
were caparisoned in the fullest trappings of feudal war. The arblast, the mangonel, the
demiculverin, and the cuissart of the period, glittered upon the neck and chest of his war-steed;
while the rider, with chamfron and catapult, with ban and ariere-ban, morion and tumbrel,
battleaxe and rifflard, and other appurtenances of ancient chivalry, rode stately on his steel-clad
charger, himself a tower of steel.
The opposite fault is the over-indulgence of romance – in Scott’s
definition of it – fiction ‘the interest of which turns upon marvellous and
uncommon incidents’. There is obviously a special strain when
‘historical’ characters are introduced. This little verbal cartoon is from
George de Barnwell, Thackeray’s more spiteful squib on Bulwer:
And the boy – for he who addressed the most brilliant company of wits in Europe was little more
– emptied the contents of the brandy-flask into a silver flagon, and quaffed it gaily to the health
of the company assembled. ’Twas the third he had taken during the sitting. Presently, and with a
graceful salute to the Society he quitted the coffee-house, and was seen cantering on a
magnificent Arab past the National Gallery.
‘Who is yon spark in blue and silver? He beats Joe Addison himself, in drinking, and pious Joe
is the greatest toper in the three kingdoms,’ Dick Steele said, good-naturedly.