LITERARY GOSSIP.

LIFE OF THACKERAY.

Everybody knows Thackeray, and nobody knows any thing about him. We are therefore glad to help ourselves and our readers to a little knowledge of him, derived from a German authority by the Tribune. He was born in Calcutta in the year 1811, and is now consequently 41 years old. His father was a high official of the East India Company, which secured him the entrée of the best society, and a large income. Our author was born a “gentleman.” He went to school in England—experienced all the tyranny of a brutal master, and the misery of that system of fagging, a legalized bullying of the little boys by the larger, which is so repulsive to every noble and decent feeling, and which the Englishmen so stoutly defend, as a process which “takes the starch out of pride,” but which is altogether too unreasonable not to lose temper about in discussing. Thackeray has revenged himself upon this inhuman and disgusting system in his Christmas story of “Dr. Birch and his Young Friends,” and he has a general fling at Boarding Schools in the opening of “Vanity Fair,” in which he exhorts the reader to trust the promise of a school prospectus no more than he does the praises of an epitaph. He left school for the University at Cambridge, where he studied with Kinglake, the author of Eothen—Eliot Warburton, who wrote “The Crescent and the Cross,” and was lost with the Amazon, and Richard Moncton Milnes, a well-known London litterateur, a poet, and biographer of Keats, and an ornamental liberal member of Parliament.

Meanwhile the elder Thackeray died, and the future historian of Vanity Fair, launched himself into its midst with an annual income of about a thousand pounds. He lived according to his whims, drew sharp and clever caricatures, smoked, lounged, feasted upon books of every kind, and opened the oyster of the world at leisure. His mother, a woman of great beauty, and full of talent and tenderness, whose memory is so filially embalmed in the character of the mother of Arthur Pendennis, married again, about this time, and the young man, always the object of the proudest maternal love, came into possession of his paternal inheritance. He immediately returned from the continent where he had been staying a little time, and took up his residence in the Temple. Nascent Jurists and Budding Barristers at Law, who have completed a full course at Cambridge or Oxford, enjoy the privilege of paying high prices for comfortable quarters in the Temple, and of eating splendid dinners in its ancient dining-room. Here Thackeray entered himself as a student of jurisprudence, and in the character of Warrington in “Pendennis,” he has developed the career of the students, and the varied life of the Temple, in some of the best passages he has ever written. Henry Taylor, the dramatist, author of Philip Van Artevelde, is among the residents of the Temple, and is mentioned by the German Commentator as the original of a character in Thackeray’s romance. We are at a loss to determine which, for if Warrington be so intended, he seems to us to lose the point. Warrington is a man of power without a career—Taylor, a man of talent, who has certainly achieved a reputation quite equal to his just claims. However, the Temple not only furnished our author characters, but also the necessity of drawing them; for while there, and when scarcely more than 23 years old, the young man had “fooled away” his property, and was poor. The days of smoking, lounging, and “loafing” were evidently ending, and he betook himself to Paris, conceiving, from his facility in sketching, that he was born for an artist. A brief time among the Parisian ateliers sufficed to remove this idea. But as his step-father at this period established a journal in London, called “The Constitutional,” the artist naturally became its Paris correspondent. Thus, like Dickens, he commenced his literary career as a journalist. In Paris, Thackeray met his present wife, an Irish lady of good family, and married her.

From this time dates his first purely literary effort—the “Yellowplush Papers,” afterward published as “Jeames’ Diary”—in which his characteristic tendency is clearly indicated. The step-father’s “Constitutional” absorbed most of his property, of course, and failed. The son was obliged to return to England, and to begin work in earnest for himself. He wrote for Frazer’s Magazine and literary reviews for “The Times,” in which he ridiculed the early Bulwer style of romance—the interesting burglars and romance murderers. But the public, resolved upon enjoying the fascination of crime sentimentally described, received his strictures coldly. The struggling author turned to the humorous, sketchy style, to win an ear and gain a penny. Literary friends, more fairly favored than he, opened their purses to him; but his wife became insane, and is, at this day, the inmate of an asylum. He worked industriously with his pen—he wrote the “Great Hoggarty Diamond,” “The Snob Papers,” the “Irish Sketch Book,” “Journey from Cornhill to Cairo,” “Our Street,” “Rebecca and Rowena,” “The Kickleburies on the Rhine,” and smaller papers, under the name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh; and Chambers’ Cyclopedia commended him, before he was so universally known, as “a quiet observer.” In all these sketches his characteristic power shows itself. The two last were written after the great fame and success of “Vanity Fair;” but they are only studies for his large pictures—and it may be noted as proof of his genuine genius, that the completed figures are infinitely superior to the designs, and it is in completing the picture from the speech, so that it shall gain in meaning as well as in elaboration and size, that the true artist is shown. Mr. Thackeray offered the MS. of “Vanity Fair” to a magazine. The editor declined it. The author published it, and made his name immortal. It was followed by “Pendennis,” a mellower, riper fruit, to our fancy; but we have no thought of entering upon a criticism of the author. His latest public literary work is the course of lectures upon the wits of Queen Anne’s times, which has been read before literary and fashionable London, and received with the greatest applause. Copious abstracts were published in the leading journals, and there is little doubt that they are quite worthy their author. Mr. Thackeray is now understood to be engaged in completing a novel of which the scene is laid among the persons and the times treated in his lectures.

Of Mr. Thackeray’s intention to visit the United States, we hear nothing said. We think that there could be little doubt of the success of his lectures here.

Tight Lacing.—In “Dickens’ Household Words,” we find a notice of the first Evening School for Women opened at Birmingham for the instruction of young women who labor in the factories during the day. The experiment has been rewarded with complete success. It is solely under the charge of ladies, who, with the most praiseworthy assiduity, devote their evenings to the moral and intellectual culture of these poor sisters of toil, adding the force of example—even in matters of dress—to the wisdom of precept. The following passage is worthy of the attention of our fair readers.

“As to the matter of dress. There can be nothing but good in telling the plain fact, that the most earnest and devoted of the ladies have found it their duty to wear no stays, in order to add the force of example to their efforts to save the young women who are killing themselves with tight-lacing alone. One poor scholar died almost suddenly from tight lacing alone. Another was, presently after, so ill, from the same abuse, that she could do nothing. A third could not stoop to her desk, and had to sit at a higher one, which suited the requirements of her self-imposed pillory. In overlooking those who were writing, we were struck by the short breathing of several of them. We asked what their employments were, supposing them to be of some pernicious nature. It was not so: all were cases of evident tight-lacing. The ugly walling-up of the figure is a painful contrast to the supple grace of some of the teachers. The girls see this grace, but will not believe, till convinced by the feel, that there are no stays to account for it.

“‘And what have you got on?’ said one of the ladies, feeling in like manner. ‘Why, you are perfectly walled up. How can you bear it?’

“‘Why,’ answered the girl, ‘I have got only six-and-twenty whalebones.’

“The lady obtained some anatomical plates, and formed a class of the older women, apart from the rest, to whom she displayed the consequences, in full, of this fatal practice. At the moment, they appear to disbelieve the facts; but a little time shows that they have taken the alarm—to what extent, the dress of their daughters, as they grow up, will probably indicate.

“The number on the books of this school is about one hundred; the average attendance is about fifty. The eagerness to attend is remarkable; and the dread of losing their place through non-attendance is testified in the strongest ways. Many are detained late at their work on Friday evenings; but they come, if only for a quarter of an hour; or if prevented, perhaps send a supplicating note that their place may not be filled up.”

American Literature in England.—America is rising in literary greatness with startling vigor. The spirit of progressive enlightenment is there ever present, and the motto blazoned in the intellectual escutcheon of the nation is, “Excelsior!” We were aware that a republic with a cheap and unfettered press, and a system of public schools that brings the means of an education within the limits of the humblest class of society, must naturally have a co-existent amount of national intelligence, which other nations with less advantages could not possess. We have long been admirers of the genius of Cooper, Irving, and Bryant; but it is only recently that we have been made acquainted with the weird and subtle efforts of Edgar A. Poe, the remarkable power of Hawthorne, the playful fancy of Holmes and Saxe, the beautiful melodies of Morris, and the ingenious heart-picturings of Grace Greenwood, the sisters Carey, Mrs. Kirkland, and Clara Moreton. The works of these writers have contributed to increase our already formed admiration of the remarkable freshness and vigor of intellect that is daily developing itself in the United States; and it is with a joyous friendliness that we recognize the growing claims of the young country to a place among the literary nations of this era.—London Daily News.