William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray wrote a novel with no hero in it and was for twenty years the only English novelist mentioned in the same breath as Dickens. He was born in Calcutta to an East India Company official, sent home at five, and educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge, which he left without a degree. He lost most of an inherited fortune to gambling and the collapse of Indian banks, tried painting in Paris, and turned to journalism because he needed the money - years of squibs, parodies and art criticism for Fraser's and Punch under a run of pseudonyms. Vanity Fair, serialised in 1847-48, made him: a novel subtitled A Novel without a Hero, in which Becky Sharp climbs by every means available to a woman with no money and the narrator declines to condemn her outright. Pendennis, Henry Esmond and The Newcomes followed. His private life was harder than the satire suggests - his wife Isabella became insane after the birth of their third daughter and lived under care for over thirty years, outliving him, while he raised the children. He was the first editor of the Cornhill Magazine. He died suddenly at fifty-two. Charlotte Bronte dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him without knowing about his wife, and the coincidence produced gossip that the book had been written by a former governess of his. The two met and did not get on. His Book of Snobs and the Yellowplush Papers came out of the Punch years. He lectured in Britain and America on the English humourists and on the four Georges, which paid better than the novels. Anthony Trollope wrote his life for the English Men of Letters series. He is buried at Kensal Green and has a bust in Westminster Abbey.

• Lived: 1811 CE – 1863 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: writer