TEZPUR, or Tejpur, a town of British India, the administrative headquarters of Darrang district, Eastern Bengal and Assam, on the right bank of the Brahmaputra. Pop. (1901) 5047. It is the centre of a flourishing tea industry, and contains many houses of English residents. Communications are maintained by river steamer, while a light railway runs northward through the tea-growing tract.
THA'ĀLIBĪ [Abu Manşūr 'Abd ul-Malik ibn Mahommed ibn Isma'īl uth-Tha'ālibī] (961-1038), Arabian philologist, was born in Nīshāpūr, and is said to have been at one time a furrier. Although he wrote prose and verse of his own, he was most famous for his anthologies and collections of epigrams. Like many other Arabian writers, he does not always distinguish between his own and other people's work. Of the twenty-nine works known to have been written by him, the most famous is his Kitāb Yatīmat ud-Dahr, on the poets of his own and earlier times, arranged according to the countries of the poets, and containing valuable extracts (published at Damascus, 4 vols., 1887). Another of his works, the Kitāb Fiqh ul-Lugha, is lexicographical, the words being arranged in classes. It has been published at Paris (1861), Cairo (1867), and Beirūt (1885, incomplete).
For his other works see C. Brockelmann's Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur, vol. i. (Weimar, 1898), pp. 284-86.
THACKERAY, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE (1811-1863), English novelist, only son of Richmond and Anne Thackeray (whose maiden name was Becher), was born at Calcutta on the 18th of July 1811. Both his father and his grandfather (W. R. Thackeray) had been Indian civil servants. His mother was only nineteen at the date of his birth, was left a widow in 1816, and afterwards married Major Henry Carmichael Smyth. Young Thackeray was brought home to England from India as a child, and was sent to private schools, first in Hampshire and then at Chiswick. In 1822 he was transferred to Charterhouse, at that time still on its ancient site near Smithfield. Anthony Trollope, in his book on Thackeray in the “English Men of Letters” series, quotes a letter written to him about Thackeray's schooldays by George Stovin Venables. “He came to school young,” Venables wrote, “a pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy.” This accords with the fact that all through Thackeray's writings the student may find traces of the sensitiveness which often belongs to the creative mind, and which, in the boy who does not understand its meaning and its possible power, is apt to assume the guise of a shrinking disposition. To this very matter Venables tersely referred in a later passage of the letter quoted by Trollope: “When I knew him better, in later years, I thought I could recognize the sensitive nature which he had as a boy.” Another illustration of this idiosyncrasy is found in the statement, which will be recognized as exact by all readers of Thackeray, that “his change of retrospective feeling about his schooldays was very characteristic. In his 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.” Even in the earlier references the bitterness which has often been so falsely read into Thackeray is not to be found. In “Mr and Mrs Frank Berry” (Men's Wives) there is a description of a fight at Slaughter House following on an incident almost identical with that used in Vanity Fair for the fight between Dobbin and Cuff. In both cases the brutality of school life, as it then was, is very fully recognized and described, but not to the exclusion of the chivalry which may go alongside with it. In the first chapter of “Mr and Mrs Frank Berry,” Berry himself and old Hawkins both have a touch of the heroic, and in this story the bully whom Berry gallantly challenges is completely defeated, and one hears no more of him. In Vanity Fair Cuff the swaggerer is defeated as completely as is Berry's opponent, but regains his popularity by one well-timed stroke of magnanimity, and afterwards shows the truest kindness to his conqueror. Thackeray left Charterhouse in 1828 to join his mother and her husband at Larkbeare in, Devonshire, near Ottery St Mary. Ottery St Mary is the “Clavering St Mary,” as Exeter and Sidmouth are respectively the “Chatteris” and “Baymouth” of Pendennis.
In February 1829 Thackeray went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and in that year contributed some engaging lines on “Timbuctoo,” the subject for the Prize Poem (the prize for which was won in that year by Tennyson), to a little paper called The Snob, a title which Thackeray afterwards utilized in the famous Book of Snobs. The first stanza has become tolerably well known, but is worth quoting as an early instance of the direct comic force afterwards employed by the author in verse and prose burlesques:—
| “ | In Africa—a quarter of the world— Men's skins are black; their hair is crisp and curled; And somewhere there, unknown to public view, A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo.” |
One other passage at least in The Snob, in the form of a skit on a paragraph of fashionable intelligence, seems to bear traces of Thackeray's handiwork. At Cambridge, James Spedding, Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Edward FitzGerald, W. H. Thompson (afterwards Master of Trinity), and others who made their mark in later life, were among his friends. In 1830 he left Cambridge without taking a degree, and went to Weimar and to Paris. His visit to Weimar bore fruit in the keen sketches of life at a small German court which appear in Fitz-Boodle's Confessions and in Vanity Fair. In G. H. Lewes's Life of Goethe is a letter containing Thackeray's impressions of the German poet. On his return to England in 1831 he entered the Middle Temple. He did not care to pursue the study of the law, but he found in his experience of the Temple the material for some capital scenes in Pendennis. In 1832 he came of age, and inherited a sum which, according to Trollope, “seems to have amounted to about five hundred a year.” The money was soon lost — some in an Indian bank, some at play and some in two newspapers, The National Standard (with a long sub-title) and The Constitutional. In Lovel the Widower these two papers are indicated under one name as The Museum, in connexion with which our friends Honeyman and Sherrick of The Newcomes are briefly brought in. Thackeray's adventures and losses at play were utilized in his literary work on three occasions, in “A Caution to Travellers” (The Paris Sketch-Book), in the first of the Deuceace narrations (The Memoirs of Mr C. J. Yellowplush) , and in Pendennis, vol. ii. chap, v., in a story (wherein Deuceace reappears) told to Captain Strong by “Colonel Altamont.” As to Deuceace, Sir Theodore Martin has related how once in the playrooms at Spa Thackeray called his attention to a certain man and said presently, “That was the original of my Deuceace.”
In 1834 or at the end of 1833 Thackeray established himself in Paris in order to study art seriously. He had, like Clive in The Newcomes, shown talent as a caricaturist from his early boyhood. His gift proved of great value to him in illustrating much of his own literary work in a fashion which, despite all incorrectness of draughtsmanship, conveyed vivid suggestions that could not have been so well given by anyone but himself. Perhaps his pencil was at its best technically in such fantastic work as is found constantly in the initial letters which he frequently used for chapters in his various kinds of work, and in those drawings made for the amusement of some child friends which were the origin of The Rose and the Ring.
In 1836 Thackeray married Isabella, daughter of Colonel Matthew Shawe. There were three daughters born of the marriage, one dying in infancy. The eldest daughter, Anne Isabella (b. 1837), married in 1877 Mr Richmond Ritchie, of the India Office, who in 1907 was created a K.C.B. She inherited literary talent from her father and wrote several charming works of fiction, notably Miss Angel (1875), and subsequently edited Thackeray's works and published some volumes of criticism and reminiscences. The younger daughter, Harriet Marian (b. 1840), married (Sir) Leslie Stephen in 1867 and died in 1875. Thackeray's own family life was early broken, for Mrs Thackeray, to quote Trollope, “became ill and her mind
