The After-Life of Catherine Hayes

Catherine Hayes was the real-life murderess whose story Thackeray drew on in Catherine.  Catherine ends with her execution, and yet somehow she lived on, in a marginal way, in his later works, even provoking a minor controversy by her appearance in the serialized version of Pendennis in 1850. 

Before Pendennis, at the end of Vanity Fair (1848), Catherine makes a brief, obscure appearance, when the narrator records Becky Sharp's three lawyers as being “Messrs. Burke, Thurtell, & Hayes” – Burke and Thurtell being the names of two other notorious murderers (Vanity Fair 877). 

Then, in April 1850, in the fifteenth number of Pendennis, Thackeray began Chapter 45 of the novel with one of his characteristic digressions on the nature of love.  In a manner reminiscent of the narrator's talk in Chapter 2 of Catherine about how people fall in love even with "vile, shrewish, squinting, hunchbacked, and hideous" persons (Catherine 22), Thackeray has the narrator of Pendennis comment that people need not be angels to be worshipped:

Let us admire the diversity of the tastes of mankind; and the oldest, the ugliest, the stupidest and most pompous, the silliest and most vapid, the greatest criminal, tyrant, booby, Bluebeard, Catherine Hayes, George Barnwell, amongst us, we need never despair.  I have read of the passion of a transported pickpocket for a female convict ...  that was as magnificent as the loves of Cleopatra and Antony, or Lancelot and Guinevere.

(The History of Pendennis,

in The Oxford Thackeray 12:1003)

This passage, strangely, provoked a greater controversy than the original story of Catherine ever did.  It happened that by 1850 there had appeared on the scene a new Catherine Hayes, a young Irish singer of that name who was, coincidentally, appearing in London when the unfortunate reference to her namesake appeared in the serialized version of Pendennis.  The result was an uproar in which the Irish press angrily attacked Thackeray for besmirching the name of Ireland's popular young singer.  In the Freeman's Journal, according to Thackeray's own account, the author of Pendennis was accused of insulting the whole Irish nation and was condemned as being "guilty of unmanly grossness and cowardly assault" (Oxford Thackeray 10: 590)

In vain did Thackeray publish an explanatory letter (in the Morning Chronicle) assuring those offended that he had been thinking only of the Catherine Hayes "who died at Tyburn, and subsequently perished in my novel—and not in the least about an amiable and beautiful young lady now acting at Her Majesty's Theatre" (Oxford Thackeray 10: 590).  He was, despite his disclaimer, "flogged all round the Irish press," as he said in a letter quoted by his daughter, Lady Ritchie, in her introduction to the Biographical Edition of Catherine. 

Lady Ritchie also recounts that her father received a threatening letter from one Briggs, who warned that a company of Irishmen was going to "chastise" him.  Briggs himself rented a room opposite Thackeray's house, causing such alarm that a police detective was assigned to protect the threatened author.  Thackeray, however, decided the situation was absurd, and went across the street to speak to Briggs, returning in twenty minutes' time, with peace restored and with a new chair, which he had bought from Briggs's landlady (Ritchie 4:xix-xxi; Ray 133-35, Monsarrat 233-34). 

Perhaps as a result of the controversy, the offending passage was cut out of later editions of Pendennis, although a passage in a later number of the novel alluding to the affair remained uncut.  In this later passage the narrator refers to the hero-worship by women of men who are not heroes, and adds: "This point has been argued before in a previous unfortunate sentence (which lately drew down all the wrath of Ireland upon the writer's head) ..." (Works 2: 520).

Works Cited

Monsarrat, Ann.  An Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man, 1811-1863.  London: Cassell, 1980.

Oxford Thackeray, The.  Ed. George Saintsbury.  17 volumes.  London: Oxford University Press, [1908].

Ray, Gordon N.  Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, 1847-1863.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958.

Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, Lady.  Introduction to Volume 4 of The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray.  The Biographical Edition.  13 vols.  London: Smith, Elder, 1899.  xiii-xxxvi.

Thackeray, William Makepeace.  Catherine: A Story.  Ed. Sheldon Goldfarb.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

-----.  Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero.  Ed. John Sutherland. The World’s Classics.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Works of William Makepeace Thackeray.  The Biographical Edition.  13 vols.  London: Smith, Elder, 1899.

Thackeray Today

Once upon a time there were just two authors: Dickens and Thackeray.  Well, maybe three.  There was also Douglas Jerrold.  The three form a triad, a noted critic of the time once said, the time being mid-Victorian England, the critic David Masson.

Who on earth is Douglas Jerrold, I hear you say?  Indeed.  For that matter who was David Masson?  Sigh.  Where are the Jonas Brothers of yesterday?

Though I specialized in Victorian literature for my PhD, I confess to never having read Douglas Jerrold and not really knowing much about David Masson.  I do know quite a lot about William Makepeace Thackeray, but sometimes I fear he is on his way to becoming the third Jonas brother.  He is certainly no longer ranked up there with Dickens, fighting it out at the top of the tree, as he himself once put it.

Nowadays if I tell someone I specialized in Thackeray, the common reaction is, Who?  And I tend to explain by saying, “The same time as Dickens, another Victorian novelist.”  And they nod sagely, and I talk about the work I did on Thackeray’s Catherine, which we both know they’ll never read.

Maybe they’ll read Vanity Fair.  Or they will at least have heard of it (though there may be some confusion with the magazine of that name).  Thackeray has become, essentially, a one book author.  And it’s a very good book, full of insight into human foibles and with an intriguing, fascinating, frustrating heroine (Becky Sharp), who over the years has sparked much critical debate.

I am not here to sell you on the merits of Thackeray’s other work – well, except maybe Catherine.  I’ve spent a lot of my life working on Catherine, producing an edition of it, hoping to get that edition reissued in paperback (so far a not yet attained goal), and just generally promoting it.  I even wrote a screenplay based on it (not that anyone was interested in turning it into a movie).

Why should we care about Catherine?  Well, I’m not sure we should.  But I do like it; it to me is a bit of a forerunner of Vanity Fair – it’s his first novel (novella, some would say; “story,” its own subtitle calls it), a decade before his masterpiece, and it shares some of its characteristics: the wry commentary on human ways, the roguish heroine (anti-heroine?).  For those not ready to tackle the 900 pages of Vanity Fair, or most other Victorian classics, it’s an easy introduction at 150 pages or so.  Like The Hobbit to Lord of the Rings (not that I’ve ever read The Hobbit … hmm).

Part of the struggle with promoting Catherine is that Thackeray himself thought it wasn’t very good (but what do authors know?).  Too gory, apparently (and it does have a nasty murder and a graphically described execution at the end, lifted almost verbatim from the eighteenth-century sources Thackeray was drawing on).  Later editors tended to cut out the gore, so many of the editions (including those online) are expurgated.

Also he feared he had become too friendly to his heroine, who really was supposed to be an anti-heroine.  Thackeray’s stated aim when he started out was to write a response to the Newgate school of fiction of that time.  You may know the opening line of one of its exemplars: “It was a dark and stormy night” (from Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford).  Thackeray thought Bulwer-Lytton (whom he hated generally), along with Harrison Ainsworth (yes, I know, another Jonas Brother) and even Dickens (for his Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist) were glorifying criminals.

He would set that right, though; he’d find the nastiest crime he could, out of the Newgate Calendar of true life crimes, and write fiction based on that, to show what criminals were like.  But as he told his mother at the end, he developed a “sneaking kindness” for Catherine, his anti-heroine, based on the real-life husband-murderer, Catherine Hayes, from 1726.  He turned her and her companions into charming rogues rather than vicious killers – which is a good thing, actually.  I’d much rather read about charming rogues than vicious killers.  But Thackeray thought he’d made a mess of things, and kept the work out of his Miscellanies, the collection of his works issued in his own lifetime.

For a long time Catherine languished in the pages of Fraser’s Magazine, where it had appeared in serial installments, until after Thackeray’s death it finally made it into one of the last volumes of his collected works put out by Smith, Elder, his publishers at the end.  It languished there too (in expurgated form, as I have mentioned).  It languishes still.  But I do think it’s worth a read, though I agree that the gory plagiarized ending is rather a mess (and maybe deserved to be expurgated: it’s there in all its glory in my edition, though).

Perhaps it is a cautionary tale, and not in the way Thackeray intended.  The leading figures of one age can vanish almost completely in the next (or the next after that).  Dickens alone remains, as he has been from the start, at the top of the tree of Victorian novelists – maybe of the tree of all novelists.  And why should that be?

I have no good answer, and perhaps am the wrong person to ask.  It would be a bit like asking fans of some almost forgotten mystery writer why Sherlock Holmes is still at the top of his tree.  Dickens was in some ways the mirror image of Thackeray.  Nowadays, as is the fashion, you can read biographical studies of Dickens revealing that he wasn’t very nice to his children or his wife.  In real life the man whose novels exuded kindness and compassion really wasn’t so kind and compassionate, it seems.

Thackeray, on the other hand, was a writer whose works exude cynicism and satire, mocking everyone and everything (most of the time, at least, and especially in his early works), but in real life he was the generous one, devoted to his daughters and his mad wife – though of course, as is the style, you can find negative portrayals of him too in modern biography.

And of course I oversimplify, but it’s almost as if you have a certain amount of kindness and compassion, and it either goes into your works or into your life.  There’s not enough for both.  And does this mean we’d rather read kind and compassionate literature (and then find out that their creator didn’t live up to his fictional image) rather than indulge in the slings and arrows of a satirist hurling Greek fire (I paraphrase Charlotte Brontë)?  Even if the hurler of Greek fire turns out to be a big teddy bear?

(Thackeray was a big man, 6 foot 3; he sprouted in his youth after an illness, and when asked if others were astonished to see how tall he had become, answered, “I don’t know.  My coats looked astonished.”  Carlyle called him a “big, fierce, weeping, hungry man; not a strong one.”)

There were other differences.  Dickens came from the lower middle class; Thackeray from the upper.  Their milieus were different; you don’t get lords and ladies in Dickens.  Not that Thackeray wrote “silver fork novels” (he satirized those, of course); he wrote as a sort of oppositional figure from within the upper middle class, reflecting the point of view of someone excluded from the best circles, as he felt he had been, in part because he’d lost his fortune and had to “write for his life,” descending into journalism, costing himself status.

But who can say why one writer lasts and another doesn’t?  Perhaps Dickens is simply better than Thackeray?  Thackeray would sometimes say so, at least in public.  “There’s no writing against [that],” he said after reading the depiction of the death of little Paul Dombey.  But this was when Thackeray’s own Vanity Fair was just appearing and winning him vast acclaim.  And aren’t there some who would prefer to read clever satires about the aristocracy rather than gritty, tearful depictions of the unfortunate?

Or maybe not.  Maybe there’s something more serious and more timeless about gritty misfortune.  Maybe Thackeray is too much of his age, and Dickens somehow passes beyond it.  And yet Thackeray’s commentary about human foibles is not really just about Victorian aristocrats; it lays bare human hypocrisy, selfishness, greed …  But again, perhaps that is less appealing in the long run than generous-minded support for the downtrodden, complete with more or less happy endings.  You don’t get a happy ending in Vanity Fair or Catherine.

Oddly, though, when Thackeray begins to go in for happier endings, in his later works, in his mellower later years after success had eased the pain of exclusion, he ends up often with something much too syrupy or just somehow odd.  Who cares about Henry Esmond finding happiness with the mother of the girl he thought he was in love with?  And isn’t it rather odd?  Maybe Dickens had just the right touch for that sort of thing, and Thackeray should have stuck to his satire.

Still, if you’re in the mood for satirical barbs (at you the reader, among others) you can do worse than sit down with Vanity Fair.  And if you want a bite-sized introduction to Thackeray (and Victorian fiction generally) you can have a go at Catherine.

THE POLITICS OF CATHERINE

Catherine is not a political novel in the sense of focusing on political or social issues in the manner of Dickens' Hard Times or Disraeli's Sybil, but it does contain several passing references to the political events of the early nineteenth century, all of which tend to suggest that the author is a Tory, even an ultra-Tory.  Judging from the political asides in Catherine, one might conclude that Thackeray in 1839 was resolutely anti-Whig from a conservative point of view and was opposed to the Reform Bill of 1832 and perhaps even to the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829.  However, an examination of Thackeray's political statements and activities in the late 1830’s reveals a rather different picture.

The two leading political parties in England in the late 1830s were the Tories and the Whigs, led respectively by Sir Robert Peel and Lord Melbourne.  Melbourne's Whigs were the governing party from 1835 until 1841, holding power thanks to the support of a small group of MPs known as Radicals.  The Radicals were advocates of political reform going beyond the terms of the Whig Reform Bill of 1832: they wanted to extend the franchise, introduce the secret ballot, and increase the frequency of elections.  Many of them had connections with the extra-Parliamentary Anti-Corn Law League, the organization of merchants and manufacturers who sought to repeal the Corn Laws which protected the landed aristocracy.  The Radicals and the Anti-Corn Law League were quite distinct from, and often at odds with, the other major extra-Parliamentary group of this period, the Chartists, who launched two violent but abortive uprisings in 1839 on behalf of the working class.

The position of Fraser's Magazine, in which Catherine appeared in serialized form between May 1839 and February 1840, was clearly Tory –  even ultra-Tory, to use the term applied to that section of the Tory party that had felt betrayed when Peel and the Duke of Wellington, the other major Tory leader, introduced Catholic Emancipation.  Fraser's continually attacked the Whigs, and was particularly critical of their attempts to find allies to the left so as to create "a confederacy of Whigs, Radicals, Republicans, Chartists, Socialists, and Atheists" (Jan. 1840, 21:121).  And despite its unhappiness with the Tory leaders over Catholic Emancipation, what Fraser's longed to see was "Toryism ... in the ascendant" (Jan. 1840, 21:31).

Thackeray had once been an ultra-Tory in the Fraser's mould.  When Catholic Emancipation came in, the seventeen-year-old Thackeray wrote articles against it and expressed "great grief & consternation" at its passage (Letters 1:34, 34n, 55).  At the time of the Reform Bill of 1832, he wrote in his diary that "the country [has] gone to the Devil!"  He worried that "to morrow perhaps a king may be pulled off his throne," and he looked on the Duke of Wellington as a "hero" for his opposition to the Reformers (Letters 1:199, 200, 189).

By the late 1830’s, however, Thackeray's political attitudes had changed.  No longer did he stand against Reform; on the contrary, he embraced it and criticized the Whigs for not going far enough with it.  Writing as the Paris correspondent of the Radical paper, the Constitutional, in 1836-1837, he criticized the "so-called liberal ministry" in England for not promoting the liberal cause in Spain and Portugal.  Attacking the "lazy Whigs," he praised instead the Radicals and celebrated Daniel O'Connell, the Irish agitator for Catholic Emancipation, saying that it was thanks to O'Connell that "freedom in Ireland and Radicalism in England ... [had] advanced."  He warned that the French government of Louis-Philippe would try to stop the progress of British reform, but expressed confidence that the French would not succeed:  "We are luckily too strong ... to be bullied back into Toryism" (Mr. Thackeray's Writings 193, 194, 172, 213, 130, 135, 128). 

Moreover while writing Catherine, in 1839, Thackeray made two drawings to assist a campaign by the Anti-Corn Law League.  And in 1840, he wrote his mother that he hoped the day would come when "the rascally Whigs and Tories ... [will] disappear from among us" (Letters 1:385-86, 458).  He disavowed Chartism, and indeed seemed terrified of Chartist violence and working-class revolution (Letters 1:410-11, 458), but he declared himself to be a "republican" and said he would like to see "all men equal, and this bloated aristocracy blasted to ... the winds" (Letters 1: 458).

This anti-aristocratic attitude can be found in Catherine, stripped of its political significance, in the unflattering portrayal of the senile Count von Galgenstein in the latter part of the novel.  Similarly, Thackeray's attack on the upper classes as drunken, gambling womanizers (in the account of Corporal Brock's progress in high society in Chapter 5) accords with the political attitude he was expressing in the late 1830’s outside the pages of Catherine.  However, within Catherine there is no hint of Thackeray's political Radicalism. 

It is true that there is an attack, in the opening paragraph of the novel, on the Whig government's roguery which could come from a Radical position as easily as from a Tory one, but later in the novel, when Thackeray associates the Reform Bill with corruption and favourably contrasts the Duke of Wellington and another Tory politician with the radical O'Connell and the Whig Lord Melbourne, the attitude of the novel seems clearly Tory.  And if the narrator's comment in Chapter 6 on the popularity of Catholicism is meant to be a veiled attack on the Catholic Emancipation Act, then Thackeray in Catherine is in effect putting himself forward as an ultra-Tory, taking a position completely in accord with that of Fraser's.

Indeed, one is forced to conclude that the reason Thackeray's politics in Catherine appear to be Tory or ultra-Tory is that he was trying to accommodate himself to the politics of Fraser's.  If the novel had not been written for Fraser's, it might not have contained Tory political statements; in fact, it might not have contained political statements at all, for Thackeray did not generally take up political issues in his fiction.  He did not write about the plight of factory workers in the manner of Dickens or Elizabeth Gaskell; nor did he present proposals for reorganizing society in the manner of Benjamin Disraeli.  Indeed, in two reviews he wrote in 1845 of books by Disraeli and Charles Lever, he expressed disapproval of novelists who wandered into "the crabbed labyrinths of political controversy" and who used their novels as platforms to "tell us that society is diseased, the laws unjust, the rich ruthless, the poor martyrs, the world lop-sided, and vice versâ."  He did not want such "instruction," he said, but preferred "romances which do not treat of algebra, religion, political economy, or other abstract science" (Morning Chronicle 72, 71, 77-78).

Of course, one could say that Thackeray was being political himself, if one defines the term broadly, in attacking corruption and ineptitude among the higher orders, as he does in his depiction of Lord Steyne and Sir Pitt Crawley in Vanity Fair.  And to the extent that his attacks express a desire to eliminate class distinction, one could say that there is a political element to them.  However, since the attacks on the upper classes are usually coupled with fantasies about rising into their ranks (consider Becky Sharp, Barry Lyndon, and in Catherine itself Corporal Brock), the strongest message that emerges from Thackeray's fiction is not that aristocracy should be abolished but that the aristocrats should open their ranks to certain deserving but currently excluded individuals.

In any case, what is clearly not found in Thackeray's  fiction are political programs, examinations of specific political or social issues, or advocacy of the rights of one social class against another.  Nor, in his fiction outside of Catherine, does Thackeray generally make the sort of partisan political comments found in his first novel.  It was more  typical of him to write mockingly of political partisans in general than to join one side or the other.  Thus, in "The Bedford-Row Conspiracy," a story he began publishing in the New Monthly Magazine even before Catherine completed its run in Fraser's, he makes fun of one political activist who becomes a Radical solely because his sweetheart leaves him for a Tory and of another who deserts the Tories as soon as they lose power.  Similarly, in Chapter 7 of Vanity Fair, he mocks the political trimming of the Crawley family, and in Chapter 1 of Catherine itself he invites the reader to laugh at the political shifts of Corporal Brock's mother.

Thackeray was never a very good political partisan.  Even when an ultra-Tory in his youth, he could denounce Reform in his diary and then go off to Cornwall to campaign in an election for his Radical friend Charles Buller against the Tories (Letters 1:246).  Later, in his Radical period, while writing his pro-Reform articles from Paris for the Constitutional, he confided to his mother that he found the Paris version of the Radical party to be "the most despicable I ever knew" and that as a result he was in danger of becoming a Tory (Ray 191).  "I am a very weak & poor politician," he confessed a few years later, "only good for outside articles and jeux d'esprit" (Letters 2:225).

It seems, therefore, that the Tory partisanship of Catherine was not Thackeray's but Fraser's – and this partisanship misrepresents Thackeray's views not simply because he was a Radical rather than a Tory at the time, but because essentially he was not a political partisan of any sort and did not approve of harnessing literature to politics.  As he put it in a letter to his mother in December 1839, using a phrase that would become a battle cry at the end of the century: "Criticism has been a party matter with us till now, and literature a poor political lackey – please God we shall begin ere long to love art for art's sake"(Letters 1:396).

Works Cited

Ray, Gordon N.  Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955.

Thackeray, William Makepeace.  Mr. Thackeray's Writings in "The National Standard" and "Constitutional."  London, 1899 (abbreviated Mr. Thackeray's Writings).

-----.  The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray.  Ed. Gordon N. Ray.  4 volumes.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945-46 (abbreviated Letters).

-----.  William Makepeace Thackeray: Contributions to the Morning Chronicle.  Ed. Gordon N. Ray.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955 (abbreviated Morning Chronicle).