ABSTRACT
Few authors have suffered more than Thackeray from the republication of stories that would not live by themselves; but the industry of disciples must stop somewhere, and the twenty-four volumes already published do not contain all that he wrote. Neither the title nor the subject of his first story are known, but he appears in a drawing of Maclise’s, as one of the contributors to ‘Fraser’ in 1835, and before that he wrote for, and lost much money by, a transitory paper called ‘The National Standard.’ But the first work of any importance upon which we find him engaged is ‘The Memoirs of Mr. C. J. Yellowplush, sometime footman in many genteel families.’ There are two tales worth notice in the Memoirs, ‘Miss Shum’s Husband,’ and ‘The Amours of Mr. Deuccace.’ 20The hero of the first is a crossing-sweeper by profession, who plays the gentleman of small means in the evening, at a tumble-down lodging in John Street. The backbone of the story is a situation of which Thackeray did not weary till the period of Pendennis, the situation, in some form or other, of Cinderella and her sisters. It is a comparatively simple way of providing a heroine, all that is necessary being to place a spiritless and amiable young woman amid vulgar surroundings. However uninteresting in herself, she excites interest by virtue of the juxtaposition. It is the wicked sisters that make us desire the prince for the little kitchen-wench, not the humility with which she receives their blows. The character of Mary Shum, as that of Caroline in the ‘ Shabby Genteel Story,’ is hardly drawn at all; they shine, where everything else is vulgar and mean, not by their virtues but by their nothingness. Many years later, in a far longer story, Thackeray tried to arouse interest in Amelia by contrasting her with Becky, and when this was found to be insufficient, by vulgarizing the characters of her parents. But it is easy to see that he grew tired of the negative doll he had created, and, from 21his not recurring to the artifice after ‘Vanity Fair,’ that he came to acknowledge his mistake. The truth is that if we consent to be interested in Cinderella, it is because the story is so slight that we never take the trouble to analyze the character at all. The artifice, though it may pass in a sketch, is quite unsuited for a work of a more important kind. Puppets, no doubt, have been introduced into the greatest works of imagination, but it is not for the purpose of shining. On the contrary, it is that they may afford a background from which the more brilliant characters may stand out in relief. For the rest, Mr. Yellowplush tells his story with much of that humour which consists in bad spelling and the alliance of pretentiousness and poverty.
