William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63)

Abstract

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811 and died in London on 24 December 1863. He was the son of a Collector in the East India Company. In 1817, after his father’s death, he was sent to live with an aunt in England, until his mother and her new husband returned there in 1820. He was educated at Charterhouse (1822–8), where he began a lifelong friendship with Edmund Lushington, and Cambridge (Trinity College) (1829–30), where he was part of a circle that included Edward Fitzgerald and Tennyson. He left without graduating (in examinations he copied from the future Regius Professor of Greek, W.H. Thompson; see Parry), and travelled on the continent. In 1831 he began to study law at the Middle Temple, but found his studies 'cold' and moved to Paris, where he trained as an artist and worked as a journalist. In 1833 he lost his inheritance in the collapse of the Indian banks; thereafter he supported himself by his writing.