In the story which forms part of Men's Wives the bully whom Berry gallantly challenges is beaten, and one hears no more of him.

In the first chapter of 'Mr and Mrs Frank Berry,' Berry himself and Old Hawkins both have a touch of the heroic. In both cases the brutality of school life, as it then was, is very fully recognized and described, but not to the exclusion of the chivalry which goes alongside with it. In 'Mr and Mrs Frank Berry' ( Men's Wives) there is a description of a Slaughter-House fight, following on an incident almost identical with that used in Vanity Fair for the fight between Dobbin and Cuff.

As he became famous and prosperous his memory softened, and Slaughter House was changed into Grey Friars, where Colonel Newcome ended his life.' Even in the earlier references the bitterness which has often been so falsely read into Thackeray is not to be found. ln his earlier books he always spoke of the Charterhouse as Slaughter House and Smithfield. To this very matter Mr Venables tersely refers in a later passage of the letter quoted by Trollope: 'When I knew him better, in later years, I thought I could recognize the sensitive nature which he had as a boy.' Another illustration is found in the statement, which will be recognized as exact by all readers of Thackeray, that 'his change of retrospective feeling about his school-days was very characteristic. 'He came to school young,' Mr Venables wrote, 'a pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy.' This accords with the fact that all through Thackeray's writings the student may find traces of the sensitiveness which often belongs to the creative mind, and which, in the boy who does not understand its meaning and its possible power is apt to assume the guise of a shy disposition. Anthony Trollope, in his book on Thackeray in the English Men of Letters series, quotes a letter written to him about Thackeray's school-days by Mr G. Thackeray himself was sent home to England from India as a child, and went to Charterhouse, since his time removed to Godalming from its ancient site near Smithfield. His mother, who was only nineteen at the date of his birth, was left a widow in 1816, and afterwards married Major Henry Carmichael Smyth.

Both his father and grandfather had been Indian civil servants. Thackeray of Hadley, Middlesex, was born at Calcutta on July 18, 1811. One of the greatest of English authors and novelists, son of Richmond Thackeray (Mrs Richmond Thackeray was born Miss Becher), and grandson of W.

Vanity fair makepeace