n 1853, when William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) made his first lecture tour of America, Boston particularly pleased him because, as he said, its “vast amount of toryism and donnishness” reminded him of Edinburgh. Today, there may be precious little toryism or donnishness left in Boston, but there remains a sturdy affection for Thackeray—and one proof of this was the superb exhibition that Harvard’s Houghton Library mounted to commemorate the bicentenary of the great novelist’s birth.

Thackeray ca. 1855

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Heather Cole, curator of the exhibition, captured the witty charm and ebullience of her subject by assembling a catalogue full of the abiding appeal of his life and work. She included the famous bust of Thack-
eray as a boy; the portrait of him with his parents, sitting atop a pile of folios and gazing out at the viewer with preternatural zest; and his wonderfully funny Punch drawings. She also included many of his letters to his female confidantes, his exquisite sketches of his daughters, Annie and Minny, pages from his manuscripts, the bright yellow installments of Vanity Fair (1848), and a copy of The Adventures of Philip (1862), his penultimate novel, printed during the Civil War by a Confederate publisher, complete with advertisements for military merchandise.

That a Confederate publisher should have printed the novel has a special aptness, for Philip is a paean to precisely the ideal of gentlemanliness that so many Confederate soldiers prized. (That was, after all, what distinguished them from Yankees.)