II
Disallowed Attributions
The following items have been attributed to Thackeray (as author or
collaborator), usually on internal evidence; the name of the bibliographer
who has made the attribution follows each entry, with a question mark
indicating some doubt on his part. Where there is no discussion, it is
because the evidence to support the attribution is too scanty for
consideration.
- 1831 February (iii, 95-113) The Novels of the Season. Gulliver?,
Van Duzer?
- August (iv, 8-25) Novels of the Season. Batch the Second.
Gulliver?, Van Duzer?
- October (iv, 308-310) Scenes in the Law Courts.
Gulliver?
- 1832 August (vi, 67-88) Elizabeth Brownrigge: A Tale. Gulliver?,
Benjamin?, Elwin?, Shepherd, Anderson, Van Duzer [See discussion
above]
- September (vi, 127-148) Elizabeth Brownrigge: A Tale.
(Concl.)
- December (vi, 653-672) The Annuals. Van Duzer?,
Elwin?
- 1833 January (vii, 65-68) The Contested Election.
Thrall?
- February (vii, 240-250) The Fraser Papers. Thrall?
- March (vii, 367-376) The Fraser Papers. Thrall?
- April (vii, 498-506) The Fraser Papers. Thrall?
- May (vii, 620-632) The Fraser Papers. Thrall?
- June (vii, 658-667) The Poets of the Day. Thrall?
- July (viii, 36-44) New Edition of Rejected
Addresses.
(review) Thrall?
- July (viii, 118-126) The Fraser Papers. Thrall?
- September (viii, 360-375) The Poets of the Day. Thrall?
- September (viii, 376-384) The Fraser Papers. Thrall?
- October (viii, 499-510) The Fraser Papers. Thrall?
- November (viii, 536-556) Boaden's Memoirs of Mrs.
Inchbald. (review) Thrall?
- November (viii, 613-621) Lady Morgan's Dramatic
Scenes. (review) Thrall?
- December (viii, 658-670) The Poets of the Day. Thrall?
- 1834 January (ix, 121-122) A Paraphrase of Anacreon, Benjamin?,
Gulliver?
- February (ix, 224-240) Allan Cunningham's Fifty
Years. (review) Thrall?
- February (ix, 240-252) The Fraser Papers. Thrall?
- February (ix, 248-249) Si j'étais petit oiseau. Vous
veillerez.
(poems) Thrall?
- March (ix, 279-287) Hints for a History of Highwaymen. (review)
Johnson?, Benjamin?, Gulliver?, Thrall.
[Thrall's argument, pp. 254-256, deserves mention. In addition to
much internal evidence, she notes that a long quotation from this review
appears in a review of Jack Sheppard (Fraser's,
February, 1840), which is probably (Thrall feels surely) by Thackeray. But
she is speaking from her erroneous supposition that Thackeray was an
active Fraserian in 1834 and a too great readiness to accept an editorial
"we" as a personal one. Thackeray gave up The National
Standard ("by wh I shall have had the pleasure of
losing £200
— It has increased in sale about 20 in the last 2 months —")[23] in February 1834 and "seems to
have
devoted most of his time to the study of painting."[24] His letters before February 1834
are filled
with expressions of annoyance at the time-consuming nature of his work on
the Standard, e.g., "The only fault I find with the N.
Standard,
dear Mother is that the end of the day, I am but ill disposed after writing
& reading so much to read
another syllable or to write another line."[25] It is, then, possible that Thackeray
wrote
this review, but it remains an unlikely possibility.]
- April (ix, 456-487) A Dozen of Novels. Shepherd?, Benjamin?,
Van Duzer?, Gulliver?, Elwin?, Thrall?
[Thrall, p. 256, argues from internal evidence that part, at least, of this
article was by Maginn.]
- June (ix, 724-738) High-ways and Low-ways; or, Ainsworth's
Dictionary, with Notes by Turpin. Johnson?, Benjamin?, Van Duzer?,
Gulliver?, Elwin?
[Thrall, p. 247, reprints part of a letter from Ainsworth, attributing this
review to Churchill.[26]]
- September (x, 338-364) The Poets of the Day. Thrall?
- September (x, 365-378) The Fraser Papers. Thrall?
- October (x, 448-462) Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah
More. (review) Thrall?
- 1835 January (xi, 59-65) France, Social, Literary, Political.
(review) Thrall?
- April (xi, 465-490) A Quintette of Novels. (review)
Thrall?
- May (xi, 586-609) A Decade of Novels and Nouvellettes. (review)
Thrall?, Gulliver?, Van Duzer?
- June (xi, 708-728) The Poets of the Day. Thrall?
- October (xii, 409-415) Washington Irving's
Miscellanies. (review) Thrall?
- 1836 February (xiii, 209-223) Paris and the Parisians in 1835.
(review) Johnson?, Benjamin?, Gulliver?, Thrall?
- April (xiii, 488-493) Another Caw from the
Rookwood.—Turpin
Out Again. Johnson?, Benjamin?, Gulliver?
[Thrall, pp. 247-248, assigns this review to Maginn. It was printed in his
Miscellaneous Writings (N. Y., 1855-57) apparently on the
authority of James Fraser's publishing-house list.]
- June (xiii, 707-715) A Letter from Cambridge to Oliver Yorke,
about the Art of Plucking, &c. [Signed "T. G."] Johnson?, Benjamin?,
Gulliver?
- July (xiv, 117-122) A Second Letter from Cambridge to Oliver
Yorke, Esq. Pluck Examination Questions. [Signed "T. G."] Johnson?,
Benjamin?, Gulliver?
- August (xiv, 180-182) A Postscript to the Second Letter from
Cambridge. Johnson?, Benjamin?, Gulliver?
[Signed "T. G." Thrall, pp. 250-252, using internal evidence, assigns these
three Cambridge articles to Robert Avis Willmott. "T. G." certainly does
have opinions quite different from Thackeray's.]
- September (xiv, 298-314) The Jew of York. Johnson?, Benjamin?,
Gulliver?
[The only reason this has been assigned to Thackeray is that its title
suggests the author of Rebecca and Rowena. The two pieces
are
quite unlike each other.]
- December (xiv, 710-719) Mr. Grant's Great
Metropolis. (review) Johnson?, Thrall?
[This review was printed in Maginn's Miscellaneous
Writings,
(N. Y., 1855-57), v. But Thrall, neglecting her convincing argument for the
authority of this edition (at least for longer articles) on p. 248, feels that
Thackeray may have had a hand in it, and lists it on her appended
bibliography as "probably" by both.]
- 1837 January (xv, 33-48) A Scourging Soliloquy about the
Annuals. Gulliver?
[This is by the author of the above Cambridge articles of June, July, and
August 1836 ("T. G."). Thrall assigns it to Willmott on internal
evidence.]
- April (xv, 498-514) One or Two Words on One or Two Books.
Johnson?, Benjamin?, Gulliver?
[Thrall, pp. 252-253, using internal evidence, assigns this review to John
A. Heraud.]
- April (xv, 528-553) The Fraser Papers. Thrall?
- May (xv, 654-679) The Fraser Papers. Thrall?
- 1838 March (xvii, 338) Sir William Molesworth.
[This has been attributed to Thackeray only by Mrs. M. G. Fawcett,
Life of Sir William Molesworth (N. Y., 1901), pp. 16-17.
Almost all of the Gallery of Illustious Literary Characters —
eighty-one
brief notices accompanying Maclise drawings — appear to have been
written by Maginn (see Thrall, pp. 258-259).]
- April (xvii, 468-470) The Reverend Sydney Smith. Benjamin?
[This attribution is improbable for reasons given above, March
1838].
- October (xviii, 471-481) Passages from the Diary of the late Dolly
Duster; with Elucidations, Notes, etc., By various Eds. Johnson, Benjamin,
Van Duzer, Gulliver, Thrall, Elwin. (Reprinted occasionally in collected
editions of Thackeray's works.)
[This puzzling work has been assigned to Thackeray on the strength of a
letter signed "Fitzroy Yellowplush" which appears at the opening of the
second part (p. 597) to deny his authorship. The "Passages"
is
in fact a parody of Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury's Diary Illustrative
of the Times of George the Fourth (1838)
— called "Lady Carry-the-Candle's Diary" by the
parodist (p.
472) and a succès de scandale at the time —
and the
confusing editorial apparatus of the original is consistently burlesqued.
"Yellowplush" had reviewed Lady Bury's gossipy Diary
brilliantly in March, 1838 for Fraser's ("Skimmings from the
Dairy of George IV"), and it seems improbable that Thackeray would
descend to this feeble writing on the same subject a few months later.
Although the letter on p. 597 is facetious, and is roughly parallel to the
deliberately confusing editorial tricks about authorship, there is every
reason to believe that Thackeray intended the letter to mean what it seems
to mean — that he did not write this parody and did not want it
attributed
to him.
See my "Thackeray, Dolly Duster, and Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury,"
RES, n.s., xvi (Feb., 1965), 35-43.]
- November (xviii, 597-611) Passages from the Diary of the late
Dolly Duster; with Elucidation, Notes, etc., By various Eds.
(Concl.)
- 1839 June (xix, 710-716) Paris Pastimes for the Month of May.
Johnson, Benjamin, Van Duzer, Gulliver, Thrall.
[See below, September, 1839.]
- August (xx, 181-188) A Handful of Trash. Van Duzer?
- August (xx, 212-223) The Paris Rebels of the Twelfth of May.
Johnson, Benjamin, Gulliver, Thrall.
[See below, September, 1839]
- September (xx, 348-359) The Fêtes of July. Johnson,
Benjamin, Van Duzer, Gulliver, Thrall, Elwin.
[This article is signed "You Know Who", as are two others of this year:
"Paris Pastimes" of June, and "Paris Rebels" of August (listed above). All
three have been assigned to Thackeray as the result of an erroneous
identification of the Fraser's "The Fêtes of July" with
another article of precisely the same title written by Thackeray for the
Corsair (U. S. A.), 5 October 1839 and reprinted by him in
his
Paris Sketch Book (1840). (See, e.g., Benjamin, II, 170).
Despite the near unanimity of previous bibliographers, the articles are
wholly different, except for title, and so stand as strong evidence against
Thackeray's authorship of the three in Fraser's.]
- 1840 January (xxi, 53-70) Recollections of Germany. Benjamin,
Gulliver (listed, but a note adds that "it is not by Thackeray").
[This article is reprinted in part in R. P. Gillies, Memoirs of a
Literary Veteran (London, 1851), II, chap. xiii.]
- August (xxii, 143-149) Epistle to the Literati. (xv, xvi) Van
Duzer, Elwin (xv only).
- 1841 January (xxiii, 101-108) A Batch of Almancks for 1841. Van
Duzer?
- February (xxiii, 169-183) The Tower of London. (review) Van
Duzer?, Elwin?
- 1842 October (xxvi, 466-476) Some of the Picture-Galleries of
England. Van Duzer?
[This is the second part of an article begun in September (xxvi, 335-347).
If Thackeray wrote one half he ought to have written the other. But there
is no evidence.]
- 1846 January (xxxiii, 85-96) Titmarsh's Tour Through
Turkeydom. Benjamin?, Gulliver.
[This is a review of Thackeray's Irish Sketch Book. The
author
shows some familiarity with Thackeray's pseudonyms, in
Fraser's and elsewhere, but it seems unlikely that Thackeray
himself would be responsible for such effusive and badly-written praise of
himself. In addition, a letter to his mother (Letters, II, 229)
speaks of the reviews of the book in some detail, without mentioning that
he himself (as the attribution supposes) wrote one of them. See also the
"Titmarsh" review listed below (Jan., 1847), where Thackeray seems to
have asked G. H. Lewes to write about Mrs. Perkins's Ball
out
of a reluctance to review his own work.]
- March (xxxiii, 308-316) Milliners' Apprentices. Van
Duzer?
