ABSTRACT
William Makepeace Thackeray was at first a boarder in Mr. Penny’s house in Wilderness Row, Clerkenwell Road, until the middle of 1825, when he became a day-boy, and stayed with Mrs. Boyes, a lady who took in boys belonging both to the Charterhouse and the Merchant Tailors’ Schools. Anthony Trollope has printed some lines of doggerel, attributed at Charterhouse to Thackeray, which show the marvellous tendency to almost impossible rhymes that was in itself a distinguishing merit of his humourous poetry. In Thackeray earlier books he always spoke of the Charterhouse as Slaughter House and Smithfield. As he became famous and prosperous, his memory softened, and Slaughter House was changed into Grey Friars where Colonel Newcome ended his life’.
