INTRODUCTION TO PENDENNIS 1822-1849-50 I. N the same way perhaps that "Vanity Fair" was begun at Chiswick in the year 1818, some of the early chapters of "Pendennis" must have been written within the first quarter of the century, and Fairoaks and Chatteris are certainly to be found between the folded sheets which travelled from Charterhouse and Cambridge to the mother at Larkbeare, by Ottery St. Mary's. Some one very like Helen Pendennis was the mistress of Larkbeare, where my father spent his holidays as a boy; and there was a little orphan niece called Mary Graham, who also lived in the old house, with its seven straight windows and its background of shading trees. Major Pendennis, most assuredly, was not to be found there I have heard my father describe the bitter journey in wintertime, when he drove from Charterhouse to Larkbeare upon the top of the snowy Exeter coach. On one occasion my grandmother told me he had to be lifted down, so benumbed was he with the cold. The journey from Cambridge must have been longer still, but he was older and better able to stand it, nor was it always winter-time then, any more than it is now. Between 1824 and 1825, after his fight with Mr. Venables and the accident which broke the bridge of his nose, my father left Penny's house and went to live in Charterhouse Square with Mrs. Boyes, who took in boys belonging to Charterhouse and Merchant Taylors. It was a low brick house with a tiled roof; he once pointed it out to us, and he took us across the playground and into the old chapel. There is a Charterhouse letter dated February 5, 1828. "I have just come out of school and am feeling rather cosy," he writes. "Rude Boreas has done blustering, for the day at least." Elsewhere Dr. Russell is likened to a lion, and his pupil quotes: "So have I seen on Africa's arid shore, a hungry lion give a mighty roar." "Don't say I am not well read," he exclaims. "The 'Carthusian' does not come on at all," he continues; "they seem to have dropped all idea of it; the novelty of the thing has perhaps gone off as well, for it strikes me that we should make but poor work of it." My father never spoke much of his time at Charterhouse. I remember once being with him and meeting a middle-aged man crossing a street, and his saying, "That man was at school with me; I used to think him one of the greatest men in the whole world;" and we watched the great man as he put up an umbrella and walked away through the rain. There is an interesting article in No. 7 of "The Greyfriar," describing Charterhouse in my father's time, when John Leech and Mr. John Murray and Mr. Venables were all in the school. An experiment was then going on. The boys themselves were set to keep order, and to teach each other. But whereas in other places, under better conditions, this system may have been pursued with success, at Charterhouse (I am quoting from "The Greyfriar") "the impression left upon one's mind was one of partial chaos. Yet men, and strong men, were bred under the system. As one looks over the blue-books of those days and notes the names that turn up, one is forced to say that the crop was a good one." All this has very little to do with Pendennis; but it may be of interest to record that Dean Liddell, who was a contemporary of my father's, described the system to Mr. Davies, the author of the article in "The Greyfriar." The elder boys were obliged to learn all the Odes of Horace by heart, and to translate them without book, for the benefit of the less advanced forms. "I cannot think that Thackeray ever exerted himself sufficiently to grapple with the Emeriti," said the Dean. "I constantly sat next him in school, and we spent most of our time in drawing." Years afterwards, when Dean Liddell and Mrs. Liddell were riding in the Row, my father, who was with them, turned suddenly to Mrs. Liddell and said, "Do you know that your husband ruined my prospects by doing my verses for me at school, and destroyed all my chances of self-improvement?" One of the last letters from Charterhouse was written on February 12, 1828. He was a monitor by this time. "There is nothing in London to do now, not a new sight of any kind that I can hear of. Mrs. Boyes and I have agreed this term very well; we have not had a single tiff-but whistling will bring the wind, so I must have care on my health, or her mighty self will launch her thunders on my luckless head, I reckon. I have not read any novel this term except one by the author of 'Granby,' not so good as 'Granby.' I have read a curious book on the Inquisition, with plates delineating faithfully the various methods of torture. Delectable! When I come home I mean to get up at five o'clock every morning, and to get four hours' sweat before breakfast." "February 13th. "I have not been out of the house to-day; I have got a headache, but don't like to stop out of school, for the doctor would tell me that it was a disgraceful shuffle, so I think it better to bear the pain. I feel every day as if one link were taken from my chain. I have a consolation in thinking there are not many links more." "February 14, 1828. "Valentine's Day, but I have had no valentines. Doctor Russell has been fierce to-day, yea, and full of anger. We are going to have a debate to-morrow night on the expediency of a standing army. We have not yet settled the sides which we shall take in this important question. I have got four hours of delightful Doctor Russell to-day before me: is it not felicitous? Every day he begins at me, 'Thackeray, Thackeray, you are an idle, profligate, shuffling boy' (because your friends are going to take you away in May)." Here are some more accounts of Doctor Russell: "Doctor Russell has treated me every day with such manifest unkindness and injustice that I really can scarcely bear it. It is hard when you are endeavouring to work to find your attempts nipped in the bud. If ever I get a respectable place in my form he is sure to bring me down again; to-day there was such a flagrant instance of it that it was the general talk of the school. I wish I could take leave of him to-morrow. He will have this to satisfy himself with, that he has thrown every possible object in my way to prevent my exerting myself. Every possible occasion he showers reproaches against me, for leaving his precious school, forsooth. He has lost a hundred boys within two years, and is of course very angry about it. There are but three hundred and seventy in the school. I wish there were only three hundred and sixty-nine." My step-grandfather sheathed his sword and hung up his cocked hat when he left Addiscombe in 1825, and settled at Fairoaks, in Devonshire. He turned farmer, cultivating the soil, dispensing cider to his reapers, studying loams and their produce, shooting his partridges in due season. "Has papa shot any cocks and snipes? he did not, I suppose, make up his fifty brace of partridges," says the schoolboy, writing home. Prince and Blucher, the two carriage horses, were like Mr. Bennett's horses in "Pride and Prejudice," and alternately drew the family coach and helped in the farm. one of his letters to my grandmother, the Major, in a stately, oldfashioned way, reminds her to go in her own carriage, with John on the box, when calling upon some neighbours. Our elders, to the In * When Pendennis left Greyfriars, it will be remembered that he was fetched away from his academic studies by his uncle, Major Pendennis. Pen, who has been put on to construe in a Greek play, makes a sad blunder or two, when the awful chief breaks out upon him: "Pendennis, sir, your idleness is incorrigible, and your stupidity beyond example. You are a disgrace to your school and to your family, and I have no doubt will prove so in after life to your country." . . . The reader is respectfully referred to the passage in question. It will also be remembered that, after school, as the clock strikes one, all the thundering majesty and awful wrath of the schoolmaster disappear. |