Fiction · 1843
Men’s Wives
Three stories about marriage, told by Thackeray's persona George Fitz-Boodle. "The Ravenswing" is the long one: Morgiana Crump, a tavern-keeper's daughter with a remarkable voice, marries the plausible Howard Walker, who spends her money, ruins himself, goes to the Fleet, and is kept there in some comfort by the singing career she builds while he explains to visitors how much he has suffered. "Mr. and Mrs. Frank Berry" sets a schoolboy fight at Slaughter House against a very different combat at Versailles years later, with the same man on the losing end. "Dennis Haggarty's Wife" is the shortest and the cruellest — an Irish surgeon's devotion to a woman who has nothing whatever to recommend her, and never had.
Thackeray published the stories in Fraser's Magazine in 1843, four years before Vanity Fair, and they belong with the early fiction in which he was working out how to write about selfishness without softening it.
This Bibliomancer edition presents all three stories complete.
Contents
- Note
- Chapter III — What came of Mr. Walker’s discovery of the “Bootjack.”
- Chapter II — The fight at Slaughter House: The combat at Versailles
- Chapter I — Which Is Entirely Introductory—Contains an Account of Miss Crump, Her Suitors, and Her Family Circle
- Chapter II — In Which Mr. Walker Makes Three Attempts to Ascertain the Dwelling of Morgiana
- Chapter III — What Came of Mr Walker’s Discovery of the “Bootjack.”
- Chapter IV — In Which the Heroine Has a Number More Lovers, and Cuts a Very Dashing Figure in the World
- Chapter V — In Which Mr. Walker Falls Into Difficulties, and Mrs. Walker Makes Many Foolish Attempts to Rescue Him
- Chapter VI — In Which Mr. Walker Still Remains in Difficulties, but Shows Great Resignation Under His Misfortunes
- Chapter VII — In Which Morgiana Advances Towards Fame and Honour, and in Which Several Great Literary Characters Make Their Appearance
- Chapter VIII — In Which Mr. Walker Shows Great Prudence and Forbearance
- Postscript
- Chapter I — The Fight at Slaughter House
- Chapter II — The Combat at Versailles
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1811–1863 · Victorian
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) was born in Calcutta and sent to England at six; he gambled away much of an inheritance at Cambridge, then tried painting in Paris before turning to journalism, writing under various pseudonyms for Fraser's Magazine and Punch. Vanity Fair (1847–48), serialized without his name attached at first, made his reputation as Dickens's great rival; Pendennis, Henry Esmond and The Newcomes followed, but he never matched its scale again. He died suddenly in London at fifty-two.
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