THACKERAY AND “THE GREAT MASTER OF CRAIGENPUTTOCH”: A NEW REVIEW OF THE LIFE OF JOHN STERLING — AND A NEW UNDERSTANDING

Abstract

TWO OF THE BEST accounts of the relations between Thackeray and Carlyle are those by Gordon N. Ray in his great life and letters of the novelist, and the well-informed essay by C. R. Sanders “The Carlyles and Thackeray” in his Carlyle’s Friendships and Other Studies. Yet both of them are crucially and entirely wrong in attributing a review of a work by Carlyle in the Times to Thackeray when we now find it was obviously by a regular reviewer Samuel Phillips.¹ So they are mistaken in several conclusions that go well beyond biographical detail and bear on the way both writers represent mid-Victorian opinion in matters affecting fiction and belief. The Times, the two writers, and the work in question, which was Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling (1851), were all opinion-formers, going to the centre of what we think of as Victorianism. But it seemed curiously clear to the otherwise perceptive Sanders and Gordon Ray that, since Carlyle and Thackeray differed on a number of questions such as the place of the great man in history, it was acceptable that the savage and stupid Times review of 1 November 1851 was his. After all, Thackeray’s daughter Lady Ritchie declared that she had talked to Carlyle about The Life of Sterling in 1871, when she “spoke of her father’s review in the Times” (Ritchie 160), with the result that it was included in the standard Centenary edition of his Works.