Word: thackerays
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Academy) since February has paced a shore-based bridge in London as Commander in Chief, U.S. Naval Forces Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean, commuted to his Navy-owned mansion in Surrey in a black Imperial. His clipped accent, his malacca stick with mufti, and his penchant for quoting Dickens and Thackeray delighted Londoners. But in 40-odd years of Navy life, Annapolisman Holloway ('19) has carved a commendable seadog career. During World War II he steamed in with the first African invasion as a destroyer squadron commander, later commanded the battleship Iowa in strikes against the Japanese home islands...
...melancholy reflection that Thackeray's lost limerick about the Countess Guiccioli might have gained him a greater literary immortality than his shelf of great novels. May I suggest...
Sixpence per Line. With intimates, Thackeray's conversation was "decidedly loose" (lost forever, presumably, is the remainder of his limerick about "...the Countess Guiccioli Who slept with Lord Byron habitually"). He enjoyed going to pubs, or, as one enemy described it:"[He] not infrequently condescends to wither mankind through his spectacles from one of the marble tables." His love of bad puns was notorious ("A good one is not worth listening to"). Said a friend: "I recollect him now, wiping his brow after trying vainly to help the leg of a tough fowl, and saying he was 'heaving...
...Thackeray delighted in debunking his own art. In his novel Philip, he wrote: "When I think how this very line, this very word, which I am writing represents money, I am lost in a respectful astonishment...I am paid sixpence per line. With [these last 67 words] I can buy a loaf, a piece of butter, a jug of milk, a modicum of tea-actually enough to make breakfast for the family." Such digressions helped to conceal the sweat and effort that Thackeray put into his work. "I can see him pointing now with his finger," wrote his daughter Anny...
...before Christmas 1863, when Thackeray was only 52, his digestion and what he amiably called his "defective waterworks" broke down for the last time, and with breakdown came a "cerebral effusion." As all London's great hostesses and VIPs were "out of town" for Christmas, it was "a vast assemblage of writers and painters" that escorted the Great Swell to his chosen grave beside his infant daughter. The glowing obituaries ranked him with the literary Olympians, but his friends recalled that he had never cared for that company. "If Goethe is a god," Thackeray once said...