William Makepeace Thackeray was born 18 July 1811, first and only child of Richmond Thackeray and Anne Becher Thackeray. His mother had lived in a dreamworld. In her youth, she had fallen in love with the highly unsuitable Henry Carmichael-Smyth, but was forced appart from him by her angry grandmother. William was born in Calcutta ( India) where his father worked for the East India Company, and sent to school in England, as was the fashion for colonial-born children, in 1817. His father had died in 1815, and shortly after William left, his mother she remarried to her first love, Captain  Carmichael-Smyth. They joined William in England in 1820.  But the couple had no more children, as Anne was unable to do so. She had large difficulties during her first pregnancy (as a child, William was noted for having an exepcionally large head).

Like most English children, William was miserable at school. He wasn't good at sports, though he was fairly popular in spite of that. While in school he developed two habits that were to stay with him all his life: sketching and reading novels.He was particularly fond of Henry Fielding´s work. He later attended Cambridge, where he lost a poetry contest to one Alfred Tennison, though several of William's satirical poems were published around this time. William also met Edward FitzGerald , with whom he remained best friends for the rest of his life. Fitzgerald is only known for his transltions.

William never quite took a degree in anything. He started studying law, though he never actually got anywhere with it. He supported himself by selling sketches and working at a bill discounting firm.This was a desreputable job in which you never really knew who you would end up owing money to.It involved buying and selling of IOU's.He'd fallen in with a bad crowd on the Continent, and he had some rather large gambling debts to pay off. After a brief flirtation with running his own newspaper, William was even more briefly an art student before falling in love with one Isabella Shawe. Since he needed enough money to marry on, William's mother and stepfather, mostly broke due to an economic collapse in India (where they'd left most of their money), scraped together all of the funds they could find and started a newspaper called the Constitution. William was appointed the paper's Paris correspondent at £450 per year. He'd also had a little book of satirical essays on the ballet published8. After a few rocky patches, William and Isabella were married on 20 August 1836.

Their first child, Anne Isabella, was born in June of 1837. Her birth was rapidly followed by the collapse of the Constitution. The sketch market had pretty much dried up. A fact is that he´d actually been turned down by Dickens to illustrate The Pickwick Papers. So William began writing as many articles as humanly possible and sending them to any newspaper that would print them. This was a precarious sort of existence which would continue for most of the rest of his life. He was fortunate enough to get two popular series going in two different publications.For these, he used pseudonyms such as Michael Angelo Titmarsh and Charles James Yellowplush. His personal life, however, wasn't going so well. His second daughter died at less than a year old, and though a third daughter, Harriet Marian, was born in 1840 and thrived, Isabella did not. She fell victim to some sort of mental illness which was so dangerous that she was witihn inches of drowning her three year-old daughter on one ocassion. After a few months  her state was so suicidal and difficult to control that she was placed in a private institution. She remained in one institution or another for the rest of her life and outlived her husband by thirty years.

Now William's life got really busy. Over the next few years, he wrote The History of Henry Esmond, The Newcombes, and Vanity Fair, made two lecture tours of America, carried on a protracted (but probably innocent) flirtation with one Jane Brookfield, wife of an old school friend, and stood as an independent candidate in an Oxford by-election.
 

 Through all this, he was continually ill with recurrent kidney infections caused by a bout with syphillis in his youth, but he still managed to have an impressive house built and settle generous dowries on his daughters. In 1859, he and a friend named George Smith started an inexpensive monthly called the Cornhill Magazine, which set a first issue sales record at over 110,000 copies. William, besides editing, contributed a great series of essays called the Roundabout Papers

In 1863, William, who felt his health was now seriously bad, travelled around visiting old haunts and friends to say goodbye. Sure enough, on Christmas Eve, 1863, he died of a cerebral effusion (a burst blood vessel). His funeral drew around 2,000 mourners, including Charles Dickens. Although the two writers were never the best of friends, they admired eachothers work. It is very important to note how  huge the influence of Thackerys' writing style was over the English language. For example, the word "snob" has its actual meaning thanks to him.

 William's recently widowed mother continued to stay with his daughters and was a terrible burden on them until she died in 1864 and was buried next to William. Minnie, the younger daughter, married Leslie Stephen, had one daughter, and died suddenly at 35.  Her widower later remarried and had another daughter who by chance would become the famous novelist Virginia Woolf.
 
 

Monsarrat, Ann. An Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1980.
Adaptated and shortened by Emilia Carballo Horton