Thackeray, William

(1811 -1863)

Information

Thackeray – Margate as Literary Setting

The first instalment of Thackeray’s ‘ A Shabby Genteel Story’ appeared in ‘ Fraser’s Magazine’, to which he was a regular contributor, in June 1840. Subsequent instalments, published after his stay in Margate, feature the town as the setting for the main events, a suitable background for the frayed and pretentious gentility of Mrs. Gann and her family. The usual gallery of grotesque Thackeray characters is paraded against the story of the tragically deceived Caroline, which gives a bitter undertone to the whole tale. In a preface written for a new edition of the story, Thackeray acknowledged this as a reflection of the sorrow in his circumstances at the time. He wrote this in 1857, twelve years after he had to place his wife in care for the rest of her life and ten years after the overwhelming success of ‘ Vanity Fair’. Thackeray undoubtedly drew on his visit to Margate in 1840 to set the scene for his story. The public houses and hotels he names may no longer exist but the High Street and Hawley Square are still part of modern Margate.

Quotations

In the year 1835, when this story begins, there stood in a certain back street in the town of Margate a house, on the door of which might be read, in gleaming brass, the name of Mr. GANN. It was the work of a single smutty servant-maid to clean this brass-plate every morning, and to attend as far as possible to the wants of Mr. Gann, his family, and lodgers ; and his house being not very far from the sea, and as you might, by climbing up to the roof, get a sight between two chimneys of that multitudinous element, Mrs. Gann set down her lodgings as fashionable ; and declared on her cards that her house commanded ‘ a fine view of the sea’. … Mr. Gann … always wore a rattling great telescope, with which he might be seen for hours on the sea-shore or the pier, examining the ships, the bathing-machines, the ladies’ schools as they paraded up and down the esplanade, and all other objects which the telescopic view might give him.
… the silver moon lighted up the bay, and , supported by a numerous and well-appointed train of gas-lamps, illuminated the streets of a town, - of autumn eves so crowded and so gay ; of gusty April nights , so desolate. At this still hour (it might be half-past seven) two ladies passed the gates of Wright’s Hotel ‘in shrouding mantle wrapped, and velvet cap’. Up the deserted High Street toiled they, by gaping rows of empty bathing –houses, by melancholy Jolly’s French bazaar, by mouldy pastry-cooks, blank reading-rooms, by fishmongers who never sold a fish, mercers who vended not a yard of riband – because, as yet, the season was not come, … at High Street’s corner, near to Hawley Square, they passed the house of Mr. Fincham, chemist, who doth not only healthful drugs supply, but likewise sells cigars – the worst cigars that ever mortal man gave threepence for.