Intrepidly into the sea

This month marks 170 years since the final monthly number of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes appeared in August 1855, an anniversary that recalls the novelist’s life and his enduring ties with Brighton - above all the pages that put Brighton’s beach, pier and sea-air squarely into Victorian fiction. In Vanity Fair he sketches the resort as ‘a clean Naples with genteel lazzaroni’, while in The Newcomes he steps onto the Chain Pier and, in a few gleeful lines, all but lets the surf spray the page.

Thackeray was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811, sent to England as a child, and educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge (he left without taking a degree). After a short flirtation with art and a loss of much of his inheritance, he turned to journalism and illustration, writing for Fraser’s Magazine and later Punch, where The Book of Snobs made his name. He married Isabella Shawe in 1836; the marriage was shadowed by her severe mental illness, and he raised their daughters - Anne (later the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie) and Harriet Marian - largely on his own. His major novels followed in quick succession: Vanity Fair (1847-48), Pendennis (1848-50), Henry Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1853-55) and The Virginians (1857-59). In 1860 he became the first editor of the Cornhill Magazine. He died in London on 24 December 1863 and was buried at Kensal Green. (See Wikipedia for more on Thackeray’s life and this sketched self-portrait.)

Brighton sits in the middle of both the life and the work. Thackeray knew the resort first-hand - letters mention him ‘sitting on the chain pier in a bath chair’, dosing himself with sea-breezes - and he was fond of calling the place ‘Doctor Brighton’, a quackish but kindly physician for overworked Londoners. In July 1859 Thackeray stayed at the Royal Crescent Hotel and produced a small watercolour titled Brighton from The Royal Crescent Hotel, July 17th 1859. Though best known as a novelist and satirist, he had trained as an artist and continued to sketch throughout his life, leaving behind drawings and painted vignettes of the places he visited.

When looking at his fiction, Brighton is less a backdrop than a mood: brisk, gaudy, restorative, faintly satirical. Vanity Fair uses Brighton as a stage where masks slip. Newly married George Osborne and Amelia Sedley take the air on the front; Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley work their separate hustles in lodgings, billiard rooms and on the cliff; and as the Waterloo campaign gathers, ‘all the principal personages’ decamp. Thackeray’s aside - Brighton as ‘a clean Naples with genteel lazzaroni’ - is both postcard and pin-prick.

The Newcomes (available to borrow digitally at Internet Archive) brings its readers to the seafront with a panoramic relish, the narrator Arthur Pendennis surveying the parade of bath-chairs, schoolgirls and telescope-wielding day-trippers. The scene catches the democratic sprawl of the beach long before cameras made it commonplace.

‘In Steyne Gardens, Brighton, the lodging-houses are among the most frequented in that city of lodging-houses. These mansions have bow-windows in front, bulging out with gentle prominences, and ornamented with neat verandahs, from which you can behold the tide of human-kind as it flows up and down the Steyne, and that blue ocean over which Britannia is said to rule, stretching brightly away eastward and westward. The chain-pier, as everybody knows, runs intrepidly into the sea, which sometimes, in fine weather, bathes its feet with laughing wavelets, and anon, on stormy days, dashes over its sides with roaring foam. Here, for the sum of twopence, you can go out to sea and pace this vast deck without need of a steward with a basin. You can watch the sun setting in splendour over Worthing, or illuminating with its rising glories the ups and downs of Rottingdean. You see the citizen with his family inveigled into the shallops of the mercenary native mariner, and fancy that the motion cannot be pleasant; and how the hirer of the boat, otium et oppidi laudi et rura sui, haply sighs for ease, and prefers Richmond or Hampstead. You behold a hundred bathing-machines put to sea; and your naughty fancy depicts the beauteous splashing under their white awnings. Beneath the rippled sands (stay, are they rippled sands or shingly beach?) the prawn-boy seeks the delicious material of your breakfast. Breakfast - meal in London almost unknown, greedily devoured in Brighton! In ten vessels now near the shore the sleepless mariner has ventured forth to seize the delicate whiting, the greedy and foolish mackerel, and the homely sole. Hark to the twanging horn! it is the early coach going out to London.’