Abstract
Historical allusion in The Newcomes is a significant part of the general and important subject of Thackeray and history. His novels form social and historical surveys of English life almost generation by generation from the early eighteenth-century to his own day. In Henry Esmond, he contributed significantly to the genre of the historical novel. His lectures on The Four Georges, as Robert Colby notes, were attended by Carlyle, Macaulay, Prescott, Hallam, and Motley, and the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica invited him to contribute an article on the Age of Anne.1 In his novels, just as he deliberately oscillates between romance and reality, so he frequently calls in doubt the boundaries between fiction and history; both phenomena are parts of the same outlook. He sees fiction as communicating information and truth that histories ignore or conceal. At the beginning of his lecture on Steele in The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, brooding on the subject of truth in history, autobiography and fiction, he concludes: ‘Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life of the time; of the manners, of the movement, the dress, the pleasures, the laughter, the ridicules of society — the old times live again, and I travel in the old country of England. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?’ (p. 543).
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Notes
Robert A. Colby, Thackeray’s Canvass of Humanity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979) p. 347.
Lennard J. Davis, ‘A Social History of Fact and Fiction: Authorial Disavowal in the Early English Novel’, in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) pp. 120–48.
Jane Millgate, ‘History Versus Fiction: Thackeray’s Response to Macaulay’, Costerus (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1974) pp.43–58.
Linda Hutcheon, ‘Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History’, in Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis (eds), Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) p. 19.
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) p. 123.
Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) p. 128.
Juliet McMaster, ‘Thackeray’s Things: Time’s Local Habitation’, in Richard A. Levine (ed.), The Victorian Experience: The Novelists (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976) p. 54.
Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811–1846 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955) p. 67. See also Ray’s The Buried Life: A Study of the Relation Between Thackeray’s Fiction and his Personal History (London: Oxford University Press. 1952).
Henry James, ‘London Notes’, Harper’s Weekly, Vol. xli (27 Mar. 1897) p. 315. The whole piece, largely a review of Lord Roberts’s Forty-one Years in India, is apropos. He calls Roberts’s career ‘a fine paragraph in a tremendous text’.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1907) Vol. i, p. 479. 18. Ibid.
E. L. Woodward, in The Age of Reform, 1815–1870, Oxford History of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938, 1946) sees attitudes already changing in 1813 when, as Warren Hastings left the House, ‘the members rose to their feet and stood bareheaded. This gesture was not merely an act of reparation; it was a sign that English opinion was beginning to take a pride in the work done by the subjects of the Crown and servants of the Company in India’ (p. 386).
Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980) p. 120.
W. H. Carey, The Good Old Days of Honourable John Company (Simla: Argus Press, 1882–87) pp. 167–8. Carey describes the causes, style and scale of the financial disaster in terms consonant with Thackeray’s account of the Bundelcund Bank: ‘In 1830–34 a great crash came on the Merchants of Calcutta, who lived as princes — but with other people’s money. This had been occasioned solely by the mode in which the great Calcutta agency houses had been transacting business for the previous ten or fifteen years, in other words, since the charter of 1814. The rage for speculation or inordinate gains, on the part of the directors, and too eager or confident cupidity of their constituents, over-trading, improvident enterprize, extravagant miscalculations and excessive expense in living, were no doubt the cause of the failures.... In the beginning of 1830 the firm of Palmer and Co., one of the “princely merchant firms” of Calcutta, came to grief, and had to be wound up in the Bankruptcy court. This was the prelude to the fall of several other trading houses then existing, and which failed from over-speculation in the purchase of indigo and other country produce; and the failure of these houses ruined many families which had been living in affluence and luxury. Messrs. Palmer and Co. failed in 1830, with liabilities of £5,000,000; in 1832, Alexander and Co., £3,440,000; in 1833, Mackintosh and Co., £2,700,000; Colvin and Co., £1,120,000; Fergusson and Co., £3,562,000; in 1834, Cruttenden and Co., £1,350,000; making a total of £17,172,000’ (pp.167–8).
See W.C.T. King, History of the London Discount Market (London: Cass, 1936; repr. 1972) p. 39 ff.
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© 1991 R.D. McMaster
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McMaster, R.D. (1991). History and India. In: Thackeray’s Cultural Frame of Reference. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12025-3_4
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