Authorial Angels: Writing and Masculinity in Thackeray's the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century

Thackeray's ideal of authorship, presented in his lecture series The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, rejects the fierce masculinity of Carlyle's "Great Man" in favor of "feminine" tenderness. Emphasizing affectionate relationships between authors and readers, Thackeray also rejects the critical ethos that privileges "high art" produced by isolated geniuses. Thackeray thus embraces a male version of the "angel in the house" role that Virginia Woolf blames for inhibiting women's writing. Yet Thackeray acknowledges the unsatisfactory, even destructive, domestic lives of the "angelic" figures he describes. The angelic function apparently is more easily fulfilled through writing than through actual human relationships. ********** When Thackeray delivered his famous 1851 lecture series, The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, (published in 1853), he spoke to audiences for whom the meaning and significance of authorship was in a state of flux. Thackeray's stated aim in his sketches of the humorists was to honor these great writers and great men as they deserved. But of what does literary greatness consist? Thackeray's implicit answer to that question entails a vision of masculinity sharply at odds with the more authoritarian model offered by Thomas Carlyle and accepted by much of Victorian society. Thackeray's treatment of male authorship deserves attention for what it says about the complexity of responses to the various gender norms that operated in nineteenth-century England--and in our own culture as well. Thackeray's disorientation of gender roles emerges subtly from an emphasis on authors' personal psychology and moral character that is a conventional part of Victorian approaches to literature. As Clifford Siskin has pointed out, the growing professionalization of writing throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century paradoxically co-existed with a "mode of attention [to literature that] was systematically psychologized" as patterns of reading "confound[ed] textual effects with authorial behavior" (14-15). Thus even as writing became more and more recognized as a potential (and potentially lucrative) "career," the interest of critics and readers alike shifted from the "power of the technology of writing to the ... personalities of people who wrote" (15). Yet this emphasis on the writer as psychological and moral subject was bound to be a source of tension since the writer's role was ambiguous both socially and ethically. Mary Poovey has pointed out that the Victorian writer could claim as ancestors leisured men of letters, those medieval court scribes and Renaissance intellectuals whose education marked them as privileged men, even if their daily meat came from patrons. On the other hand, the professional writer was descended from the early and mid-eighteenth-century hacks who sold ideas by the word and fought off competitors for every scrap of work. (102-103) The result of this mixed heritage was a tension-ridden set of conflicting needs and expectations. Nineteenth-century professional writers had to be (and were) concerned with marketplace issues such as royalties, copyright laws, different forms of publication, and the selection and distribution methods of lending libraries, as well as be cognizant of the desires of their expanding audience. (1) Yet even in a fiercely competitive capitalist society, the writer could be the object of scorn for handling his literary products as a merchant would handle other commodities (Poovey 102). Moreover, even as he had a duty to entertain his readers, he also had a "moral responsibility" to them that they might or might not find as welcome as his purely amusing aspects (Carlisle 2). The stigma of Grub Street and the frivolity of the entertainer thus clung to the writer even as Thomas Carlyle (and others) assured him that he was a prophet, a virtual priest whose "wisdom was an expression of a God-given gift" (Poovey 103). …