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William Makepeace Thackeray contributed heavily to Fraser's Magazine in the early years of his career. There he first published the various "Yellowplush" papers (1837-38), "Catherine" (1839-40), "A Shabby-Genteel Story" (1840), "The Great Hoggarty Diamond" (1841), the various "Fitzboodle" papers (1842-43), "Barry Lyndon" (1844), and a large variety of ballads, tales, travel pieces, and critical articles. Though he was contributing at this time to a number of other periodicals, Thackeray's most substantial and important work appears in Fraser's; it is this magazine more than any other that provided the apprentice training that was to turn him into a highly professional novelist.[1]
Thus it becomes of some importance to the Thackeray scholar to examine these early writings. But an investigation of the available bibliographies reveals an extraordinary lack of agreement about which Fraser's articles are Thackeray's. At one time or another, one hundred and fifty-three different contributions have been listed as surely or possibly by him, but no single authority has included more than one hundred and twenty-two, and most bibliographies list under one hundred. The differences are not only quantitative, however; we find items listed as doubtful on one bibliography marked as sure on the next, and not mentioned at all on the next but one. The first attempt at a list was made by R. H. Shepherd in 1881, and revised in 1887 as
The two most recent studies appeared about thirty years ago. (Gordon N. Ray in his recent biography is content to mention the bibliographical problem in passing.[2]) Harold S. Gulliver's Thackeray's Literary Apprenticeship (Valdosta [Georgia], 1934) includes two lists of articles and some discussion (pp. 66-89). Although he attempts to weigh evidence with some care, in fact he tends to include items for which there is no evidence. He gives ninety-four contributions to Thackeray and adds eighteen as possible. Miriam M. H. Thrall in Rebellious Fraser's (N. Y., 1934) is even more generous. Unaware of the detailed evidence of Thackeray's activities and interests in the early 1830's which would appear in The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray,[3] she credits him with much additional writing: she lists ninety items as Thackeray's, four as probably by him, and twenty-eight as probably by him in collaboration with various other writers.
None of these bibliographies can be relied on wholly, though in most of them the major works are listed accurately. They are, in general,
Perhaps the most important reason for the confusion of which I have been speaking has been the long delay in both the publication of Thackeray's Letters and the writing of a dependable biography;[5] certainly we are concerned here with the clarification of one of many biographical and bibliographical problems which clog the path of Thackeray studies. But there are two specific difficulties which tend to confuse the particular question of the Fraser's contributions: there is much legitimate doubt about Thackeray's connection with the magazine from 1832 to 1837, and there are large differences in practice in respect to the validity of internal evidence in determining authorship of anonymous work. It is necessary to comment briefly on both of these problems before presenting the bibliography.
Thackeray began contributing regularly to Fraser's in November 1837, using the first of what was to become a dozen or so fanciful pseudonyms, Charles Yellowplush, Esq. Before that date he may have written a number of anonymous pieces, but the only contribution of which we can be sure is the ballad "Il était un Roi d'Yvetot," which was included in the rambling "Fraser Papers for May [1834]" and was
Fraser's was founded in 1830 by "Doctor" William Maginn (1793-1842), along with Hugh Fraser, and James Fraser, the publisher. Maginn was the editor and guiding spirit of the magazine until drink and debts began seriously to limit his effectiveness in 1837.[6] Thackeray records in his diary that he met Maginn 16 April 1832, and subsequently came to know, like, and respect him.[7] Much has been made of this connection, and it does seem reasonable that Maginn would have welcomed contributions from Thackeray's pen. In addition, a portrait of "The Fraserians" by Daniel Maclise, published in the January 1835 issue, shows Thackeray seated between Percival Banks and Jack Churchill, "Maginn's special aides-de-camp."[8] But to the fact of the Maclise portrait, so often cited, must be added the fact that a list of "Fraserians" published in January, 1836 (p. 4) fails to include Thackeray, although it is apparently quite comprehensive.
The evidence, then, for Thackeray's association with Fraser's before 1837 is quite slim. It is altogether possible that "Il était un Roi d'Yvetot" and a portion of esprit de corps were sufficient for his inclusion in the portrait — which also included James Hogg and several others not in London, and the deceased Reverend Edward Irving and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.[9] And it is one thing to say that Thackeray and Maginn were close friends, even professional friends ("Dr Maginn called & took me to the Standard shewing me the mysteries of printing & writing leading articles, with him all day till 4"[10]) and quite another to assign Thackeray articles in, or leading editorial functions for, the magazine. All the same, it is possible that Thackeray published more than the one ballad in Fraser's during this time, and perhaps some day more evidence will appear to allow us to add these items to the Thackeray bibliography. At the present time, however, only internal evidence can be brought to substantiate the many attributions that have been made to Thackeray for this period.
That internal evidence is an untrustworthy guide to authorship has been demonstrated so frequently it can virtually rest as an indisputable principle for the bibliographer of nineteenth century periodicals. Mr. Walter Houghton has discovered about six thousand contributors writing for periodicals from 1825-1900; with so many magazine writers at work, it is usually quite unrealistic to attribute unsigned work to any one author because of "characteristic" language, or sentence structure, or sentiments. Certainly such internal evidence is of considerable importance to help support or deny an attribution based on some other source, but only rarely can it stand by itself as any sort of proof. In many cases "internal evidence" becomes a matter of intuition and guesswork, and too often it emerges as a selective process to support a presupposition. The extraordinary diversity of opinion among Thackeray bibliographers is perhaps enough evidence of the unreliability of internal evidence, but it would be easy to multiply instances of obvious errors stemming from this cause (see list of disallowed attributions below, particularly June, 1834; December, 1836; and January, 1840). But perhaps the history of "Elizabeth Brownrigge" (Aug.-Sept. 1832) can stand as an example of the inadequacy of internal evidence and an illustration of how it can mislead those who rely on it too heavily.
"Elizabeth Brownrigge" is a parody of the popular novels of criminal life and has seemed to many critics to foreshadow Thackeray's "Catherine" and "Barry Lyndon" — both published some years later in Fraser's, and both inspired in part by Eugene Aram and other Newgate novels. "Elizabeth Brownrigge" is assigned to Thackeray with all confidence by three of the bibliographers (Shepherd, Anderson, Van Duzer) and with various expressions of uncertainty by three others (Benjamin, Elwin, Gulliver), and it has been reprinted in a number of Thackeray editions.[11] One would therefore expect to find some evidence that connects Thackeray to the parody. But all that can be said for this connection has been summarized with his usual good sense by George Saintsbury: "While I certainly shall never be so rash as to say Thackeray did not write it, I can see not the slightest evidence that he did."[12] We might go a step further and add that neither Thackeray's diary for 1832, nor a letter to his mother dated 8 August 1832 mention "Elizabeth Brownrigge", though both of them
Dr. John Brown, who came to know Thackeray intimately in 1851,[14] first associated "Elizabeth Brownrigge" with Thackeray in a memorial article in The North British Review (Feb., 1864). But he claimed no word from the author as his authority, saying only "the internal evidence seems to us strong." This reasoning was supported by Algernon Swinburne, who wrote R. H. Shepherd, "Just before 'Catherine' [i.e., seven years before] appeared another burlesque and grotesque horror — 'Elizabeth Brownrigge,' a story in two parts, which ought to be Thackeray's, for, if it is not, he stole the idea, and to some extent the style, of his parodies on novels of criminal life, from this first sketch of the kind."[15] (Both Maginn and Douglas Jerrold had previously published similar parodies). Most recently, Ernest Boll has presented a closely argued case for Thackeray's authorship from internal evidence:
But the internal evidence itself has led to other conclusions. Benjamin, after including the parody in the 1899 edition of his biography, changed his mind in his 1910 revision. There he summarized the evidence to date and found it inconclusive, finally abandoning the theory because "Elizabeth Brownrigge" is so clearly out of position in the Thackeray canon: "If he did write 'Elizabeth Brownrigge' in July 1832, how is it that he did not follow up this ambitious start?"[18] (But, no doubt through some oversight, the parody remained listed [as doubtful] in the appended bibliography). Indeed, the internal evidence which seems so indisputably to stamp the piece as Thackeray's to Brown, Swinburne, and Boll, and which Benjamin and C. P. Johnson[19] (and I) consider quite inconclusive, seems to Thrall to identify it as William Maginn's[20] and to M. H. Spielmann to establish it as Douglas Jerrold's.[21] We cannot take the space here to discuss in detail the complexities of these arguments, but the one fact that seems to emerge beyond question from the long dispute is that the method of "proving" authorship by internal evidence is quite untrustworthy as a basis for attribution unsupported by some other kind of evidence. When Thackeray wrote to his mother, apologizing for his failure to send her copies of his newspaper articles, "Most likely you'll see the best of the articles in Galignani and of course will put down all the good ones to me,"[22] he showed an awareness of the problems of internal evidence that his bibliographers would do well to heed.
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