Thackeray's life, depicted in this large and handsomely produced biography, is as interesting as that of a character from his novels. D.J. Taylor, himself a novelist, must have wished to recreate his material as fiction - he includes some atmospheric but fictional vignettes - but he has been faithful to fact while showing the way in which Thackeray transformed the incidents of his own life into an imaginative entertainment for the Victorian reader.
The young man who squandered his father's fortune at the gaming table; who wandered round the continent in search of experience and happened to contract gonorrhoea; who married a timid eighteen-year-old little more than a schoolgirl; who wrote hack journalism - light articles, book reviews and opera criticism - for years; who relished the company of lords and ladies at the same time as he mocked them; who, as he grew older, was more and more inclined to temper his views to those of his public; who loved Paris and despised the French - that young man could have stepped out of his own A Novel without a Hero, which is the subtitle of Thackeray's best-known work, Vanity Fair.
Thackeray's life is one of the best-documented of Victorian times, so it is possible to follow his struggle to make a living from journalism and his ventures into newspaper proprietorship and his bitter squabbles with his fellow writers. His marriage came to a sad end, for his wife began to show signs of mental instability after the birth of their third child and threw herself from the boat when he was taking her to Ireland to recuperate in her family home. He brought her back to England but was unable to give her the care she needed and had to board her out. She outlived him by 31 years but did not recover her reason. Thackeray found some consolation in his two surviving children, but the pressure of work did not allow him to spend much time with them.
His first novel, Barry Lyndon, which tells the story of a dissolute and callous Irish adventurer of the eighteenth century, did not please the public, but his second, Vanity Fair, made him famous. His ironic revealing of the snobberies and mean stratagems for personal advancement of the upper-middleclass society that he knew from the inside out appealed to a public that did not always realise that his cynicism was directed at it.
The book brought fame but not wealth. There were many claims on Thackeray's purse and he was driven by the need to provide for his family after his death. Subsequent novels did not attain the level of Vanity Fair, and so to journalism he added lecturing, a career which culminated in two lecture tours of North America. More surprisingly, he stood for parliament but failed to be elected. He would have liked a public appointment with minimal duties which would have absolved him from the need to write for a living. He would probably not have objected to a title.
His most deeply-felt relationship, a platonic one, was with a friend's wife. It had its ups and downs like a sick man's temperature chart and lasted about seven years. It was broken off in circumstances which remain unclear, though there may be hints in Thackeray's novel, Esmond.
For the last ten years of his life he was chronically ill and Victorian medicine could do little. Nevertheless it was a surprise when he died of a heart attack at the age of 52. Overwork, aided by over-indulgence in good food, was too much for his weak constitution.
His reputation, once as high as that of Dickens, has declined, but this biography should re-arouse interest in a writer who can still, when at his best, amuse and instruct.
Douglas Sealy is a critic and translator