THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD SHEWING WHO ROBBED HIM, WHO HELPED HIM, AND NOTE TO THE KENSINGTON EDITION In the revised edition of Thackeray's works published in 1869 there appeared an "advertisement," which is here retained (p. ix), explaining why "A Shabby Genteel Story was included in the same volume with PHILIP and prefixed to it-an arrangement followed in subsequent editions and in this. Two days after the writing of PHILIP was ended, in Thackeray's new house in Palace Green, Kensington, he wrote to his mother: 'Think of the beginning of the story of the 'Little Sister' in the Shabby Genteel Story' twenty years ago, and the wife ill, and the publisher refusing me £15, who owed me £13-10s. and all that money diffi 6 culty ended, God be praised, and an old gentleman sitting in a fine house like the hero at the end of the story!" Begun in 1860, in the Onslow Square house, PHILIP was finished on July 3, 1862;-Thackeray's memorandum says, 6.15 P.M., Finis Philippi." Its publication was begun in January, 1861, in the Cornhill Magazine, which had been founded just a year before by Smith, Elder & Company, with Thackeray as editor; and the serial course of the novel lasted until August, 1862, five months after he had resigned the editorship. It had been preceded there by "LOVEL THE WIDOWER," which had begun with the magazine (January to June, 1860); and was paralleled and succeeded by the "ROUNDABOUT PAPERS," which appeared from the earliest numbers of the Cornhill until Thackeray's death. There is an autobiographical interest in PHILIP, indicated by Thackeray's statement to Mr. George Smith that the hero in certain numbers " will, entre nous, take pretty much the career of W. M. T. in the first years of his ruin and absurdly imprudent marriage; " but the statement must be taken in a very general sense. Certain of the Paris passages are frankly reminiscent; and if such a one as the capital scene in the British Embassy does not repeat actual experience, it probably comes very close to that of the W. M. T. of those days. Some of the few references in letters and in the recollections of friends to the writing of PHILIP have been taken to show that he worked upon it with a fatigue and absence of freshness new to him; but criticism has perhaps made too much of these in seeking to account for the clear lack of success of PHILIP, even among the most unvarying lovers of Thackeray, in comparison with the greater novels. Fits of depression beset him during the writing of them all. Mr. Marzials1 is not alone in thinking that the lassitude, if lassitude there was, was only temporary, and that the old powers reappear in DENIS DUVAL. 1 Life of Thackeray, 1891. The story of the engagement of Frederick Walker to make the drawings for PHILIP has been told more than once. He was a boy of hardly more than twenty when he applied to the Cornhill Magazine for work in illustration; but Mr. Smith, and then Thackeray, to whom Mr. Smith brought him, saw the promise of his work; and Thackeray, who had had the idea of once more making the drawings himself, gladly substituted Walker, after a correspondence which is not more charming for the kindness of the older than for the fine feeling of the younger The house in Palace Green, in which the story was ended and in which Thackeray's last two years were passed, is given as the frontispiece of the first volume in the present edition; but in the second volume the drawing by Walker is retained as frontispiece, of which Mrs. Ritchie and Walker's biographer have both recorded that it was suggested by Thackeray: "the church is the one in Queen's Square, Bloomsbury, if you are curious to be exact." man. |