Chapter Tennyson to Thackeray of T by Biographical Dictionary of English Literature

the interruption of this, caused by the permanent breakdown of his wife’s health, was a heavy calamity. This, along with his own latterly broken health, and a sensitiveness which made him keenly alive to criticism, doubtless fostered the tendency to what was often superficially called his cynical view of life. He possessed an inimitable irony and a power of sarcasm which could scorch like lightning, but the latter is almost invariably directed against what is base and hateful. To human weakness he is lenient and often tender, and even when weakness passes into wickedness, he is just and compassionate. He saw human nature “steadily and saw it whole,” and paints it with a light but sure hand. He was master of a style of great distinction and individuality, and ranks as one of the very greatest of English novelists.

Summary.—born 1811, ed. at Charterhouse and Cambridge, after trying law turned to journalism, in which he lost his fortune, studied art at Paris and Rome, wrote for Fraser’s Magazine and Punch, Barry Lyndon, Book of Snobs, and Jeames’s Diary, published Vanity Fair 1847-8, Pendennis (1848-50), lectured on Humourists 1851, and on Four Georges in America 1855, published Esmond 1852, Newcomes 1853, Virginians 1857-59, edited Cornhill Magazine 1860, his last great work, Denis Duval, left unfinished, died 1863.

Lives by Merivale and Marzials (Great Writers), A. Trollope (English Men of Letters), Whibley ((Modern English Writers). Article in Dictionary of National Biography by Leslie Stephen.