Blighted Wretch

The news traveled swiftly along London's Grub Street. Charles Dickens' illustrator, Robert Seymour, had shot himself after finishing only half his sketches for the Pickwick Papers. A few days later, with some sample sketches tucked hopefully under his arm, a stout, bumbling, bemonocled young man called on Mr. Dickens to ask for the vacant job. The novelist took a quick look at the sketches and shook his head. "Had it not been for that unfortunate blight which came over my artistical existence," declared William Makepeace Thackeray many years later, "I should have tried to be not a writer, but a painter or designer of pictures."

Up to that time, Thackeray had never quite decided which to be. As a schoolboy, made miserable by a too massive head and painfully nearsighted eyes, he was "licked into indolence, abused into sulkiness, and bullied into despair." He took his revenge on his schoolmasters and schoolmates by drawing cruelly accurate caricatures of them in his schoolbooks. As a young dandy in Paris, he was happiest hobnobbing with Left Bank artists, Bohemians "and fellows of that sort." And these friends could often find him laboriously copying paintings in the Louvre in the hopes of becoming, like them, an artist.

"Cockadoodleodoodle!" After the "unfortunate blight," Thackeray began writing art criticism. His nom de plume, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, became a feared and hated name among Britain's painters. Even when he had become a novelist and was rolling in royalties ("-L-10,000 -- Cock-adoodleodoodle"), he was still "bitten with my old mania."

Sneezing Titmarsh. It was in the fifth of his Christmas Books, which he illustrated himself, that Thackeray came closest to realizing his earlier ambition to draw. ("What, you, too, Mr. Titmarsh? you sneering wretch. . .?") His last and most famous Christmas book--The Rose and the Ring--was written around some sketches he had drawn to amuse his daughters. He continued his fairy tale to entertain a neighbor's sick child. "It was," wrote the little girl, "a black day when the dear giant did not come. The people in The Rose and the Ring were real people--to me and to him."

Last week, the manuscript from which Thackeray read was published--in facsimile --by Manhattan's Pierpont Morgan Library. It was a handsome $35 book, in a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Americans might have seen some of Thackeray's illustrations before (in the Everyman's Library edition), but the Morgan copy was in Thackeray's own neat, minuscule handwriting, and in his watercolors. Thackeray's absurdly hawk-nosed countesses, spindle-shanked kings, periwigged barons, and tubby, pimply princes looked as fresh as if he had just laid down his pen and brush upon his "happy, harmless fableland."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.