Back to the Classics 2021 #3

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

 New-to-you classic by a favorite author. I’ve read all the Dickens and Trollope I’m going to read, I think; Cal’s mushiness, long-windedness and facetiousness exhaust my patience and the mediocrity of works like the The Belton Estate makes me wary and chary of Tony when he’s not at his best. Since 2017 I’ve been reading Thackeray: Barry Lyndon, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo, Vanity Fair. But I don’t I think I went seriously hardcore until 2019 when I read Pendennis and another non-fiction work The Book of Snobs. I mean, who reads those? In the worst of the pandemic I started Esmond, which Trollope called Thackeray‘s best novel, but bailed because in the late spring of 2020 I just wasn’t in the mood for 18^th century comedy in the Fielding manner. With hundreds of deaths daily, I mean, who was? Someday Esmond and its sequel The Virginians. Someday. Meanwhile, this one, the sequel of sorts to Pendennis.

The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family - William Makepeace Thackeray

Legend has it that Edward Blake (1833 – 1912), an Irish MP and later premier of Ontario, read this 1855 novel once every year to keep his moral compass clean. Such was the popularity of The Newcomes in the early 20^th century that the main character, Colonel Thomas Newcome, became proverbial. In his autobiography Theodore Rooselvelt said his uncle was a “veritable Colonel Newcome.”  In the middle of the 20th century, many English professors thought much of The Newcomes.

However, given the inscrutable process of the waxing or waning of a work’s reputation, it has fallen off our radars in our year 2021. Despite everything we’ve been going through in the last year or so, we hardcore readers remain an optimistic bunch. And optimistic readers are not much into a 900-page novel like this one that, even more than Vanity Fair and Pendennis, is shot through with melancholy profound even for Thackeray. He’s often funny and satirical, but not for the habitually hopeful and preternaturally confident, for example, is his depiction of the treadmill of dissatisfaction, thus:

I protest the great ills of life are nothing—the loss of your fortune is a mere flea-bite; the loss of your wife—how many men have supported it and married comfortably afterwards? It is not what you lose, but what you have daily to bear that is hard. I can fancy nothing more cruel, after a long easy life of bachelorhood, than to have to sit day after day with a dull, handsome woman opposite; to have to answer her speeches about the weather, housekeeping and what not; to smile appropriately when she is disposed to be lively (that laughing at the jokes is the hardest part), and to model your conversation so as to suit her intelligence, knowing that a word used out of its downright signification will not be understood by your fair breakfast-maker.

Got bleak? To me, a reader who figures the challenge of aging gracefully is to take life as it comes with a resigned but cheerful orientation, then, this nearly plot-free story of unhappy married couples and atrocious parents is worth reading.

If you’re strong enough.  

So that he can strike a nostalgic tone, Thackeray sets the story in the late 1830s. Colonel Newcome has returned to England after 30 years of soldiering in India. Naïve, trusting, and steeped in straightforward military values, he feels perplexed and put off by the social follies and vanities of the early Victorian era. It seems to him that reputation-seeking trumps honor, shrewdness eclipses simple-heartedness, and snobbery smothers family feeling. Thackeray, to my mind, was a truth-seeker and skeptic, especially about the mysteries of human behavior, but Colonel Tom, while the stuff of a sage role model deserving of imitation, is too good to be true even amidst his series of tribulations.  

But in case reverence for Old Colonel Tom is too great a challenge, Thackeray presents a host of secondary actors who are all too believable in their mixtures of folly, ignorance, prejudice, cowardice, heartlessness and ungenerosity. Rummun Loll is an Indian merchant masquerading as a rajah. Barnes Newcome is a cold-blooded seducer, hard-hearted banker and ill-natured husband. The clergyman, Charles Honeyman, is a humbug with a “wheedling tongue.” Aunt Newcome is Consummate Virtue and accordingly overbearing and clueless. Fool and brute Lord Farintosh can't act any better because he really is feeble-minded. But the worst is Mrs. Mackenzie, as odious and unforgettable a character as the monstrous Sophie Gordeloupe in Trollope’s The Claverings.

Thackeray’s goal here was similar to that in Vanity Fair and Pendennis - to examine middle- and upper-class society and its social customs. So The Newcomes give us readers the impression of essays or long journalism instead of a tightly-constructed novel with a distinct plot. The art history, anthropological, sociological and psychological subjects are immense and the commentary digressive so the novel, like Pendennis, seems loose. While the tangents are fun and instructive, with the best scenes having a wonderful theatricality, the reader, though mightily entertained throughout,  sometimes feels there’s a high probability of story, character, theme, subject, genre, parody getting all unstrung.

Undeniably, the narrative voice of Arthur Pendennis is awkward – is he player or observer? How does he know what he knows? Does he get the inside dope from his paragon of a wife, the lively and appealing Laura? The happy ending unfortunately calls to mind the happy denouement that Dickens was persuaded to finish Great Expectations.

This is naïve and solipsistic but I persevere with Thackeray because we believe virtue is its own reward, that contentment in a flourishing life comes not out of marrying for mercenary reasons, networking in society, looking out for #1, and doing plain old chicanery but of taking care of other people and knowing your own strengths and weaknesses. “O friend,” says Thackeray:

I have said, this book is all about the world and a respectable family dwelling in it. It is not a sermon, except where it cannot help itself, and the speaker pursuing the destiny of his narrative finds such a homily before him. O friend, in your life and mine, don't we light upon such sermons daily?—don't we see at home as well as amongst our neighbours that battle betwixt Evil and Good? Here on one side is Self and Ambition and Advancement; and Right and Love on the other. Which shall we let to triumph for ourselves—which for our children?

Simply examine life as you live with family, friends, and colleagues and you’ll discern plenty of lessons. But examine it mindfully, as Socrates urged, or life won’t be worth living.

Still with me? I’d recommend this novel to that one in ten million reader who is contemplating reading Vanity Fair again.