Note 22 to Chapter 1 of the author's Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray, which University Press of Virginia published in 1992. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Manuscript diary, Beinecke. Chapman had met Thackeray after one of his lectures on Richard Steele two days earlier, at which time Thackeray expressed an interest in purchasing "at the 'trade price' some of my 'atheistic' publications." In his 14 June meeting at Chapman's, Thackeray declined an invitation to write a review of "Modern Novelists for the Westminster Review" because he could get more for his prose elsewhere and because he thought himself unprepared to do such an article. He also "complained of the rivalry and partizanship which is being fostered, I think chiefly Fo(r)ster'd, in respect to him and Dickens by foolish friends." Though Thackeray suggested that Charlotte Brontë write the proposed article, Mary Ann Evans objected, and George Lewes finally agreed to do it.
Last modified: 4 April 2001