by Gillian Gill
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In our twenty-first century, our interest in a book seems to be inseparable from our curiosity about its author. That confusion is something the resolutely anonymous novelist “Elena Ferrante” anathematizes, but I am not convinced she is right in every case. If someone picks up a novel by Charles Dickens because she has heard about the invisible woman in his life—to use Claire Tomalin’s phrase denoting Ellen Ternan—well, why not? Dickens is a terrific read.
One reason why we are fascinated by Queen Victoria and repelled by Prince Albert is that their youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, failed to scrub from the historical record the documentary proof that Queen Victoria had been a passionate woman who could not wait to get into bed with her husband at night. Comparable evidence for Albert’s sexual appetite has not been forthcoming, though several renegade royal historians, including Lytton Strachey, suggest that Prince Albert, the rigidly faithful husband and father of nine, loved men, not women. In our LGBTQA age, if tomorrow some documents turned up in an obscure German archive showing that Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha had been seduced by his tutor as a boy and had several aristocratic men lovers at Bonn University, the prince consort would be dug out of the historical graveyard and given a whole new life.
Virginia Woolf was painfully aware of the dilemma a biographer faced when dealing with aspects of a subject’s life that went against contemporary moral standards. In her second novel, Night and Day, she creates a character, Margaret Hilbery, based very closely on Anne Thackeray Ritchie. Mrs. Hilbery is writing the biography of her famous poet father Richard Alardyce, and she is unable to progress past his twenties, as she cannot decide whether to reveal or conceal Alardyce’s sexual adventures as a young man. She sees that there was an indissoluble link between Alardyce’s creative genius and his extramarital affairs: “She had been her father’s companion at the season when he wrote the finest of his poems. She had sat on his knee in a tavern and the haunts of drunken poets and it was for her sake, people said, that he had cured himself of his dissipation, and become the irreproachable literary character that the world knows, whose inspiration deserted him” [my emphasis].
If we substitute “novels” for “poems” we have here Woolf’s condensed summary of the tragedy of William Makepeace Thackeray’s life. It would be interesting to know if this perception was something that Anne Thackeray Ritchie confided to her or whether she had deduced it for herself on the basis of her wide reading in Victorian social and literary history.
The more one looks at the sex lives of the great Victorian writers and artists, the more obvious it is that they were no less perverse and polyamorous than the members of the Bloomsbury group. Historians, novelists, and playwrights like Steven Marcus, Peter Gay, Phyllis Rose, Tom Stoppard, and Colm Tóibín have shown that the Victorians were, if anything, queerer, because secrecy and shibboleth spiced up the sexual stew.
The difference between the Kensington of Thackeray and the Bloomsbury of Woolf, as we shall see later in this book, was not what happened in the bed or the brothel or the hayloft, but what was said and written about what happened, where, and with whom. In regard to sexual activity, a code of silence for men and of ignorance—or feigned ignorance—for women prevailed in mid-Victorian England, and the funeral of William Makepeace Thackeray illustrates this very well.
In defiance of the unwritten Victorian rule barring women from going to the cemetery, Anne and Harriet Thackeray insisted on accompanying their beloved father to his grave. Arriving at the burial site, they saw the unknown, incongruously dressed women being urgently shooed away by black-clad male mourners. They had seen women like that before many times—in the streets just off Pall Mall and Drury Lane and driving brazenly out in the Bois de Boulogne. Behind black veils, the faces of the Thackeray sisters betrayed nothing, and in all her many autobiographical works, Anne Thackeray Ritchie never made any mention of what had happened.
6
Anny and Minny
GROWING UP, Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa suffered from a superfluity of family. Though their parents had each been one of only three, and Aunt Caroline Stephen had considerately remained single, in Virginia’s generation there had been an explosion of cousins. Uncle Fitzy Stephen and his wife, Mary, contributed seven, Aunt Adeline and Uncle Henry Vaughan another seven, while Aunt Mary and Uncle Herbert Fisher came in with an outrageous eleven. Any or all of the aunts and uncles, with clutches of cousins, might at any time descend on the Stephens in Kensington, and whereas Leslie could escape to his study, his daughters were trapped next to the teapot, murderously close to wishing that their family had been more vulnerable to the measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and diphtheria that still cut swaths through the infant population of England.
But there was one aunt whose arrival at 22 Hyde Park Gate was greeted with pleasure by all six Stephens, and that was Aunt Anny—Anne Thackeray Ritchie as she was known to her loyal readers, Lady Ritchie as she became after her husband’s knighthood—and she was, of course, not really a relative at all. Aunt Anny did not come very often and rarely quite when expected, but when she came, deaf Leslie smiled and cupped his hand to his ear, Julia looked twenty years younger, and Virginia and Vanessa waited in joyous suspense to hear what the dear, dotty old lady would come out with next. Perhaps the tale of how, as a little girl, she had been taken by her father’s friend to an apartment in Paris and told to be absolutely quiet and listen while a pale, thin gentleman played his latest composition—and the man was Chopin. Or the tale of her arriving a week earlier than arranged to stay at Down with the Charles Darwins, and how lucky she had been to get her dates wrong, since a week later poor Charles was dead.
Anne Thackeray Ritchie came to the Stephen home because she was one of Julia’s oldest and closest friends, because Leslie Stephen had once been her sister’s husband, and because Anne was determined to let nothing come between her and the Stephen family, which included not only Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian, but also Anne’s only niece by blood, Laura Makepeace Stephen.
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When, finally, William Thackeray and his daughters were reunited in Kensington, Anny and Minny Thackeray entered some fifteen years of settled happiness and growing affluence clouded only by their father’s regular bouts of ill health.
Life in Kensington was a little staid, as a host of redoubtable women helped Thackeray maintain his façade of irreproachable respectability. These ladies included a battery of Thackeray-Ritchie aunts, and notable friends such as Adelaide Kemble Sartoris, the retired opera diva, and her sister Fanny Kemble Butler, once a famous actress. In the early Kensington years, aware that he must not seem to be neglecting his daughters’ education, Thackeray employed a series of governesses, carefully choosing, due to the fracas over Jane Eyre, the ugliest women he could find. Unfortunately, the governesses proved as ignorant as they were plain, and by the age of fifteen, Anny declared she would have no more of them.
Thackeray’s next solution to the problem of providing a live-in female chaperone for his daughters was to welcome Amy Crowe into his household. She was the penniless orphan daughter of Thackeray’s painter friend Eyre Crowe, and she became a second sister to Anny and Minny and a third daughter to William. When Amy married Edward Thackeray, a dashing army officer who was one of William’s second cousins, the large Thackeray clan rejoiced, and when in 1865 Amy died in India after giving birth to her second daughter, they grieved. Edward brought his tiny daughters, Anne and Margaret Thackeray (called Annie and Margie in the family), back to England, and Anny and Minny took the infants into their home and served as their adoptive mothers until cousin Edward remarried and took his children back.
Anny and Minny Thackeray grew up to be the epitome of respectability, their reputations untarnished by even a breath of scandal. They were Victorians in a way Leslie Stephen would later celebrate as rectitude in his Dictionary of National Biography and Lytton Strachey later still would mock as hypocrisy. But the social conformity of the Thacke
ray sisters was a far more complex thing than either Stephen or Strachey understood. If we look behind the façade that William Makepeace Thackeray so carefully created to hide his private life, we can see that Anny and Minny as young women had a better introduction to “Vanity Fair” than did either Leslie or Lytton, whose travels in Europe and cultural links to Europeans were neither deep nor extensive. That the two women were in no way infected by Becky-Sharp-itis is, I think, to their credit and their father’s. Thackeray was arguably the most acute social critic of the England of his day. He gave his daughters the key to his life and his library and then, for the most part, he respected their minds enough to allow them to use those keys as seemed to them best.
As Virginia Woolf knew from her wide reading in the lives and work of women writers, the free use of a father’s library was essential to any number of famous and achieving women. Anny and Minny Thackeray had that freedom. Though they did not learn Latin and Greek like their contemporaries Elizabeth Barrett, Florence Nightingale, and George Eliot, they had superb French, along with good Italian and German, so The Divine Comedy and The Decameron were theirs, along with Goethe and Schiller, La Princesse de Clèves, and the letters of Madame de Sévigné. On the shelves of Thackeray’s library, the unexpurgated works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Milton jostled books by his beloved eighteenth-century writers—Steele, Addison, Fielding, Sterne, Swift, Pope, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire—all authors whose works appeared on neither the shelves nor the syllabi of the governesses and female academies charged with the education of “young persons” (that is, unmarried girls). Novels could take girls like Anny and Minny into a thousand different worlds and minds, turn their heads with romance, and lay bare the traps of passion. Thackeray was also interested in the genre of folktales, newly popular due to the research done by German scholars such as the Grimm brothers. In fairy tales, the Thackeray women found the immemorial plots of human life, and when she was older, Anne would write several successful books in which she imagined modern versions of classic tales like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Little Red Riding Hood.”
And unlike the invalid Elizabeth Barrett—a scholar of Greek but a prisoner in her own home, as Virginia Woolf, in Flush, would so sympathetically show from the point of view of the poet’s equally captive dog—the Thackeray sisters were able to flesh out their literary adventures with music, opera, art, architecture, and the experience of everyday life in foreign countries. That they began their traveling life poor and ended it rather rich only extended their range of experience.
Paris had been William Makepeace Thackeray’s second home ever since his first year of freedom as a Cambridge undergraduate. Once Thackeray came under the spotlight of the English press, he, like his friend Dickens, escaped scrutiny by traveling in Europe, and it was not by chance that the subjects Thackeray chose for his novels after Vanity Fair required extensive field work abroad. Anny and Minny and their father were culture vultures when that was hard, indefatigably trekking through churches, galleries, and museums all over France, Germany, and Italy. A man of superb taste and a collector, Thackeray trawled antique shops and curio stalls, and his daughters went with him. Ardent music lovers all three, the Thackerays went to symphony concerts, attended exclusive salons to hear the latest string quartets, as Proust would do a generation on, and they had many a night at the opera. Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell as adults would also spend as much time as they could afford in Europe, and they would explore the worlds of music, theater, and ballet, but they did so only after the death of their father. Leslie Stephen never went near an art gallery, hated music long before he went deaf, and, according to his biographer Noel Annan, attended the theater only a couple of times, in order to see in the flesh the famous beauty Lillie Langtry, one of the Prince of Wales’s mistresses.
Anne and Minny were intelligent and observant young women, and if indeed their father had a secret life, their travels together abroad must have offered them some clues to it. Just by walking and driving at night through the streets of great European cities and seeing the world through their father’s sharp, cynical eyes, Anny and Minny were exposed to things that an English miss was not supposed to see. The opium-eaters in the salons. The scantily dressed girls on the street corners. The drunks littering the pavement. The emaciated beggar infants drugged into sleep. In Paris or Berlin or Venice, let us picture two intelligent young women lying awake in the heat of their shuttered room while next door, over much wine, their famous father and his European friends converse late into the night. These would be fast-paced conversations in several languages, in which things were discussed that English artists and writers were not free to explore in their published work—free love, for example, which many believed in and some practiced. Exposed to the very best of European culture from their teenage years, the Thackeray sisters were as cosmopolitan as they were Victorian, and their experience of life with their father was much richer and broader than that of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen with their parents a generation later.
Did Anny and Minny notice that their father’s old and famous friend Elizabeth Barrett Browning was often under the influence of opium? Of course, but they were not shocked. Opium products were an integral part of their world, and laudanum, a liquid form of opium, was available by the pennyworth in England on every town street. When the Thackeray women once paid a visit to their father’s old Cambridge friend Richard Monckton Milnes at Fryston, his family place (known in the gay underworld as the Yorkshire Sodom), were they surprised when the red-haired teenage waif Algernon Swinburne, Monckton Milnes’s latest literary protégé, got up to read his shockingly sensual poem “Les Noyades”? Of course, but their father and his Cambridge friend the archbishop of York were in the audience listening to Swinburne too, and they clapped, so where could be the harm?
Did Anny and Minny know that the reason the illustrious father of their friend Katy Dickens Collins had left his wife, Catherine, was that he was in a relationship with a young actress? Well, yes. Their father had caused a furor at his club by remarking he had seen Dickens and Ellen Ternan together in the street. Did Anny and Minny understand that they could be friends with George Eliot when abroad, but could never entertain her in their home because she was an adulteress? Quite certainly. Did they hear that their father’s writer friend Wilkie Collins kept not one mistress and her children, but two? Possibly.
And even in the beautiful new house that Thackeray had custom-built and meticulously furnished on Palace Green, Kensington, facing the royal palace, occasional stories surfaced from the days before Victoria and Albert cleansed the Augean stables of English society, stories for the writer Anny to set down in her diary. Thus, Thackeray Ritchie tells how her paternal grandmother, the deeply religious and extremely proper Anne Becher Thackeray Carmichael-Smyth, in the days immediately before her death in 1864, became a little addled and amazed her granddaughters by telling them the story of how, as a young teenager, she was coerced into her first marriage and had had to give birth to their father all alone.
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William Makepeace Thackeray loved both his daughters, but he was still very much the patriarch, the son of an exceptionally beautiful woman to whom he was exceptionally close, and a man who chose Isabella Shawe as his wife because she was small, pretty, compliant, ignorant, and his inferior in every way. How a woman looked still mattered to Thackeray much more than how she thought, and from Anne’s infancy he convinced himself that this daughter was too clever and too plain to ever attract a husband. His daughter Anne, Thackeray once wrote ruefully, was “a man of genius.”
Anne from earliest childhood worshiped her father, and she accepted his judgment. At fifteen she became Thackeray’s amanuensis and undertook some of his professional correspondence. At eighteen she published her first essay in Cornhill, the magazine her father edited, and began a modestly successful career as a writer of fiction and memoir. Inchoate feelings of dissatisfaction and yearning, often expressed as illness, as it was among so many afflue
nt Victorian women, possessed Anne as she grew into adulthood. To be a writer, to be perhaps “a man of genius,” was not enough for her, as it was not enough for that other plain woman of proven genius, Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans (George Eliot).
Anne Thackeray as a young woman
Minny, early on, was assigned a different destiny. A tiny, calm, obedient child, very unlike her turbulent sister, she was the family pet and pretty like her mother. William Thackeray expected Minny to marry and bear the sons he and his mother longed for. That, as adults, plain Anny could cast her spell over a whole room of people and sweet Minny could complete a literary assignment on deadline for her sister if Anny was too ill to do it, did not seriously affect the female roles assigned to the two sisters in their father’s lifetime. As the years passed, Minny remained tied to her father’s coattails just like Anny, and both women started to feel that life was passing them by.
But when Thackeray was discovered dead in his room, everything changed for Anny and Minny. Their father had been their idol and the center of their lives. When their widowed grandmother Anne Carmichael-Smyth also died, one year to the day after her son, the Thackeray sisters were doubly bereft but also free to set up house together without a chaperone. According to British law, in the absence of a will and a male heir, Thackeray’s two daughters each inherited a half of their father’s estate. That included a gracious home with modern conveniences in a superb location, furnished with choice art and antiques. It also included several other real estate properties, Thackeray’s copyrights, and the huge mass of his private papers. The house on Palace Green was sold for ten thousand pounds, a profit of six thousand pounds, and all but its most precious contents were sold at auction. Then, as we saw in Chapter 4, William Thackeray’s great friend and publisher George Smith, of Smith & Elder, “rode round to offer 10,000 pounds for all of Thackeray’s copyrights,” as Henrietta Garnett puts it, “thereby earning the girls’ undying gratitude and making the best bargain of his life.”
