English journalist, novelist, famous for his novel Vanity Fair (1847-48), a tale of two middle-class London families. Most of Thackeray's major novels were published as monthly serials. Thackeray studied in a satirical and moralistic light upper- and middle-class English life – he was once seen as the equal of his contemporary Dickens, or even as his superior. The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844) was adapted to screen by Stanley Kubrick.

"This I set as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without a positive hump, may marry whom she likes." (Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848)

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India, the only son of Richmond Thackeray, a Collector in the East Indian Company's service. After his father died in 1815 he was sent to home to England by his mother, Anne Becher (1792-1864); she remained in India. He was educated at Charterhouse (or "Slaughterhouse" as he called it), where he became interested in journalism (and grew to six feet three inches), and at Trinity College, Cambridge. Thackeray abandoned his studies without taking a degree, having lost some of his inheritance of twenty thousand pounds through gambling. In the beginning of the 1830s he visited Germany, where he met Goethe, still very creative in his later years.

During 1831-33 Thackeray studied law at the Middle Temple, London, and then gave it up. In 1833 he brought the National Standard, but lost his fortune a year later in the Indian bank failures and other bad investments. According to an anecdote, Thackeray offered to undertake the task of illustrating Dickens's Pickwick Papers in 1836, but the author himself found Thackeray's drawings unsuitable.

In 1836 Thackeray married a poor Irish girl, Isabella Gethin Shawe (1816-1894); they had three daughters. Their first child, Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919), became a writer – her impressionistic texts impressed Virginia Woolf, who drew a portrait of her in Night and Day (1919) as 'Mrs Hilbery.' Ritchie (1837-1919) published several novels, and contributed to an 1898-99 edition of her father's works. A prominent intellectual figure of her time and well-acquainted with a number of the great names of British literature, she also wrote memoirs of her contemporaries, including Tennyson (1809-1892) and the critic and art historian John Ruskin (1819-1900).

After art studies in Paris, Thackeray returned in 1837 to London and started his career as a hard working journalist to support his family. Often he used absurd pen names such as George Savage Fitz-Boodle, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Théophile Wagstaff, and C.J. Yellowplush, Esq. Like Dickens, he was a staunch opponent of the death penalty. Under the pseudonym Hibernis Hibernior he wrote during the Irish Famine: "As the people are starving, as usual, and the begging season is to be uncommonly well attended, Mr. MAGEE begs to warn the people of England, THAT THE TWO STRONGEST OF FEELINGS OF THE IRISH, ARE HATRED TO ENGLAND, AND A SANGUINE HOPE OF IRELAND." ('Traitors to the British Government', Punch, No. 384, p. 218)

Thackeray contributed to Fraser's Magazine, a conservative publication, The Morning Chronicle, The Morning Chronicle, and New Monthly Magazine, and many other periodicals. In addition, he reviewed books for The Times. Thackeray's writings attracted first attention in Punch, where he satirized English snobbery. These sketches reappeared in 1848 as The Book of Snobs, in which he stated that "he who meanly admires mean things is a Snob."

After the death of her third child in 1840, Isabella Thackeray suffered a mental breakdown, from which she never recovered, through she survived Thackeray, by thirty years. Isabella died of apoplexy in a private asylum. Thackeray's relationship with his daughters was affectionate and caring. He had time to play with his children, he always talked to them as if they were grown ups, and even introduced them to opera when they were very young. Anne Thackeray Ritchie later wrote: "Ours was more or less a bachelor's establishment, and the arrangements of the house varied between a certain fastidiousness and the roughest simplicity. We had shabby tableclothes, alternating with some of my grandmother's fine linen; we had old Derby china for our dessert of dried figs and dry biscuits, and a silver teapot . . . for breakfast, also three cracked cups and saucers of unequal patterns and sizes. . . . " (Thackeray: Volume 1: Interviews and Recollections, edited by Phillip Collins, 1983, p. 81)  

Already in his first novel, Catherine, originally published in Fraser's Magazine (1839-1849), Thackeray broke with the literary conventions of his day, saying at the end: "The characters of the tale ARE immoral, and no doubt of it; but the writer humbly hopes the end is not so. The public was, in our notion, dosed and poisoned by the prevailing style of literary practice, and it was necessary to administer some medicine that would produce a wholesome nausea, and afterwards bring about a more healthy habit."

The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), portrayed an adventurer, opportunist, and gambler, who serves in the Seven Years War, first under the English flag, and then in the Prussian army, gains wealth, and eventually is punished for his imperfections. "Suppose in a game of life – and it is but a twopenny game after all – you are equally eager of winning," Thackeray wrote much later in 'Autour de mon Chapeau' (1863). "Shall you be ashamed of your ambition, or glory in it?"

In Vanity Fair, set at the time of the Napoleonic wars, Thackeray created one of the most fascinating immoral female characters, Becky Sharp, who manages to avoid the fate of Barry Lyndon: "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year."  The book brought Thackeray prosperity and made him an established author and popular lecturer in Europe and in the United States. 

Vanity Fair was sub-titled 'A Novel without a Hero'. "Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds." The vast satirical panorama of a materialistic society centers on Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, good-natured but 'silly.' They are two boarding-school friends, whose destinies are contrasted. Clever and ambitious Becky is born into poverty as the daughter of a penniless artist. Her plans to marry Amelia's brother Joseph fail. She marries Rowdon Crawley, but he is disinherited. Becky manages to live at the height of fashion through the patronage of Lord Steyne. When her husband discovers the truth, he departs to become the governor of Coventry Island. Becky is ostracized and she moves to the Continent. In the meantime Amelia's stockbroker father is ruined. Amelia is loved by William Dobbin but she marries George Osborne – he dies in the battle of Waterloo. Amelia's son is left into the care of his grandfather, who dies and leaves him a fortune. Amelia travels in the Continent with his brother and they meet Becky. Dobbin has returned from India and disapproves Amelia's kindness to Becky. Older and disillusioned, Dobbin and Amelia can marry. Becky regains her hold over Joseph, who dies in suspicious circumstances. Becky's husband Rowdon dies, and Becky ends the novel in the guise of a pious widow. (See also: Anthony Trollope, Michael Innes) "It is quite feasible to say that Vanity Fair is the great novel that it is, just as Madame Bovary and Éducation Sentimentale are the great and still greater novels that they are, just because their authors were both in love with, and passionate intrigued by, their respective heroines." (The March of Literature: from Confucius' Day to Our Own by Ford Madox Ford, introduction by Alexander Theroux, 1994 p. 812)

Like many of Thackeray's novels, Vanity Fair is not devoid of racism: the character Rhoda Swartz, "the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitt's," enters the story in the opening chapter. Thackeray believed in Lavater's physiognomic theories and commented, after observing  African-Americans, that those men were "not my men and brethren, these strange people with retreating foreheads, and with great obtruding lips and jaws . . .  Sambo is not my man and brother." ('Racism in the Mid-Victorian Novel: Thackeray's Philip' by John Peck, in Varieties of Victorianism: The Uses of a Past, edited by Gary Day, 1998, p. 128)

Thackeray's long love for Jane Brookfield, the wife of an old Cambridge friend, Reverend William Brookfield, ended when she got pregnant again by her husband. William demanded that she cut off all contact with him. Following the example of Dickens, Thackeray went to America to deliver a series of lectures. There he also pursued a relationship with the 19-year-old Sally Baxter. "I have put the two letter in the fire wh. I wrote yesterday—two very fine long fond sentimental letters—They were too long and sentimental and fond." (to Sarah Baxter, 22 Decemeber 1852, in Selected Letters of William Makepeace Thackeray, edited by Edgar F. Harden, 1996, p. 234) The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., appeared in three volumes in 1852, and reflected the melancholic period in the life of the author.

By the end of his career, Thackeray's disillusionment with contemporary culture seems to have deepened. In The Adventures of Philip (1862) the protagonist, Philip, is out of place in a world that does not accommodate his vision of masculinity. Deborah A. Thomas has explained  in Thackeray and Slavery (1993) Philip's racism as a manifestation of hardening attitudes toward racial groups in British thinking in the middle of the nineteenth century. It has been said, that the only major Victorian writer, who was even more offensive that Thackeray, was Thomas Carlyle.

What becomes of Thackeray's view on slavery and issues of such weight, he avoided taking a clear stand – unlike his friend Charles Dickens, the conscience of his age. As Thackeray said of himself, he was a "quietist." The History of Pendennis (1848-1850), an autobiographical novel, was concluded with the lines, "let us give a hand of charity to Arthur Pendennis, with all his faults and shortcomings, who does not claim to be a hero, but only a man and a brother." The closing words echo the famous abolitionist slogan, "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" However, Thackeray had parodied this phrase first time in a sketch, 'On Some Political Snobs,' published in Punch on 4 July 1846: "We can't be men and brothers as long as that poor devil is made an antic before us in his present fashion... we have abolished negro slavery. John must be emancipated from plush." (The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel by Julia Sun-Joo Lee, 2012, p. 54) 

The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, was published serially from 1853 to 1855. So Young Park has called the the work "perhaps the least-read, greatest, most sprawling novel of the long nineteenth century." ('Victorian Fable-Lands' by So Young Park, in My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice, edited and with an introduction by Annette R. Federico; with a foreword by Jane Tompkins, 2020, p. 93)  This rambling story about artistic ambitions, love, marriage arrangements, and making a fortune takes place in London, Paris, and India. The narrator and one of the characters is Arthur Pendennis. "The novel seemed to play tricks on me, making me forget characters, their social networks, their subplots. I had prided myself on my reading memory; it was the one thing I could rely on to get me through graduate school. . . . What was exasperating was that The Newcomes made me not only to forget things but also misremember details." (Ibid., p. 97)

Thackeray said that he couldn't start a novel until he knew every aspect of his characters. He called Victorian times "if not the most moral, certainly the most squeamish." (An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and thnic Slurs in the English-speaking World by Geoffrey Hughes, 2006, p. 481) Once, as an editor, he rejected an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem because it employed the word harlot. Thackeray became in 1860 the first editor of the Cornhill Magazine, for which he wrote his Roundabout Papers, Lovel the Widower, The Adventures of Philip and the unfinished Denis Duval.

During the 1850s Thackeray's health began to decline. In between excessive eating and drinking, Thackeray made an unsuccesful attempt to stand for Parliament in 1857. His contacts with friendly rival Dickens ended in a quarrel at the Garrick Club, but their daughters continued to be friends.

William Makepeace Thackeray died suddenly, at the age of fifty-two, on Christams Eve 1863. Just before his death he had reconciled with Dickens. "We had our differences of opinion," Dickens said in his 1864 Cornhill Magazine obituary notice of Thackeray. "I thought that he too much feigned a want of earnestness, and that he made a pretence of undervaluing his art, which was noT good for the art that he held in trust." (The Light Blue, a Cambridge University Magazine, Volume III, 1868, p. 285)

Thackeray was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. His bust at the Westminster Abbey was made by the Italian sculptor Marachetti. The poet's daughter was not satisfied with the work and let another sculptor to modify her father's stone sideburns until they were the right length.

For further reading: Chapters from some Memoirs by Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1894); Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity by Gordon Ray (1955); The Irish Characters in Thackeray's Fiction by Evelyn Powell Payne (thesis, 1963); Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom by Gordon Ray (1958); The Exposure of Luxury by Barbara Nathan Hardy (1972); Prodigal Genius by John Carey (1977); Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity by Robert A. Colby (1979): The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel by Robin Gilmour (1981); Reading Thackeray by Michael Lund (1988); Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference by Rowland McMaster (1991); Thackeray and Slavery by Deborah A. Thomas (1993); Thackeray and Women by Micael M. Clarke (1997); W.M. Thackeray's European Sketch Books: a Study of Literary and Graphic Portraiture by S.S. Prawer (2000); The Inheritance of Genius: A Thackeray Family Biography, 1798-1875 by John Aplin (2010); Making Time in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon: Art, History, and Empire by Maria Pramaggiore (2015); Allegorical Thackeray: Secularised Allegory in Thackeray's Major Novels by Ellen Redling (2015); Thackeray in Time: History, Memory, and Modernity, edited by Richard Salmon and Alice Crossley (2016); 'Victorian Fable-Lands' by So Young Park, in My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice, edited and with an introduction by Annette R. Federico; with a foreword by Jane Tompkins (2020); The Genius of Barry Lyndon: Factual and Theoretical Approaches to Kubrick's Masterpiece by Patrick Webster (2024)

Selected works:

• The Yellowplush Papers, 1838
• Catherine, 1839-40
• The Paris Sketchbook, 1840
• Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank, 1840 (with illustrations of his works)
• The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond, 1841
  - Samuel Titmarsh eli tarina isosta Hoggartyn timantista (suomentanut Heikki Impivaara, 1907)
• The Irish Sketchbook, 1843 (as M.A. Titmarsh)
• The Luck of Barry Lyndon, 1844 (rev. in 1856 as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, esq.)
  - film 1975, dir. by Stanley Kubrick, starring Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger. (Kubrick wanted to recreate on screen the look of 18th-century paintings and so set out to film the movie without any artifical lighting at all.)
• Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, 1846 (as M.A. Titmarsh)
• Mrs. Perkins’s Ball, 1847
• The Book of Snobs, 1848
• Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, 1847-48
  - Turhuuden turuilla 1-2 (suom. Aino Tuomikoski, 1955-1956)
  - films: 1911, dir. Charles Kent, starring Helen Gardner as Becky Sharp; 1915, dir. Charles Brabin and Eugene Nowland, starring Minnie Maddern Fiske and Shirley Mason; 1922, dir. W. Courtney Rowden, starring Cosmo Kyrle Bellew as Becky Sharp; 1923, dir.  Hugo Ballin, starring Mabel Ballin; 1932, dir. Chester M. Franklin, starring Myrna Loy; 1935, Becky Sharp, dir.  Rouben Mamoulian, starring Miriam Hopkins, Cedric Hardwicke, Frances Dee; 2004, dir. Mira Nair, starring Reese Witherspoon, James Purefoy, Eileen Atkins, Gabriel Byrne
• "Ourn Street", 1848 (as M.A. Titmarsh)
• The History of Pendennis, His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy, 1848-50
• Doctor Birch and his Young Friends, 1849 (as M. A. Titmarsh)
• The Kickleburys on the Rhine, 1850
• Rebecca and Rowena: A Romance upon Romance, 1850 (as M. A. Titmarsh)
• The English Humourists of the 18th Century, 1851
• The Confessions of Fitz-Boodle; and, Some Passages in the Life of Major Gahagan, 1852
• Men’s Wives, 1852
• The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., 1852 
  - Henry Esmondin tarina hänen itsensä kertomana (suom. Martta Räsänen, 1923)
• The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, 1853-55
• The Rose and the Ring, or, The History of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo. A Fire-Side Pantomime for Great and Small Children, 1855
  - films: 1979 (animation). prod. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), dir.  Patricia Martin and Lotte Reiniger, Pierscien i róza, 1987, prod. Zespól Filmowy "Kadr" (Polans), dir. Jerzy Gruza, starring Katarzyna Figura, Stefan Kazuro, Katarzyna Cygan, Zbigniew Zamachowski
• Miscellanies, 1855-57 (4 vols.)
• The Virginians: A Tale of the Last Century, 1857-59
• Four Georges, 1860
• Lovel the Widower, 1860
• Poems and Essays, 1860
• The Adventures of Philip on his Way Through the World, 1862
• Roundabout Papers, 1860-63 (reprinted from the Cornhill magazine)
• Denis Duval, 1864
• The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1869 (22 vols.)
• The Orphan of Pimlico and Other Sketches, Fragments and Drawings, 1876 (with notes by Anne Isabella Thackeray)
• The Christmas Books of Mr. M.A. Titmarsh, 1883 (New York, J.W. Lovell company)
  
• The Complete Poems of W. M. Thackeray, 1886
• A Collection of Letters of Thackeray, 1847-1855, 1887 (edited by Jane Octavia Brookfield)
• Thackeray’s Complete Works, 1888 (Sterling ed.)
• The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1898-1899 (13 vols.,  with biographical introductions by his daughter, Anne Ritchie)
• Stray Papers, by William Makepeace Thackeray; Being Stories, Reviews, Verses, and Sketches (1821-1847), 1901 (ed., with an introduction and notes by Lewis Melville)
• Contributions to Punch etc., 1903 (edited by Walter Jerrold, with illustrations by Charles E. Brock)
• The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1903-04 (32 vols., Kensington ed.)
• The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1904 (30 vols., with introd. by William P. Trent and John Bell Henneman)
• The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1945-46 (4 vols., collected and edited by  Gordon N. Ray)
• The Illustrations of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1979 (edited by John Buchanan-Brown)
• Drawn from Life: The Journalism of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1984 (with drawings by the author; selected, edited, and with an introduction by Margaret Forster)
• The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1994 (2 vols, edited by Edgar F. Harden)
• Vanity Fair: a Novel Without a Hero, 1998 (edited with an introduction by John Sutherland; with 193 illustrations by the author)                
  
• The Snobs of England; and, Punch's Prize Novelists, 2005 (edited by Edgar F. Harden)
• Burlesques from Cornhill to Grand Cairo: Including Juvenilia, 2005
  
• The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century; and, Charity and Humour, 2007 (edited by Edgar F. Harden)
  
• The Adventures of Philip: On His Way Through the World Shewing Who Robbed Him, Who Helped Him, and Who Passed Him, 2010 (edited by Judith Law Fisher)
  
• Vanity Fair, 2015 (new edition; edited with an introduction and notes by Helen Small; with 193 illustrations by the author)
  
• Vanity Fair, 2016 (Dover Thrift Edition; illustrated with two hundred drawings made by the author for the first edition; with a note upon the text by John T. Winterich and a note upon the drawings by John Sloan)
• The Luck of Barry Lyndon, 2023 (East India Publishing Company)
  
• The Christmas Books of Mr. M.A. Titmarsh, 2022 (Legare Street Press)