The family lived in a mansion serviced by a large staff and the first few years were lived in great luxury. He later recalled that he remembered "great saloons and people dancing in them, enormous idols and fireworks, riders on elephants or in gigs, and fogs clearing away and pagodas appearing over the trees."
Background
On a pillar in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey is a white marble bust, with a brown marble base, to novelist and essayist William Makepeace Thackeray. It is placed near Addison's statue and is by the sculptor Carlo, Baron Marochetti. A petition to the Dean of Westminster for permission to erect a memorial was signed by Charles Dickens and many other authors and artists of the day. The monument was paid for in 1865. The inscription reads:
"William Thackeray Makepeace born 18 July 1811 died 24 Dec: 1863"
Education
He disliked Charterhouse, parodying it in his later fiction as "Slaughterhouse." Nevertheless Thackeray was honoured in the Charterhouse Chapel with a monument after his death. Illness in his last year there postponed his matriculation at Trinity College, Cambridge, until February 1829.
Never too keen on academic studies, he left the University in 1830, though some of his earliest writing appeared in university publications The Snob and The Gownsman.
Career
On reaching the age of 21, he came into his inheritance but he squandered much of it on gambling and by funding two unsuccessful newspapers, The National Standard and The Constitutional for which he had hoped to write. He also lost a good part of his fortune in the collapse of two Indian banks. Forced to consider a profession to support himself, he turned first to art, which he studied in Paris, but did not pursue it except in later years as the illustrator of some of his own novels and other writings.
Views
Quotations:
Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.
It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.
Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.
Except for the young or very happy, I can't say I am sorry for anyone who dies.