ABSTRACT
William Makepeace Thackeray’s centenary year was marked by a number of events celebrating the birth of the writer whose reputation rested principally on the success of a work produced nearly 65 years earlier. By 1911 few were alive who had known him personally—he had been dead for almost half a century—nor would many have been able to draw upon the memory of reading Vanity Fair (1847–48) or any of the other major novels when first published. Chief amongst the early survivors and occupying a uniquely privileged position was his elderly daughter Anne (Annie) Thackeray Ritchie, by this time Lady Ritchie, who almost single-handedly shaped the way in which posterity would view him, at least during the decades since his death in 1863. All of his private papers had passed to his two daughters, an archive which survived substantially intact beyond the death of Annie’s younger sister in 1875—when some Thackeray manuscripts transferred to the widowed Leslie Stephen—and until her own in 1919.
