William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
Autograph letter signed (‘W.M. Thackeray’) to Edward Fitzgerald, Bridgewater, 18 July 1831
Three pages, 220 x 180mm, bifolium. Provenance: Sotheby's, 18 December 1986, lot 98.

‘I am twenty years old, & don’t know why this birthday has awakened a number of solemn & unpleasant feelings, w[hic]h such an anniversary never raised before. But I was looking back yesterday, & I cannot find a single day in the course of my life which has been properly employed – I can only behold a melancholy succession of idleness & dissipation, which now leaves me without mental satisfaction, & I fear without proper repentance’. Written on his birthday, in a melancholy tone: ‘I looked by chance at the opposite page after I wrote the word repentance, & do you know seeing that account of my dinners & wine drinking has quite gladdened me, & made me think there is some chance for me after all’, he goes on to state that he will no longer practice law. Complaining of his work, ‘I am staying here alone doing that stupid book at the rate of about 3 pages a day’, he mentions those that he is currently staying with before expressing his affection for Fitzgerald ‘I don’t know what should put me in so sentimental a mood, but do you know I have been for the last half-hour drinking tea, & thinking about you & your sister’. The letter goes on with lamentations on the past, ‘I left London a very few days after you, for I felt very miserable & solitary there I used to go & walk in Regent Street but the place was a desert without your fashionable form’, and comments on his financial situation, including the eighteen pence he paid for dinner whilst apologising, ‘the paper on w[hi]ch I write cost me sixpence a quire & I have no doubt you will be a little angry with my economy that is if you read my letter’.

Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883) was most famously the translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He and Thackeray had met at Trinity College, Cambridge the previous year and remained friends for the following two decades. When asked by his daughter at the end of his life which of his friends he cared for most, Thackeray replied ‘There was 2Old Fitz" and I was very fond of Brookfield once’. Few of the letters between the two survive today, with Fitzgerald burning most of their early correspondence.