In his masterpiece Vanity Fair, William Thackeray wrote: “Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.” Below, the Victorian satirist writes to his own mother with an update on various social engagements and physical complaints.
To Mrs. Carmichael-Smythe
22 November 1829
Cambridge. Monday Night.
The weather is bitter cold in spite of wind in tempests & rain in torrents; these have had an uncomfortable effect on my eyes wh. will prevent my writing a very long letter; I have therefore discontinued my night reading. Do you know that I fear the Christmas turkey must not smoke for me except at Cambridge. For I must read to take anything like a respectable degree. Dismiss your visions of wranglers, my dear Mother, if I am a Senior Optime you should be very well content. These are however as unpleasant things to write of as they are to study. So we will no more. My pumps were an inch too short, & the rain poured in torrents so that I stayed at home instead of going to Dr. Thackeray’s Ball. Yesterday as I was walking home with a great tin box of oil colors under my arm wh. a man gave me, I met the charming Mistress Pryme who invited me to a tea tomorrow. I belong to a debating Club now in our College only consisting of 7. There are amongst them 3 1st Class Men, who are very nice fellows only they smell a little of the shop. The Trinity boat has been most ignominiously beaten by the Peter-House.
Our freshmen this year are not so many as the Johnians who are obliged to have 4 chapels & 2 dinners a day. I thank my Fortune daily I was not a Johnian. It is the lowest, most childish, piggish punning place. I am sitting in a mans rooms with a most excellent bottle of Claret before me to wh. I have paid sincere & frequent visits, I have however valorously broken the cork into the bottle, & there being no corkscrew, must abstain from further potation. I was at a gay dinner at Youngs yesterday. Good bye dear Mother I have a long walk to take with my friends. I hope the storms wont [sic] visit the estate. Love to father & Mary. Your affte. son—
From The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray. Vol. I. Edited by Gordon N. Ray. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945. pp. 106-7.
FURTHER READING
Find here Edwin Percy Whipple’s 1865 review of Vanity Fair.
An excerpt from an unusual Thackeray essay, “Ogres.”