Thackeray's Pendennis - gendered things and places.

Department of English and ComparativeLiterary Studies

University of Warwick

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Title of Module: EN9A1 Victorian MaterialitiesDate due: 19th May 2014

Title of Essay Arthur’s women: Gendered objects and places in Thackeray’s ‘Pendennis’

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Arthur’s women: Gendered objects and places in

Thackeray’s Pendennis

After the success of Vanity Fair, with which Thackeray

finally became a famous author, The History of Pendennis was

published in monthly parts (Hawes 23) between November 1848 and

December 1850, when it also appeared in two volumes. Thackeray

told Lady Castlereagh1 ‘Mr Pendennis makes me much richer than

Mr Vanity Fair.’ (458) yet it is for the latter that he is now

primarily known. Pendennis is undoubtedly one of Henry James’s

targets: ‘what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their

queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary,

artistically mean?’ (1908) Thackeray even states in his self-

deprecating Preface ‘this book began with a very precise plan,

which was entirely put aside.’ (33) One should rarely take such

statements at face value, however, and here, particularly, it

invites interrogation, as he lays claim to ‘a little more

frankness than is customary’ (p34) in his portrait of the

central character. “Truth is best”, he asserts. The nature of

that truth, and the means whereby it is presented in an


ostensibly realist novel are worth further investigation.

Pendennis, like its almost exact contemporary David Copperfield, is

semi-autobiographical; Thackeray admitted that he liked Arthur

Pendennis ‘because I fancy we begin to resemble each other in

many points.’2 (437). Thackeray contrasted his characters with

those of Dickens: ‘I quarrel with his art in many respects: wh

I don’t think represents nature duly.’3 While he dismisses, in

the same letter, Mr Micawber as an exaggeration, neither

Costigan nor Altamont are strictly realist portraits – the

novelist is disingenuous here, masking both satirical intention

and his own use of exaggeration.

This is a novel about social climbing, in which the

majority of the characters are in some way liminal, and in

which social class, gender, even identity are unstable. As in

many mid-Victorian novels, things have an important role in

identifying aspects of the characters, reinforcing themes,

acting as metonymy and reminding the attentive reader of the

wider world of which this is a facsimile. James’s ‘queer

elements of the accidental and the arbitrary’ are frequently

neither, and contribute substantially to the ‘meaning’ of the

novel as a whole. In particular, both male and female


characters in the life of Arthur are marked and identified by a

relationship with textiles and other possessions, as Crossley

notes: ‘Clothes […] as well as obscuring the body, […] also

ornament the body; costume transmits information about the

person wearing it (such as class, wealth, occupation, gender,

age), allows for the symbolic use of items of dress, and also

provides crucial opportunities for self-creation.’ (34)

Thackeray uses material goods as symbols and metaphors much as

did his contemporaries; class, status and gender are unstable

qualities, and a source of anxiety for many Victorian writers

and readers. There is a tension between things connected to

women and those associated with male characters, which serves

to emphasise the instability of many categories.

The figure of the Regency dandy hovers over several of the

male characters, though one more akin to George, the Prince

Regent in his younger years than the archetypal Beau Brummell.

Brummell’s own liminality, however, and his penurious end are

relevant here; Clavering, Major Pendennis, even Arthur seem to

be at risk of following his example. According to Clare

Nicolay, ‘Brummell and other dandies were increasingly

identified with the old regime's effete corruption’ (289). By


the late 1840s surviving dandies of that generation were

elderly, and public attitudes to the era had changed radically

– the young Queen, the epitome of domesticity, stood for

everything against the flamboyance and excess of her uncles and

their contemporaries. The Regency period was also that of

Waterloo and the Peninsula War, but Thackeray presents the

Major as an anachronistic near-parasite. Even his body is

unstable – on arriving at Fairoaks he requires his man, Morgan,

to ‘make a mystery of mystery of his wigs: curling them in

private places’ and to supply ‘a little Morocco box, which it

must be confessed contained the Major’s back teeth, which he

naturally would leave out of his jaws in a jolting mail coach,

and without which he would not choose to appear.’ (100-101) As

Brian McCluskey points out, ‘The commodification of the

gentleman is complete once he becomes an "ornament" whose chief

function is to circulate in society as the hollow signifier of

his own wealth and status.’ (389) As an ornament he is a site

of conspicuous consumption - usually the function of Victorian

elite women - and has a degree of effeminacy contrasted later

in the novel with the “honest” clothes of Pen’s friend

Warrington.


Nicolay points out, ‘Regency dandyism established itself

as distinctly masculine: Brummell eschewed lace, ruffles,

frills, hair powder, excessive jewelry (sic), and perfume. In

Pendennis, however, Thackeray repeatedly suggests that the

Major's style is humorously effeminate: his wig, stays, rouge,

and tight-fitting boots are outdated affectations which connect

him to the similarly outmoded aristocratic ethos.’ (297)

Ironically the wig, which in his youth emphasised his military

calling (Cox 104) now attracts the scornful nickname of

‘Wigsby’. His concern for his own appearance is echoed in

several of the younger men at points when they are at their

most self-indulgent or narcissistic – Foker and Pen wear

embroidered, velvet items, especially headgear, and have

elaborate dressing-cases for which a ‘real gentleman’, it is

implied, should have no use. Laura notes that in vacations

from Oxbridge Pen has ‘wonderful shooting jackets, with

remarkable buttons; and in the evening in gorgeous velvet

waistcoats, with richly-embroidered cravats, and curious linen.

And [ … ] oh, such a beautiful dressing-case, with silver

mountings, and a quantity of lovely rings and jewellery.’ (200)


The successful performance of masculinity in Pendennis

depends on a disdain for outward appearance and reliance on the

fruits of one’s own labour to achieve status and affluence. Pen

and his young male counterparts are intoxicated by showy

clothing: at Oxbridge his fraudulent appearance of affluence

wins him temporary friends but leads to failure academically

and personally. He has a dandy’s taste for jewellery, denoting

a degree of effeminacy to contemporary readers: ‘partiality for

rings, jewellery, and fine raiment of all sorts [ … ] Mr. Pen,

during his time at the university, was rather a dressy man, and

loved to array himself in splendour. [ … ]They said he used to

wear rings over his kid gloves.’ (203) As Pen moves from one

location to another he is able to re-create himself, engaging

with different worlds, themselves dependent on ‘show’, but in

which he can earn an honest living and progress to greater

comfort simply by moving to rooms on a lower floor, a contrast

with the multiplicity of dwellings occupied by the Clavering

family which are a kind of stage with which the performance of

status is framed.

Gentility, the act of being ‘a gentleman’ or ‘a lady’, is

of great importance in a novel which deals primarily with


social mobility and its attendant anxieties. Major Pendennis is

an officer, whose commission depended on financial help from

his apothecary brother (47) and who ‘on the return of his

regiment from India and New South Wales had sold out and gone

upon half-pay’ (48). Pen’s father, John Pendennis, is

described as a ‘gentleman’ frequently, yet we are told in

Chapter II that ‘the secret ambition of Mr Pendennis had always

been to be a gentleman.’ Although while still a practising

apothecary in Bath he was wealthy enough to have his own

carriage blazoned with the Pendennis arms, it seems that only

the possession of a country house could cement that status:

fortune aided him considerably in his endeavour, and

brought him to the point which he so panted to attain. He

laid out some money very advantageously in the purchase of

a house and small estate close upon the village of

Clavering before mentioned. […] A lucky purchase which he

had made of shares in a copper-mine added very

considerably to his wealth, and he realised with great

prudence while this mine was still at its full vogue. (45)


Ownership of landed property is clearly more genteel than

money, from the source of which John Pendennis carefully

distances himself as soon as possible. This wealth,

furthermore, is itself founded on instability – the copper mine

shares were ‘still in vogue’ when sold, suggesting they were

part of the variety of investment bubble very common during the

Industrial Revolution. Pendennis senior very much performs

gentility employing material items as ‘props’: he behaves like

a farmer at market, holds dinners in county society and ‘wore a

bottle-green coat and brass buttons with drab gaiters, just as

if he had been an English gentleman all his life.’ (47) The

family portraits have clearly been bought in bulk and ‘All the

family delighted in my brother the Major. He was the link which

bound them to the great world of London, and the fashion.’ (48)

While to be a gentleman, then, depended on constant

performance, to be a true lady was something natural or innate.

Arthur interacts with a broad range of female characters, but

his mother is presented from the start as the touchstone

against which they should be measured; the narrator makes this

clear to the reader long before it is clear to the hero. Helen

Pendennis is, according to her brother-in-law, ‘as fine a lady


as any in England, and an honour to the family.’ (49) Her

ladylike qualities come from ‘tranquil beauty, her natural

sweetness and kindness, and that simplicity and dignity which a

perfect purity and innocence are sure to bestow upon a handsome

woman’ (49). Even in retirement while her husband is active at

market or watching traffic pass his gates: ‘to love and to pray

were the main occupations of this dear woman's life’. (49) She

lives frugally, making ‘most of her dresses and caps’ (178) and

denies herself material goods in order to contribute to

‘Arthur’s Education Fund’4. Notably, she is not associated with

possessions as the other female characters are – her limited

wardrobe is dignified but simple and her primary focus is on

self-deprivation. Insofar as she is to be regarded as an ideal,

it is one of marked passivity and vacancy. She dies in her

son’s arms while praying a childhood prayer with him, her

affairs all in order, ‘her little property ready for

transmission to her son’.

A small number of possessions are distributed: a silver-

gilt vase, a coffee pot and a diamond ring, with her hair.

(600) These tokens of Victorian domesticity are redolent of the

wider world from which they originate. The vase, a gift to


Helen’s husband from the aristocratic family whose son he

‘saved’ is destined for the doctor she considered saved her own

son, linking the generations and reminding the reader of the

comparatively humble origins of the family money. The vase

itself is an ostentatious item, though of provincial

manufacture: ‘Hippocrates, Hygeia, King Bladud, and a wreath of

serpents surmount the cup to this day; which was executed in

their finest manner by Messrs. Abednego, of Milsom Street; and

the inscription was by Mr. Birch, tutor to the young baronet.’

(542) The symbolism of the ornament is as mixed as its

composition, suggesting that the value placed on it by the

recipient is rather higher than that for the giver. The coffee

pot suggests a generation before the ubiquity of tea as a

domestic beverage, while the diamond, as in so many Victorian

stories, is a reminder of the Indian empire. Jean Arnold points

out that ‘Gleaming diamonds thus enter the lives of characters

in Victorian fiction as signs and symbols of established

cultural values’ (18). The diamond ring, combined as it is with

the hair, suggests fidelity and, through its transparency, is a

symbol of virtue. However, as Arnold says, ‘Victorian jewels

symbolised established public values of money, class, gender


roles and empire.’ (18) The bequest to Warrington is one he

cannot wear and which emphasises the superior financial and

social status of the bestower. By this period, as Arnold

reminds us, men did not wear conspicuous jewellery.

The lack of significant jewelry worn among men argues an

immense disjunction in gender roles; however, while

working class women’s lack of jewelry may have evinced

their disadvantage, men’s lack of jewelry evinced their

privilege. (4)

Arguably the present of the ring undermines Warrington’s status

as a gentleman. ‘For much of the nineteenth century, aesthetics

was often defined as having a moral, social component, so that

jewels could be seen as symbolizing these cultural values.’ (9)

Here the values seem deliberately confused.

The other diamond is, significantly, the cross, Laura

receives as she leaves Fairoaks. The combination of piety with

the riches of empire is appropriate for Laura, born on Coventry

Island, a fictional colony already used by Thackeray as the

dangerous posting which killed Rawdon Crawley in Vanity Fair.


Both Helen’s daughter and planned daughter-in-law, she is very

much a liminal character, moving often in elite society, yet

comparatively poor. She wears white to the ball in Chapter

XXVII, almost inevitably, but ‘her brown ringlets flowing back

over her fair shoulders from her honest rosy face’ (282),

suggest that she is not part of the fashionable elite,

represented by Blanche, whose ‘shoulders were the whitest in

the whole room’. (283) She is as ‘natural’ in the setting of

the ball as Blanche is ‘artificial’, and in a predominantly

comic sequence we are invited to mock almost every character

but her - a sanctity and immunity to satire which link her

strongly to Helen and to the ideal Victorian woman.

The whiteness of Laura’s dress has several meanings – it

is the colour of purity and chastity, explaining its co-option

by Blanche, but it also implies simplicity, a desirable trait

in a Victorian heroine. She impresses her patroness, Lady

Rockminster, with her ‘artless looks, and gay innocent manner.’

(283) The white dress of a young woman of her class in the

1830s was almost certainly of muslin, a fabric which had by

then been highly fashionable for over thirty years. An

exceptionally finely-woven textile, originally an import from


Bengal, its manufacture had been suppressed and the market then

swamped by Lancashire-made imitations (Daly 39). Nor was this

ethically neutral, as Mrs Gaskell was to show in North and South

in 1854; one of her working-class characters dies from a

disease contracted from inhalation of air-borne cotton

fibres(283). While the sufferings of industrial textile workers

were beginning to be recognised at this time, to the majority

of Thackeray’s readership they were intellectually as distant

as Bengali workers. Moreover, white textiles require

considerable maintenance, even today. Laura’s dress took not

only many hours of work by a seamstress, but much effort to

maintain its pristine appearance, as Judith Flanders says:

‘Laundry was an expensive business, and a major part of any

household budget.’ (118) Only the more affluent could wear such

garments; Laura and Helen may be defined as living frugally,

but there is a significant level of middle-class privilege at

work here behind the scenes. Thackeray’s narrator comments on

the labour involved in cleanliness:

the gentlemen of the inns of court, and the gentlemen of

the universities, have their supply of this cosmetic


fetched in jugs by laundresses and bedmakers, and live in

abodes which were erected long before the custom of

cleanliness and decency obtained among us. (316)

The effort is recognised, though the young gentlemen, however

impecunious, do not perform it.

Laura’s ball gown contrasts with those of other ladies:

Blanche is in green, a colour perhaps intended to represent a

rural idyll. Loofbourow points out that pastoral motifs are

systematically associated with Blanche, in increasingly

synthetic contexts (110). However, many green dyes of the

period were toxic (Web Exhibits), and the colour is traditionally

associated with both envy and poison. Her mother is ‘splendid

in diamond, velvet, lace, feathers, and all sorts of millinery

and goldsmith’s ware.’ (283) This list reads like the proceeds

of the plunder her wealth ultimately turns out to be. Miss

Roundle is ‘a large young woman in a strawberry-ice coloured

crape dress, the daughter of the lady with the grapes in her

head, whose bunches Pen had admired.’ (286) Her dress and her

mother’s headwear both suggest vulgarity – far from admiring

the latter, Pen had been sarcastic: ‘six pounds of grapes in


her hair, besides her false pearls. "It's a coiffure of almonds

and raisins," said Pen "and might be served up for dessert."’

(285) Thackeray invites the reader to mock the dated hairstyle,

but also Pen’s youthful self-conceit, ‘In a word, he was

exceedingly satirical and amusing.’ The dress seems to shift in

colour from pink to red during the course of the ball, from a

delicate colour suiting a young lady to a brazen hue unsuitable

to a member of the elite.

The ball is a public affair at an inn, and attempts to

separate the classes consistently fail; the venal intention of

the Rockminster party giving the ball is to entice voters for

the family’s candidate. Thus there is a deliberate and

uncomfortable mingling with the mercantile classes within the

space of the ballroom and the hotel. As elsewhere in the novel,

the more conscious characters are of class boundaries, the more

permeable they appear to become. The chef, Mirobolant, dresses

and behaves as one of the gentry, approaching Blanche as a

presumed equal and challenging Pen to a duel (292), while

Altamont is able to penetrate with ease the ‘select room’ for

the gentry and ‘absorb his drink’, an unsuspected threat in the

heart of the elite setting. His meeting with Blanche


foreshadows later events and introduces her alternative name.

More than one character has multiple names, from Emily/Millie

Costigan/Fotheringay/Mirabel to Altamont/Amory/Armstrong.

Identity itself seems to be unstable in the case of these

characters, and allows them to perform a range of roles, either

on stage or in life and to move up and down in society.

Laura, however, remains much the same. She is not perfect;

she enjoys Pen’s jealousy and Blanche’s irritation at her

success, (283) while later her treatment of Fanny Bolton is

harsh and unyielding (551). Wagenknecht in 1943 cruelly

referred to ‘Laura Bell of Pendennis, who would probably make

more men happier by being boiled in oil than any other

Victorian heroine’ (294). Often her innocence and artlessness

are tainted by lack of emotional control, something Katharine

M. Rogers suggests may be part of a realist presentation of the

Victorian ideal:

Thus he could present the Victorian ideal as a real woman,

with all her amiable qualities as well as the deficiencies

necessarily associated with them. A woman who is totally

absorbed in her husband and children, as Victorian women


were supposed to be, can hardly avoid being weakly

dependent, like Amelia Osborne, or jealously possessive,

like […] Helen Pendennis. A submissive woman can get her

way by pathetic looks, as Amelia and Helen do. An

absolutely pure one is apt to be as narrow-minded as Helen

or Laura Bell. (258)

So, Laura is both artless and innocent but at the same time

dull and narrow-minded. Rogers regards this as ‘a loss of

realism and a flattening of interest.’ (258) Arguably, however,

she goes through a learning process as much as Pen does. She

comes to regret her harshness towards Fanny and the self-

righteousness with which she rejected Pen’s first proposal.

Thackeray leaves us in some doubt as to her true feelings when

she reads Warrington’s letter at Helen’s grave (784). The

enforced naivety of her life with Helen has been replaced by a

fuller understanding of the complexity of the world, in part

thanks to the more worldly tutelage of Lady Rockminster but

also because of a broader range of experience. Laura’s nebulous

relationship with Pen seems odd to today’s eyes. She is,

slightly disturbingly, consistently described as his sister,


and regarded by Helen as her daughter. While she has a secret

love for Pen through much of the book, she admits that she

would have accepted Warrington, had he been free, at a time

when she refused Pen.

While Arthur is unwell she appropriates the suite of rooms

on a lower floor, which has been explicitly identified by the

narrator as a location of elevated class and affluence. The

absent owner, Sibwright, is a qualified and practising lawyer,

unlike Pen, and too fashionable to remain in London at that

time of year (543). He is a ‘buck and flower’, and the contents

of his rooms are detailed elaborately in a way which seems to

blur the boundaries not of class but of gender:

the prettiest little brass bed in the world, with chintz

curtains lined with pink—he had a mignonette-box in his

bedroom window, and the mere sight of his little

exhibition of shiny boots, arranged in trim rows over his

wardrobe, was a gratification to the beholder. He had a

museum of scent, pomatum, and bear's-grease pots, quite

curious to examine, too; and a choice selection of

portraits of females, almost always in sadness and


generally in disguise or deshabille, glittered round the

neat walls of his elegant little bower of repose. (544)

Despite these racy portraits, Sibwright’s rooms are feminised,5

and the adjective ‘little’, frequently used to describe Laura

elsewhere, recurs in the description. Moreover, Laura tries on

his legal wig, “I opened the japanned box, and took out that

strange-looking wig inside it, and put it on and looked at

myself in the glass in it.” (544) This, very much an act of

transgression at a time when the concept of a female barrister

could only be comic, contributes to a suggestion of disturbing

gender fluidity emphasised by the fact that this is also the

location in which Laura reads one of the French novels used

consistently through the novel as a sign of potential

corruption and degradation even for men.

Laura is associated with a number of books and other

texts, most of which work to assert her suitability as a

heroine. When Warrington returns to his rooms, for example, he

sees ‘the Major seated demurely in an easy-chair […] listening,

or pretending to listen, to a young lady who was reading to him

a play of Shakspeare in a low sweet voice.’ (546) – the choice


of Shakespeare implies patriotism as well as respectability. By

the time the family party is in Belgium, however, she is

reading ‘books of devotion’ (580) more in keeping with Helen’s

state of health. Later, reading aloud is one of her duties in

the household of Lady Rockminster. This confirms her

intellectual readiness to be married to Arthur and to become

the secular domestic saint, while contrasting with the habits

and reading materials of Blanche.

As in Vanity Fair and several later novels, Thackeray creates

a deliberate opposition of the two central young women of his

tale. Blanche Amory, née Betsy Amory, is blonde where Laura is

dark, and her choice of name is echoed in her choice of

appearance and surroundings. White as a colour of textiles and

furnishings carries associations of purity and virtue, but also

of expense and extravagance. Here it is a veneer, barely

masking the reality of the spoilt and bad-tempered young woman.

While Laura comes of moderate but undeniably middle-class

origins, Blanche, like Emily, is a rootless individual, severed

from her colonial origins in time and space, detached in

sympathy and ambition from her family, in particular her

parental figures and determined to claw her way up the social


ladder. Blanche appears to have all the advantages – she lives

in a country house of some magnificence and a very desirable

London home. She is better-educated than her mother, attractive

and has a fortune of her own. However, beneath the beautiful

surface lies corruption. Very few characters take any time at

all to detect her essential falseness – even Pen is only

briefly infatuated by her charms.

Everything about Blanche is artificial, from the Arcadian

idyll in the country to the grandeur and ‘chastity’ of the

London house. She is initially described in terms which say

little about what she is:

"Oh, Miss Amory is a muse—Miss Amory is a mystery—Miss

Amory is a femme incomprise. [ …] Miss Amory paints, Miss

Amory writes poems, Miss Amory composes music, Miss Amory

rides like Diana Vernon. Miss Amory is a paragon, in a

word." (243)

She is, it seems, self-created. She is accomplished and

intelligent, but pert and self-centred. In many ways she

appears to be the archetypal Victorian heroine – blonde,

talented, wealthy – but Thackeray demonstrates the falsity

here, inviting the reader to question many assumptions.


When we meet Blanche in person it is at church, and she is

dressed ‘meek in dove-colour, like a vestal virgin’ (246), what

Alice Crossley calls ‘a carefully chosen screen of

impenetrability’ (34). Her friendly overtures to Laura include

a critique of her attire, however, ‘I admired you so at church.

Your robe was not well made, nor your bonnet very fresh. But

you have such beautiful grey eyes, and such a lovely tint.’

(247) and also of Helen ‘She must have been pretty once, but is

rather passee; she is not well gantee, but she has a pretty

hand’ (ibid). Her primary concern for material objects is thus

emphasised at the same time as her self-conceit and impudence.

Laura laughs, and is initially impressed by her new friend,

She showed Laura her drawings, which the other thought

charming. She played her some of her waltzes, with a rapid

and brilliant finger, and Laura was still more charmed.

And she then read her some poems, in French and English,

likewise of her own composition, and which she kept locked

in her own book—her own dear little book; it was bound in

blue velvet, with a gilt lock, and on it was printed in

gold the title of 'Mes Larmes.' (248)


The accomplishments here take a predominantly material

expression; most noticeable is the book, ‘My Tears’, the

outside of which is in luxurious blue velvet and gold. While

Laura is charmed, however, the attentive reader is already

alert to the contrast between surface and interior:

Blanche was fair, and like a sylph. She had fair hair,

with green reflections in it. But she had dark eyebrows.

She had long black eyelashes, which veiled beautiful brown

eyes. She had such a slim waist, that it was a wonder to

behold; and such slim little feet, that you would have

thought the grass would hardly bend under them. Her lips

were of the colour of faint rosebuds, and her voice

warbled limpidly over a set of the sweetest little pearly

teeth ever seen. She showed them very often, for they were

very pretty. She was very good-natured, and a smile not

only showed her teeth wonderfully, but likewise exhibited

two lovely little pink dimples, that nestled in either

cheek. (248)


The ‘green reflections’ alert one to the possibility that the

blondeness is not natural, as do the dark eyebrows and

eyelashes, while the colour itself has ominous implications of

poison. Her teeth are frequently visible because she is well

aware of how pretty they are, and her smile thus becomes a

device for self-display rather than an expression of real good

humour. Laura is impressed: ‘had never seen anything like it

before; anything so lovely, so accomplished, so fragile and

pretty; warbling so prettily, and tripping about such a pretty

room, with such a number of pretty books, pictures, flowers,

round about her.’ (248), but the repetition of ‘pretty’

emphasises the fact that Blanche is in a carefully-created

setting, which shows her to best effect. She performs not only

her music and poems, but also her own personality. Her ready

use of French makes her doubly suspect; Thackeray wrote at a

time of considerable upheaval in France and the British middle

classes suspected all things French. Throughout Pendennis French

novels imply lax morality or are an undesirable distraction

from real work or real life. Arthur translates poems of Goethe

and Schiller for Laura and Blanche; the latter translates ‘the

plaintive outpourings of her own tender Muse’ (250) from


French. The contrast between her own works and those of the

German literary giants emphasises the triviality and pretence

of the young woman, while the fact that ‘she had subsequently

improved her mind by a sedulous study of novels of the great

modern authors of the French language. There was not a romance

of Balzac and George Sand which the indefatigable little

creature had not devoured’ (253) damns her entirely. Writers

who might now be studied as parallels or equals of Thackeray

and his contemporaries were interpreted as dangerously corrupt

by his readers.

Blanche collects and loses friends as she does material

possessions. She has ‘had hosts of dear, dear, darling, friends

ere now, and had quite a little museum of locks of hair in her

treasure-chest, which she had gathered in the course of her

sentimental progress.’ (254) The friends are explicitly equated

with their hair here. Gifts of hair were an old tradition –

both Pope and Donne refer to it in poems – but in the Victorian

period it assumed enormous importance, the hair standing for

the bodily presence of the giver. To Blanche, however, they are

method of tallying her triumphs and disappointments, such as


the shock of discovering one of her dear friends serving behind

a shop counter. (254)

By the time she arrives in London the imperial origins of her

mother’s fortune are public and explicit. Lady Clavering’s

father was ‘a rich old indigo-planter’ and her ladyship becomes

widely known as ‘The Begum’ (395). Major Pendennis has served

in India and known the family and thus forms part of the nexus

of imperial connections which serves to validate the Clavering

wealth but ultimately leads to dark revelations. The source

and substance of the riches cause gossip across London: ‘Indigo

factories, opium clippers, banks overflowing with rupees,

diamonds and jewels of native princes, and vast sums of

interest paid by them for loans contracted by themselves or

their predecessors to Lady Clavering's father’ (394) – this is,

quite explicitly, loot of one kind or another.

The source of much of the family wealth, indigo, carries

with it a history of violence and oppression as do so many

colonial products. The dyestuff was in huge demand in the

Victorian period, and the production of the plant Indigofera

tinctoria, known in India since at least the Greco-Roman era, was


increased greatly to meet it. A successful cash crop in South

Carolina from about 1740 (Martin 3) produced, inevitably, by

slaves, it was introduced widely in Bengal from 1780 onward,

partly because the American Revolutionary War had blocked usual

supplies. As Raaj Sah points out, ‘The East India Company, its

servants and private British traders were eager to develop a

regular means of remittance to transfer their wealth and pay

for imports,’ (67); this was offered by a commodity exportable

in raw form and thus not subject to the ban on imported

products which had devastated the Indian textile industry (67).

Elaine Freedgood discusses the deindustrialisation of cotton

production in India (66); something very similar happened in

the production of indigo. After the decision to concentrate

crop production in Bihar and Bengal, rather than the

traditional sites in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Lahore, Oudh and Agra,

a 15% tax on indigo was imposed in the latter areas. There

production came typically from small farms, the crop sold on to

middlemen who extracted the dye and marketed the finished

product (Sah 69). In the new areas, however, British

plantations ‘operated on a large scale. In fact, these were the

first large organizations to operate in rural India which were


not military or religious in nature.’ (Sah 69). Coercion was

widely used to move production from food to the cash crop. The

planters were also administrators and given judicial powers,

while

The brutalities of the British indigo system were very

much evident in its formative years, as early as 1796, and

the cultivators (sic) misery and resistance were common

since the early nineteenth century. [ … ] Planters blamed

the administration for insufficient financial support and

for the law prohibiting planters from owning land. They

blamed Indian landlords for their non-cooperation and

wickedness. The administration often traced indigo

problems to the fickleness of the farmers' minds. (71)

In a ‘system called niz in Bengal and zeerat in Bihar, tenants

were evicted from their hereditary land and then routinely

forced to work as wage labourers.’ (72) and systematically

driven into debt in many cases. Only after a passive ‘revolt’

in 1859-60 did it become illegal to force workers to produce


indigo; production in Bengal declined so rapidly thereafter as

to prove that few of the producers had farmed it from choice.

Thus Lady Clavering’s wealth is by no means morally

neutral, and the source of Blanche’s own £10,000 is

compromised. Moreover, the dyestuff can be seen as a form of

metonymy; indigo is an extremely potent colorant, covering

almost all of any original pattern or colour, much as Blanche

covers her own nature and origins.

Lady Clavering is not a woman of any great degree of

education, though very good-natured, as we see when Pen and the

Major encounter her outside her London residence:

"Lor, if it isn't Arthur Pendennis and the old Major!"

jumped back to terra firma directly, and holding out two

fat hands, encased in tight orange-coloured gloves, the

good-natured woman warmly greeted the Major and his

nephew.

"Come in both of you.—Why haven't you been before?—Get

out, Blanche, and come and see your old friends.—O, I'm so

glad to see you. We've been waitin and waitin for you ever


so long. Come in, luncheon ain't gone down," […] and

Blanche, casting up her eyes towards the chimneys,

descended from the carriage presently, with a timid,

blushing, appealing look, and gave a little hand to Major

Pendennis. (394)

The gloves here are a sign of vulgarity, as is her accent, but

she is genuine in her hospitality, while Blanche’s ‘timid,

blushing, appealing look’ contrasts directly with the eye-roll

she performs before leaving the carriage – once again, she is

false. Lady Clavering perhaps stands for the population of

Britain, complacently accepting the produce of empire as she

does the ‘triumphs’ of her daughter, and very unwilling to dig

deeper into the unpleasant stories behind both.

The London house is as gorgeous and decorated as Blanche

herself:

The dining-room shutters of this handsome mansion were

freshly gilded; the knockers shone gorgeous upon the newly

painted door; the balcony before the drawing-room bloomed

with a portable garden of the most beautiful plants, and


with flowers, white, and pink, and scarlet; the windows of

the upper room (the sacred chamber and dressing-room of my

lady, doubtless), and even a pretty little casement of the

third story, which keen-sighted Mr. Pen presumed to belong

to the virgin bedroom of Miss Blanche Amory, were

similarly adorned with floral ornaments, and the whole

exterior face of the house presented the most brilliant

aspect which fresh new paint, shining plate-glass, newly

cleaned bricks, and spotless mortar, could offer to the

beholder.’ (393)

The floral ornaments bring the country into the city, but now

as a symbol of performance. The house, freshly repainted and

equipped with plate glass, performs a newness which it does not

possess. Amongst the possessions emphasising wealth are four

servants: a coachman and two footmen in ornate livery and a

porter whose task is to lay a roll of haircloth protecting the

dainty feet of the ladies from the harsh surface of the

pavement. McClusky points out that ‘The flunkey finds himself

fetishized by anxious employers who invest each part of his

body and article of his livery with social significance, an


attention to detail whose equivalence with sexual obsession

underscores the fact that all aspects of the employer's

identity-sexual as well as social-hinge upon the flunkey's

display’ (387). The wigs, buckles and laces (gentlemen’s dress

of an earlier era) as well as the size and height of the

footmen make them a desirable commodity as much as the landau:

lined with brocade or satin of a faint cream colour, drawn

by wonderful grey horses, with flaming ribbons, and

harness blazing all over with crests: no less than three

of these heraldic emblems surmounted the coats-of-arms on

the panels, and these shields contained a prodigious

number of quarterings, betokening the antiquity and

splendour of the house of Clavering and Snell. (393)

The colour white, very much present in this description, is

muted into a ‘faint cream colour’, the ‘grey’ of the horses and

even the yellow of the carriage. So, too, when the party enters

the house:


what could equal the chaste splendour of the drawing-

rooms?—the carpets were so magnificently fluffy that your

foot made no more noise on them than your shadow: on their

white ground bloomed roses and tulips as big as warming-

pans: about the room were high chairs and low chairs,

bandy-legged chairs, chairs so attenuated that it was a

wonder any but a sylph could sit upon them, marquetterie-

tables covered with marvellous gimcracks, china ornaments

of all ages and countries, bronzes, gilt daggers, Books of

Beauty, yataghans, Turkish papooshes and boxes of Parisian

bonbons. Wherever you sate down there were Dresden

shepherds and shepherdesses convenient at your elbow;

there were, moreover, light blue poodles and ducks and

cocks and hens in porcelain; there were nymphs by Boucher,

and shepherdesses by Greuze, very chaste indeed; there

were muslin curtains [ … ] there was, in a word,

everything that comfort could desire, and the most elegant

taste devise. (399)

Here the whiteness and airiness of the carpet is linked to the

floral décor but also a crowd of objects, ‘gimcracks’ from


across the world, carrying suggestions of Oriental decadence.

Blanche, the ‘sylph’ seems almost to vanish, physically in this

sequence – she entered the carriage ‘with aerial lightness’,

but now becomes almost weightless, the foot making no more

noise than a shadow and the chairs incapable of supporting

weight. Her body becomes absorbed into the luxurious

surroundings, which are ‘very chaste indeed’. Her practical

mother knows only that they ‘“cost a precious deal of money,

Major, […] I don't advise you to try one of them gossamer gilt

chairs…’ Blanche is again a ‘sylph’ Foker mentions a

performance of La Sylphide (404), a romantic ballet in which

the eponymous fairy steals the heart of a young farmer and

destroys his forthcoming marriage. Thackeray’s narrator waxes

lyrical about Taglioni in the role, thus situating the action

in the mid-1830s, but leaves the obvious implication to the

reader.

Blanche reaches her peak of performance in the ill-fated

dinner party. Eager to demonstrate her skills on the piano she

rushes her mother through the courtesies of the end of the

meal, and the two ladies retreat to the drawing room upstairs.

(405) The entire house becomes a stage, the activity therein


visible to all those passing by, including the policeman, ‘from

outside the house you looked inwards upon a night-scene of

feasting and wax-candles.’ (406) While, as Alice Crossley says,

‘the interior of the home at this period is carefully

constructed so as to separate public from private’ (39), here

all is revealed, both the orchestrated appearance of elegance

and the catastrophic invasion by Altamont who, penetrating the

sanctity of the home, disrupts not only its calm and order but

ultimately the foundations of the family. Altamont himself,

extraordinarily inebriated, is presented through the things

with which he adorns himself: ‘very gorgeously attired with

chains, jewellery, and waistcoats, which the illumination from

the house lighted up to great advantage; his boots were shiny;

he had brass buttons to his coat, and large white wristbands

over his knuckles […]his whiskers of the Tyrian purple.’ (406)

Here again dyestuffs combine with jewellery to create a false

glamour, one incapable of hiding his drunken crudeness. The

exterior shines, much as Blanche’s exterior glows white, but is

again a veneer.

Blanche is in many ways a screen onto which other colours

are projected; when at the theatre she is ‘thinking whether she


looked very wan and green under her rose-coloured hood, and

whether it was the mirrors at Gaunt House, or the fatigue and

fever of her own eyes, which made her fancy herself so pale.’

(480) while she is dazzling and blinding Foker and Pen can see

how yellow she looks. In very close succession we see her as

rose, green, yellow and as a blinding sun. Later she carefully

selects the outfit with which she is to overawe Fanny when

presenting her some cast-off (and entirely unsuitable) ball-

dresses:

Blanche, with pink and blue, and feathers, and flowers,

and trinkets (that wondrous invention, a chatelaine, was

not extant yet, or she would have had one, we may be

sure), and a shot-silk dress, and a wonderful mantle, and

a charming parasol, presented a vision of elegance and

beauty. (685)

The abundance of decorative items, particularly the shot silk

dress, neither one colour nor another, is both an aspect of

luxury and a metonymy for Blanche, herself neither one thing


nor another, who visits Fanny to patronise her but is then

confronted by her real father.

While Laura and Blanche are the main rivals for Pen’s

affections, two other young women attract his interest.

Emily/Millie Costigan, an actress known as Miss Fotheringay is

perhaps the most obvious red herring. She is a wholly

artificial construct whose stage persona contrasts radically

with her offstage personality – even her performance belongs to

her ‘coach’, Bows. The young, gauche Pen becomes infatuated

with her and her designing father, believing him to be wealthy,

plots to ensnare him. The novel begins here, when Major

Pendennis is brought rushing down from London by mail-coach to

untangle the affair. Emily, notably older than Pen and more

worldly wise, is also lacking in intelligence and subtlety. She

is incapable of interpreting a role on stage without memorising

the detailed coaching of Mr Bows, a somewhat mournful figure

who suffers more than once from unrequited love. Arthur sees

her in her finery on stage, but the reader is shown the mundane

realities of her life: ‘She brought in a pair of ex-white satin

shoes with her, which she proposed to rub as clean as might be

with bread-crumb: intending to go mad with them6 upon next


Tuesday evening in Ophelia, in which character she was to

reappear on that night.’ (143) She performs her histrionics on

stage, while Blanche reserves them for a domestic setting.

Fotheringay is consistently interested in food, whether as a

cleaning agent, as here, or, more often, as nourishment. She is

Irish, and this need to concentrate on her food is a reminder

of the Great Irish Famine which was only starting to come to a

close as Thackeray began his novel. ‘So poor little Arthur has

no money? Stop and take dinner, Bows; we've a beautiful beef-

steak pudding.’ she says, resigned to losing the match, and

ties up his love-letters to return them ‘like so much grocery,

and sate down and made tea afterwards with a perfectly placid

and contented heart’ (148).

Despite her father’s constant machinations, there is an

essential honesty about this character, ironically in the light

of her profession. She keeps her performance for the stage

alone, and offstage has few concerns. We are told that:

She cannot justly be called a romantic person: nor were

her literary acquirements great: she never opened a


Shakspeare from the day she left the stage, nor, indeed,

understood it during all the time she adorned the boards:

but about a pudding, a piece of needle-work, or her own

domestic affairs, she was as good a judge as could be

found; and not being misled by a strong imagination or a

passionate temper, was better enabled to keep her judgment

cool. [ … ] As for that poor lad, she said she pitied him

with all her heart. And she ate an exceedingly good dinner

(146).

Milly is placid, above all, accepting that the men around her

will negotiate the value of her beauty as a commodity, and

eventually marries an elderly baronet, thus becoming Lady

Mirabel – her ‘beautiful looks’ becoming her name. She takes

care to provide adequately for her father while separating

herself from him socially – she is one of the more successful

social climbers in the novel, quite unaffected by romantic

notions.

Fanny Bolton has the lowest social status of all of the

young women with whom Arthur has dealings, so low, indeed, that

from the start of their acquaintance Pen knows he must not


allow their relationship to develop - it is assumed that no

honourable connection could develop between them, and Laura and

Helen both leap immediately to the conclusion that she has

become his mistress when they find her tending him in his

illness. She is quite literally a liminal character as the

daughter of the doorkeeper, living in the lodge which is the

only means of access to the suites of rooms in Shepherd’s Inn

and meeting Pen at another threshold, the gates of Vauxhall

gardens. By the time Thackeray was writing this famous pleasure

resort was run-down and tawdry, well past its glory days as a

haunt of the eighteenth-century fashionable elite (Coke 2005).

The choice of location thus suggests a turning-point as the

doorkeeper’s daughter is escorted by the fraudulent Captain to

a former aristocratic setting. There is significant mingling of

the classes here:

‘Of course there were votaries of pleasure of all ranks

there—rakish young surgeons, fast young clerks and

commercialists, occasional dandies of the Guard regiments,

and the rest. Old Lord Colchicum was there in attendance

upon Mademoiselle Caracoline, who had been riding in the


ring; and who talked her native French very loud, and used

idiomatic expressions of exceeding strength as she walked

about, leaning on the arm of his lordship.’ (492)

– with this is more than a hint of moral danger, once more

associated with the French language. Fanny is particularly

enthralled by the fireworks, ‘splendour such as the finest

fairy tale, the finest pantomime she had ever witnessed at the

theatre, had never realised.’ (491) The evanescent nature of

the fireworks and the oil lamps which also enthral her

emphasise how fleeting the relationship is likely to be.

Fanny’s gloves are grubby and she makes no attempt to

disguise her poverty. Pen feels his own magnanimity in

escorting women so far beneath his status that they cannot even

be considered ladies - ‘ladies was not the word—they had

bonnets and shawls, and collars and ribbons, and the youngest

showed a pretty little foot and boot under her modest grey

gown, but his Highness of Fairoaks was courteous to every

person who wore a petticoat whatever its texture was, and the

humbler the wearer, only the more stately and polite in his

demeanour.’ (491) Fanny wears a grey gown much as Blanche did


when Pen’s first met her, but in this instance it is a genuine

statement of her modest and unassuming nature. She is unaware

of her own attractions though, like Blanche, ‘her teeth were

like little pearls’ (491). Her ignorance and naivety protect

her from the dangers around her, despite her instinct to flirt.

Pen is happy to escort the girl who ‘did not make his bed

nor sweep his chambers’ (492), but Fanny is undoubtedly of the

class which does, and cleanliness becomes her route to social

progress. She ultimately marries Huxter, an apothecary little

given to soap and water, and her influence on him shows early

signs of promoting his rise in society. At Vauxhall he is

a young man in a large white coat with a red neckcloth,

over which a dingy shirt-collar was turned so as to

exhibit a dubious neck—with a large pin of bullion or

other metal, and an imaginative waistcoat with exceedingly

fanciful glass buttons, and trousers that cried with a

loud voice, "Come look at me and see how cheap and tawdry

I am; my master, what a dirty buck!" and a […] lady in

pink satin on the other arm (494)


Red and pink once again imply vulgarity, but it is the dirt

that matters. Huxter’s occupation may be identical to John

Pendennis’s, but his neglect of hygiene keeps him in a lowly

position. As Nicolay says, ‘Virtually every element of his

appearance is ridiculous: filthy, garish, fussy, and obviously

cheap.’ (299) However, once married, Fanny and Huxter begin

the process of moving up in society by educating each other

about things. Bowes describes their lodgings: ‘She makes 'em

very trim and nice, though; gets up all Huxter's shirts and

clothes: cooks his little dinner, and sings at her business

like a little lark.’ (749) Bowes is still infatuated, but there

is every sign that Fanny will lead her husband into the paths

of cleanliness and thus virtue.

Social mobility is one of the primary concerns of the

novel, and by its conclusion most of the major characters have

achieved it in one direction or the other. Blanche marries

ultimately, but in Paris, that dangerous location in which

nothing can be stable,

Blanche Amory, it is well known, married at Paris, and the

saloons of Madame la Comtesse de Montmorenci de


Valentinois were amongst the most suivis of that capital.

The duel between the Count and the young and fiery

Representative of the Mountain, Alcide de Mirobo, arose

solely from the latter questioning at the Club the titles

borne by the former nobleman. Madame de Montmorenci de

Valentinois travelled after the adventure: and Bungay

bought her poems, and published them, with the Countess's

coronet emblazoned on the Countess's work. (785)

Yet again, names are dangerous, unreliable things.7 Blanche’s

husband duels the chef Mirobolant, now apparently a fierce

proponent of democracy, over the authenticity of names. Once,

presumably, widowed, she tours Europe and her poems are

published, presumably lucratively. She has fallen from the rank

of heiress, stepdaughter to a baronet to the nameless

illegitimate offspring of an escaped convict and risen again to

a rank which meets at least her own approval.

Laura and Pen are, of course, destined for each other.

She, has effectively ascended to the sainthood held by Helen as

‘Major Pendennis became very serious in his last days, and was

never so happy as when Laura was reading to him with her sweet


voice, or listening to his stories. For this sweet lady is the

friend of the young and the old: and her life is always passed

in making other lives happy.’ (783) She has accepted her role

as angel of the house – there will be no further experiments

with lawyer’s wigs or French novels - while the Major has lost

all defining features but his age. As with so many other

momentous occasions in the novel, the wedding-day is defined by

sartorial choice:

Mr. Arthur, attired in a new hat, a new blue frock-coat

and blue handkerchief, in a new fancy waistcoat, new

boots, and new shirt-studs (presented by the Right

Honourable the Countess Dowager of Rockminster), made his

appearance at a solitary breakfast-table, in Clavering

Park. (783)

While in most weddings the bride’s dress is the primary object

of interest, here it is Pen’s which draws attention. He has

sold land to the railway company, a neat means of providing the

necessary to support the middle-class life while signalling the

approach of the ‘present day’. He now wears entirely new


clothes, but they are restrained and, fully masculine, lack the

ornamentation of his earlier dandyism. The instabilities of

class and gender have been resolved and Pen, in an ending

echoing Wedgwood’s famous slave medallion, and thus as

ambiguous as much of the rest of the novel, ‘is only a man and

a brother.’8


Notes

1. 527. To Lady Castlereagh. 28 November 1848.2. 513. To Mrs Brookfield. 7-9 October 18483. 772. To David Masson. 6th May 1851.4. This is the source of the term used by Virginia Woolf in ‘A

Room of One’s Own’, and of the term ‘Oxbridge’ also found there and elsewhere.

5. However, it should be noted that the colour pink was not at that period seen as effeminate, or even gendered, as it tends to be today.

6. This is one of the more obvious references to Sheridan’s 1779 play The Critic, in which the heroine ‘runs mad in white satin’ while her Companion ‘runs mad in white linen’. 7. The original Madame de Valentinois was Diane de Poitiers, maîtresse en titre of Henri II of France and hugely powerful until his death in 1559.8. Wedgwood produced a special edition medallion in 1787 in support of the campaign to abolish slavery. A cameo of a kneeling slave in chains is surrounded by the words ‘Am I not aman and a brother?’


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Thackeray's Pendennis - gendered things and places.

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