Note 2 to Chapter 2 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.
The present retelling emphasizes the professional, trade, and economic aspects of the story at the expense of the personal biography which is relevant but so readily available and so often emphasized that there is no point in telling it again. Despite recent biographical accounts by Anne Monsarrat and Catherine Peters, both of which add some new material, the basis for any account of Thackeray's life remains Gordon Ray's four-volume collection of Letters and Private Papers and his two-volume biography, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity and Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom. Monsarrat and Peters bring enthusiasm and appreciation to an old story which they augment minimally, the former occasionally making mistakes that undermine the work, though both arc well-written and serve the purpose of introducing new readers to Thackeray. My own account is, of course, based largely on the Letters and Private Papers and Ray's biography, but I also have used 370 letters from Thackeray to his various publishers that are not in Letters, though some of these were available to Ray when he wrote the biography.
Last modified: 4 April 2001