The Inheritance of Genius: A Thackeray Family Biography, 1798-1875 (review)

William Makepeace Thackeray is primarily known today as a public cosmopolitan figure, the popular Victorian author of Vanity Fair. In The Inheritance of Genius: A Thackeray Family Biography, John Aplin undertakes an ambitious and engaging project that shifts our understanding of Thackeray as this largely public figure to one who was also deeply devoted to and influenced by the domestic circle that included not only his mother, Anne Carmichael-Smyth, and his wife, Isabella, but also his two daughters, Annie and Minny. The first of two volumes, The Inheritance of Genius spans 1798-1875, beginning with the year that Thackeray's father arrived in India, covers Thackeray's life (1811-1863), and concludes with Minny's premature death at the age of thirty-five. The volume, as Aplin states in the preface, "is not primarily a study of Thackeray the writer, or his better-known public, clubbable persona" (xiii). Rather, in this first volume, Aplin aims "to place the daughters, mother and wife of this remarkable man as central figures in a family history which continued beyond his death" (xiii) in an effort to shed light particularly on his two daughters and their "inheritance" of his "genius."

In documenting the lives of the Thackeray family, Aplin draws on a rich trove of primary sources, including diaries, letters, and journals as well as previously unpublished papers and photographs that belong to the Thackeray family. He puts these materials to good use, painting a compelling portrait of Thackeray as a paterfamilias who juggled the demands of his public and private lives. Thackeray was strikingly dedicated to his family and to the arrangement of his domestic affairs, before and after his wife's mental illness became pronounced following the birth of their last daughter, Minny. Aplin underscores the assiduous care with which Thackeray sought a cure for Isabella and the great reluctance with which he made the difficult decision to remove Isabella permanently from their home when her mental instability grew too severe to manage. After securing permanent care in London for Isabella away from the family, Aplin demonstrates, Thackeray took equal care in working through the adversity of his domestic circumstances, relying heavily on his mother to provide both his daughters and himself with an unconventional, if nevertheless deeply loving, home and sense of familial belonging. As his daughter Annie commented upon moving into their first house after the removal of their mother: "Once more, after his first happy married years, my father had a home and a family - if a house, two young children, three servants, and a little black cat can be called a famly [sic]" (62).

The real success of Aplin's work lies in his focus on the author's familial relationships with the three central women in his life: his mother and two daughters. He successfully challenges the prevailing understanding of Thackeray's mother as a strict, unforgiving religious figure in the Thackeray household; while Thackeray and his mother differed sharply on religious matters and the girls' religious education, Aplin paints a more sympathetic, sensitive portrait of her as a woman of strongly-held religious principles to whom Thackeray turned in an effort to raise his daughters during his frequent and extended absences. And although both girls were largely content to stay in their father's shadow, as Aplin notes, they were both "intelligent observers of their rich environment," and, like their father, they "[delighted] in the comic absurdities of everyday living" (xiii). Of the two girls, Annie perhaps more explicitly "inherited" her father's "genius." Aplin emphasizes her spirited personality as well as her interest in and talent for writing, an interest that Thackeray encouraged by helping her to publish her first essays in the newly-begun Cornhill Magazine. After his death, Annie would later assume her father's mantle first by going through his notes for his final, unfinished novel and publishing her summation of the novel's possible conclusion, then becoming a novelist in her own...