Home » Languages » English (Sr. Secondary) » Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “William Makepeace Thackeray ” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “William Makepeace Thackeray ” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

William Makepeace Thackeray 

( 1811 – 1863)

Thackeray was an English journalist, novelist, famous for his novel Vanity Fair (1847-48), a tale of two middle-class London families. Most of Thackeray’s major novels were published as monthly serials. Thackeray studied in a satirical and moralistic upper-middle-class English life – he was at one time considered the equal of his contemporary Dickens, or even as his superior. William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India, the only son of Richmond Thackeray, a Collector in the East Indian Company’s service. After his father died he was sent home to England. He was educated at Charterhouse and at Trinity College, Cambridge. Thackeray abandoned his studies without taking a degree, having lost some of his inheritance of twenty thousand pounds through gambling. In the beginning of the 1830s he visited Germany, where he met Goethe. During 1831-33 Thackeray studied law at the Middle Temple, London, but had little enthusiasm to continue his studies. In 1833 he brought with a large heritage the National Standard, but lost his fortune a year later in the Indian bank failures and other bad investments.

Thackeray began to contribute regularly to Fraser’s Magazine, Morning Chronicle, New Monthly Magazine and The Times. His writings first attracted attention in Punch, where he satirised English snobbery. These sketches reappeared in 1848 as The Book Of Snobs, in which Thackeray states; “he who meanly admires mean things is a Snob.” In 1840 Isabella Thackeray suffered a mental breakdown, from which she never fully recovered, although she survived Thackeray by thirty years. The author was forced to send his children to France to his mother. The children returned to 4nglarid in 1846 to live with him. In the 1840s Thackeray started to gain a name as a writer. In Vanity Fair he gives a panoramic Picture of high life in England, and created one of the most fascinating immoral female characters in Victorian literature, Becky Sharp. “I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.” (From Vanity Fair). The .book brought him prosperity and made him an established writer and popular lecturer in Europe and in the United States. His increasing love for Jane Brookfield, the wife of an old Cambridge friend, led to a rupture in their friendship. The History Of Henry Esmond appeared in three volumes in 1852, and reflects this melancholic period in the life of the author. “`It is strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.” By the end of his career, Thackeray’s disillusionment with contemporary culture seems to have deepened. In The Adventures Of Philip (1862) the protagonist, Philip, is out of place in a world that does not accommodate his vision of masculinity.

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