No one much liked the ending of Esmond when it was published in 1852. George Eliot’s comment is typical: ‘the most uncomfortable book you can imagine … the hero is in love with the daughter all through the book, and marries the mother at the end.’1 Eliot’s discomfort has been shared by many – perhaps most – readers. It is troubling that a woman whom the orphaned hero clearly regards for much of the narrative as his mother should end up the mother of his own child. But Eliot is wrong, or impercipient, in her implication that there is something unexpected, or unprepared for, in Esmond’s eventual union with Rachel. For one thing, her name, with its allusion to the long-waited-for biblical bride (Genesis 29), is a clear hint sown in the earliest pages of the narrative. At other points Thackeray is at elaborate pains to predict the final marriage, and cue the reader that Harry’s ultimate happiness will lie not with the flighty Beatrix, but with her serene mother.

One such cue is found in Chapter 33, ‘Beatrix’s New Suitor’ (i.e., the Duke of Hamilton), where the young heroine upbraids her discomfited ‘knight of the rueful countenance’ (i.e., Esmond):

‘I intend to live to be a hundred, and to go to ten thousand routs and balls, and to play cards every night of my life till the year eighteen hundred [it is currently 1712], And I like to be the first of my company, sir; and I like flattery and compliments, and you give me none; and I like to be made to laugh, sir, and who’s to laugh at YOUR dismal face, I should like to know; and I like a coach-and-six or a coach-and-eight; and I like diamonds, and a new gown every week; and people to say – “That’s the duchess – How well her Grace looks – Make way for Madame l’Ambassadrice d’Angleterre – Call her excellency’s people” – that’s what I like. And as for you, you want a woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at your feet, and cry “O caro! O bravo!” whilst you read your Shakespeares, and Miltons, and stuff. Mamma would have been the wife for you, had you been a little older, though you look ten years older than she does – you do, you glumfaced, blue-bearded little old man! You might have sat, like Darby and Joan, and flattered each other; and billed and cooed like a pair of old pigeons on a perch. I want my wings and to use them, sir.’ And she spread out her beautiful arms, as if indeed she could fly off like the pretty ‘Gawrie’, whom the man in the story was enamoured of.

‘And what will your Peter Wilkins say to your flight?’ says Esmond, who never admired this fair creature more than when she rebelled and laughed at him. (Ch. 33)

This banter (‘Mamma would have been the wife for you’) is a clear premonition of the final outcome, couched as it is in the elaborate games of literary allusion through which Esmond and Beatrix conduct their sexual relationship. Beatrix’s mock contempt for ‘your Shakespeares and Miltons’ (she is, in fact, a highly civilized woman) and Harry’s graceful allusion to the ‘Gawries’ perfectly catch the tension under its veneer of badinage. Esmond’s specific reference at the end of the exchange (which may elude the modern reader, but would have been picked up by every Victorian) is to Robert Paltock’s fantasia, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins. The Gawries whom he alludes to were flying women and – significantly – the pedestrian Peter finally marries one. Henry Esmond still hopes he may one day capture the high-flying Beatrix.

It’s an elegant exchange, and in keeping with the highly wrought literary quality of this section of Esmond’s narrative. The preceding chapter, ‘A Paper out of the Spectator’, is universally acclaimed as one of the most brilliant tours de force in Thackeray’s prose, containing as it does a brilliant pastiche of Addison. Like the Peter Wilkins’ allusion, Henry’s mock Spectator essay is loaded with clever and coded messages. It follows on from his sentimental comedy The Faithful Fool, with its representation of the hero as Eugenio (the name is a hint to Beatrix – if she could but catch it – that Esmond is, in fact, not illegitimate but well-born, and the true Marquis; something that she will discover later to her astonishment.) The Spectator paper is pseudonymously addressed by ‘Oedipus’ to ‘Jocasta’, signalling that Thackeray was well aware of what knowing post-Freudian readers would find in his novel, a hundred years later. Has Esmond chosen these names unconsciously, or is he aware of certain unusual sexual desires in himself?

There is, however, a big problem with the ‘Gawrie’ reference in the following chapter. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins was first published in 1751. Paltock’s fable was hugely popular all through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 Its date (or rough period) of publication would have been familiar to any of Esmond’s early readers capable of enjoying the Spectator joke. And any reader incapable of picking up that literary joke would have been beneath the narrator’s notice. The 1751 date of Peter Wilkins’s publication is, however, wholly irreconcilable with the date at which the exchange between Harry and Beatrix takes place. Thackeray is insistent about the precise year (1712) and even the month and day on which the conversation occurs. (1 April – April Fool’s Day – is the date carried by the spoof Spectator paper). The nobleman Beatrix is about to marry (her ‘new suitor’, the fourth Duke of Hamilton, a historical figure) was killed in a duel in November 1712 – an episode which is used climactically soon afterwards in the novel. Queen Anne enters the novel in person, further clinching the 1712–14 date of action. The third volume of Esmond’s narrative is locked into precise, obtrusive, chronological markers which Thackeray seems intent on hammering home. In the final chapters, Esmond and Rachel emigrate to Virginia in 1718. She dies in 1736, and he is dead (presumably in the 1740s, around the period of the Scottish Rebellion) well before the publication of Paltock’s work from which he is supposed to quote in 1712.

Thackeray often makes small errors of chronology. But the ‘Gawrie’ lapse is gross – suspiciously so. It is equivalent to Hardy’s Jude quoting at length from The Waste Land, or Emma Woodhouse comparing Harriet Smith’s plight to that of Jane Eyre. It jars. And it occurs at a section in the novel where Thackeray is so exact and virtuosic in his play with eighteenth-century comic literature (a subject on which he was currently lecturing to British and American audiences, and on which he was the leading authority)3 as to render it wholly incredible that he did not register the error. And – if by some blindspot he did not register it – why did he not remove the reference in the revised edition of Esmond (as he dropped other embarrassing material)?

Readers certainly registered the lapse. Thackeray’s ‘Peter Wilkins’ solecism was gleefully seized on by early contributors to Notes and Queries, and every edited text of the novel ruefully notes it as a damaging anachronism. Rather than join the querists and annotators in gloating over or lamenting what looks like a monumental blooper, it makes better sense to assume that Thackeray put this anachronism into his text, and kept it there in revised editions, for an artistic purpose. That purpose can be deduced from the intricate narrative framework of the novel. The story is ‘edited’ by the daughter of Rachel and Esmond, Rachel Esmond Warrington (‘REW’), who has had the written ‘Memoirs’ (i.e. the text of the novel) from Esmond’s own pen. Her garrulous and frequently vulgar preface is dated 3 November 1778.

‘REW’ is an unequivocally ridiculous figure as she appears on the edges of the story: vain and jealous of her mother’s claim on her father’s affections, vengeful against ‘Mrs Tusher’ (i.e. Beatrix – who has to descend a long way from her ‘Duchess’ aspirations), headstrong, and rather stupid. And in the last volume REW loses editorial control over her material, inserting a series of increasingly fatuous footnotes, culminating in a bizarre footnoted dissertation in Chapter 39 on her father’s Christian gentleness of manners to all and sundry, not excluding ‘the humblest negresses on his estate’.

What we are led to assume is that REW’s spoiling pen has also intervened in the text of the ‘Memoirs’, as well as at its prefatory and marginal edges. The passages which speckle the third volume, predicting the eventual ‘Darby and Joan’ happiness of Esmond and Rachel have been inserted by REW we may plausibly deduce, at some point after 1751 and her parents’ death. Like other pious biographers, she wants to project a whitewashed image of her parents to the world. Thackeray himself was morbidly aware of the dangers of such loyal filial impulses, and the kind of pious absurdities they might lead to. He frequently instructed his daughters over the last years of his life, ‘No biography!’ – an instruction which his daughter Anne religiously observed (there was no family-authorized biography of Thackeray until the 1950s, when Gordon Ray was finally given permission).4 REW is not restrained as strictly as Thackeray’s daughters on the question of paternal biography – indeed, Esmond seems to have consciously charged his daughter with the care of his ‘Memoirs’ and a nihil obstat on their eventual publication. REW as we can see, habitually exceeds her strict editorial remit, adding her own ‘improvements’ which go well beyond the signed footnotes into the actual text of Esmond’s memoirs. But, impulsive and unscholarly as she is, REW betrays her interference by a gross solecism – a solecism so gross, indeed, that no one who knows the author(s) can picture Thackeray or Esmond making it. It is only too easy, however, to imagine Rachel Esmond Warrington perpetrating the blunder.

Notes

1. Gordon S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols. (London, 1954–78), ii. 67.

2. See, for instance, S.J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, British Authors before 1800 (New York, 1952), 391–2: ‘Coleridge, Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt all admired Peter Wilkins, and Southey wrote that the winged people of the book “are the most beautiful creatures of imagination that were ever devised.” Paltock’s book (dedicated to Elizabeth, Countess Northumberland, presumed to be the prototype of his heroine) ran through four editions before 1800 and at least sixteen later. A musical pantomime based on the book was produced in 1800 and a play in 1827.’

3. Thackeray began his reading for the ‘English Humourists’ in December 1850. The first series of lectures were delivered in London, 22 May–3 July 1851. Composition of Henry Esmond began in August 1851. He delivered lectures around the UK over the following year. The novel was published in October 1852, on the eve of Thackeray’s departure to lecture on the English Humourists in America.

4. See G.N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (New York, 1955), 1–3. Thackeray’s actual injunction to his daughters was ‘Mind, no biography!’