‘The Author’s Own Candles’:
Notes on the Illustrations to Thackeray’s VanityFair
In 1833, William Makepeace Thackeray was living in Paris, studying art and dabbling in journalism as a young — he was twenty-two — gentleman of independent fortune when the failure of a Calcutta bank left him with £100 a year and a sudden obligation to earn his own living. He had been drawing all his life — his childhood letters to his mother are decorated with his sketches — but now the question arose of whether a career as an artist would allow him to regain the fortune that he had lost. 1 A long struggle was beginning, a struggle that would only come to fruition with the publication of Vanity Fair in 1847-1848.
It was a struggle on two fronts that led Thackeray to a unique career as illustrator of his own writings. Debarred from illustrating such works as Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (he applied for the job) by a lack of proficiency in the technical aspects of woodcutting and steel engraving, Thackeray would eventually turn his artistic skills to the illustration of letterpress which he produced with the prodigious energy that we have come to associate with the Victorians, first to accompany the copy he produced for magazines and newspapers, eventually for the serialized novel that would establish his reputation.2
1 An introduction to Thackeray the artist is to be found in John Buchanan Brown, The Illustrations of William Makepeace Thackeray, London : David and Charles, 1979. 2 Thackeray was writing for Fraser 's Magazine and for Punch, producing art criticism and book reviews for the Times and the Morning Chronicle as well as for the New Westminster Review, Bentley's Miscellany, the New Monthly Review, Ainsworth’s Magazine. He was producing humorous verse, satirical sketches, travel chronicles, parodies and burlesques,
