[By Thackerays own desire no full authentic account of his life has been published. It was neither a long life, nor in the ordinary sense an eventful one. He was born at Calcutta, the son of Richmond Thackeray and Anne Becher, on 18th July 1811; and he died at Kensington on 24th December 1863. He was educated at the Charterhouse, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where, though he took no degree, he made some announcement of his tastes and powers in a periodical called The Snob, and in a burlesque poem on the prize subject of Timbuctoo, on which Tennyson wrote seriously. He had inherited a competence, but it was lost in injudicious newspaper speculations and otherwise, and by the time when he was five-and-twenty he had to write, not for his amusement but for his bread. He married, however, in 1836, but after a brief married life Mrs. Thackeray was attacked by a mental disorder which never left her, though she survived her husband by more than thirty years. For some time Thackeray, though a prolific writer, did not make the mark that was in him to make, and it was not till Vanity Fair appeared (in parts, it was completed in 1848) that his genius was properly recognised. This was followed by Pendennis (1850), Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1855), and The Virginians (1859). On the foundation of the Cornhill Magazine Thackeray was appointed its editor, a post which he did not find in all ways congenial; but he contributed to it some of his very best work in the Roundabout Papers. His minor work, both in prose and verse, was very considerable, but difficult to enumerate in brief space. It included Catherine (1840); Barry Lyndon; The Paris (1840), Irish (1843), and Eastern (1845) Sketch Books; Philip; and the unfinished Denis Duval, which his death cut short; besides lectures on the English Humourists and the Four Georges, several Christmas Books, many prose articles, and much light verse.] 1