William Makepeace Thackeray’s first novel, The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century by Fitz-Boodle [The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.], appeared in Fraser’s Magazine as a monthly serial in 1844. It was later revised and released in two volumes in 1852 as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon. The delay in releasing it in book form was partially due to the lack of critical response to the serial version, which discouraged Thackeray from publishing it as a novel.
Because he kept a schedule of his writing and reading, much is known about his mental and emotional state, as well as his choice of sources. Thackeray confessed in correspondence that he did not like the work, having conceived the idea far more easily than he succeeded in executing it. He found concentration difficult while separated from his family without a permanent home. He was able to vent the frustration that supports the bitter tone of much of his early writings. His investigation into the concept of “luck” no doubt reflected on his own continued lack of success.
Uninterested in writing melodrama, Thackeray developed his main characters as fully formed individuals, although they are caught up in decidedly melodramatic circumstances. Thackeray’s choice to position a protagonist/narrator bearing distinctly medieval mores, such as the subservience of women and the acceptance of capricious title adoption, in an unforgiving 18th-century Ireland accounts for the hyperbole that proves more ironic than comical.
The first-person account delivered by Redmond Barry of Brady’s Town was based mostly on a real-life figure, Andrew Robinson Bowes. Thackeray used as his source Jesse Foot’s The Lives of Andrew Robinson Bowes, Esq. and the Countess of Strathmore (n.d., circa 1810).
Born Andrew Robinson Stoney of County Durham in King’s County, Ireland, 1745, Stoney served as a lieutenant and received half pay at the age of 18. He physically and emotionally tortured his first wife, Hannah Newton, heir to a coal fortune, spending her inheritance, beating her, and, according to one account, pushing her down stairs in public. She died after a short marriage, and Stoney began to search for another means of support. He chose an heiress, Mary Eleanor Bowes, widow of the ninth earl of Strathmore.
Through various schemes and seeming courageous acts, including sustaining a wound in a duel with a man who had publicly insulted the widow, Stoney won her heart, married her, and assumed the last name of Bowes. He quickly spent much of her fortune and began his pattern of abuse, but she bore him a son, strengthening their ties. His brutal affections, including whipping, beating, kicking, degrading, imprisoning, deceiving, starving, and lying, finally convinced his wife to file for a divorce. She produced an antenuptial deed of trust that freed her of Bowes’s debts, and he lost all claim to their homes and income.
Although he kidnapped and tortured her following their separation, his efforts at forcing her to sign over any property to him failed, and she escaped. Bowes received a mere three-year prison sentence for his acts against his ex-wife, but his debt confined him to a cell for life. He died having earned the affection of various other women while imprisoned and produced five children with one.
Other rogue tales also influenced Thackeray, but he reproduced no details from them. Rather, his shaping of Lyndon as a despicable yet fascinating man, mainly for his naiveté in believing himself always in the right, seemed to have been the outcome of various readings. He made Lyndon more appealing than Stoney when, following the death of his son, Lyndon genuinely grieves—the only instance in which his emotion seems unmotivated by potential self-gain.
Thackeray’s notes reveal accounts of certain events that also inspired some of the novel’s scenes, one being the execution of Princess Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel in 1788 by her husband, Frederic William of Wurtemberg, who beheaded her for infidelity. Thackeray may have drawn details from real-life inhabitants of Ireland, as discussed in Burke’s Landed Gentry of Ireland (inception 1826). Thackeray also took inspiration from the fiction of some of his favorite writers, most notably Henry Fielding’s satire Jonathan Wild the Great (1743). He altered Fielding’s third-person narration to first person, like that of Maria Edgeworth’s Thady Quirk in Castle Rackrent (1801), a likely influence due to the similar lack of guile in the totally untrustworthy first-hand reports.
In addition, Thackeray’s novel contains the same high degree of violence found in Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1751).
From Redmond Barry’s first sentence, “Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it,” the reader understands the narration as highly misogynistic, delivered by a man who lacks respect for all women but cannot survive without them. The son of Roaring Harry Barry, a man “just on the verge” of making his fortune when he died, Barry lives with his mother’s brother and his hated wife at Castle Brady. He becomes a self-confessed favorite with Uncle Cornelius and with some of his cousins who refer to him as “the English.” Worming his way into the graces of one cousin by joining forces to hate another, he indulges in fistfights while romancing a female cousin, Honoria Brady. Eventually involved in a duel for her “honor,” he must escape to Dublin where he alters his name to Barry Redmond. He joins the army and defends both sides in the Seven Years War.
He openly confesses to later enjoying the title of Captain Barry, although he had never been more than a corporal, promised an ensigncy should he distinguish himself, “but Fate did not intend that I should remain long an English soldier.” In an ironic scene, Barry deserts his post and masquerades as a British officer. His ruse is discovered when he claims to carry dispatches to a general who has been dead for 10 months. The truth revealed by a Prussian guard, Barry confesses to his audience, “[T]he game was up. I flung down a knife with which I had armed myself… ‘I volunteer,’ I said.”
Barry eventually reunites with his uncle, Cornelius Barry. Now known as Chevalier de Blibari, Cornelius enlists Barry’s company in cardsharp escapades that eventually lead to an “unfair” imprisonment. Barry later tricks the wealthy and widowed Countess of Lyndon into marriage and lives a life of debauchery and extravagance. As Barry Lyndon, he abuses his wife and stepson and spends the family fortune—actions his wife tolerates for the sake of their son, Bryan. Lyndon’s luck disappears following Bryan’s accidental death when the countess’s family helps her regain control of her estate. He moves to the Continent and, following the death of his wife, goes to Fleet prison for debtors, where he dies in his mother’s care.
With a narrative approach appealing in its total lack of self-awareness, Lyndon presents a litany of his own achievements. Most involve some type of violence, which varies in its manner of delivery depending on the gender of Lyndon’s enemies, who are legion. In his opinion, born deserving all of wealth and status, Lyndon pursues his materialistic goals with enthusiasm, impervious to the moral or ethical guidelines employed by civilized humans. When he tells his readers of London’s “merry” past, which he remembers fondly in his gout-ridden old age, he surmises, “people have grown vastly more moral and matter-of-fact than they were at the close of the last century, when the world was young with me.” That charming narrative approach allowed the novel an enduring popularity, a later conversion to film and stage presentations, and its electronic availability on the Internet.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anisman, Martin J. Introduction. The Luck of Barry Lyndon, by William Makepeace Thackeray. New York: New York University Press, 1970.
McMasters, Juliet. Thackeray: The Major Novels. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971.
Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. London: Oxford, 1965.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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