Chapter 6

Secure in the knowledge that his writing had earned him international acclaim, Thackeray felt a lecture tour in America would help recover the fortune he had lost as a young man. “I must and will go,” he wrote Anny, “not because I like it, but because it is right I should secure some money against my death for your mother and you two girls.”

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- His first tour began in November 1852, during which he presented a series of six lectures on a group of 18th century writers he termed the “English humourists,” which he had given frequently in Britain the previous year. With over one thousand audience members nearly every night, the lectures were an immediate success. From New York, Thackeray travelled to Boston, and then Providence, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. Thackeray was a frequent guest among American literary circles, which included Henry James Sr., Henry Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and others. He returned to England in May, overwhelmed by the “rush and activity” of American life, but pleased with his experiences. “I have met very many pleasant and clever men and women natural witty and extremely good natured among one another. There’s nothing to sneer at – some usages different to ours, but a manliness and fairness that puts our society to shame often.” As he anticipated, his tours were a financial success. “I think that money will be the sweetest of any I ever had,” he wrote his daughters.
  
  He returned for a second tour in 1855 with a series of lectures on the “Four Georges,” a critical and satirical view of the House of Hanover. Thackeray lectured in New York, Boston, Providence, Salem, Albany, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Macon and Columbus, Georgia, Mobile, Alabama, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. While the tour was another financial success, Thackeray viewed it more negatively than the first; he now found American manners unpleasant, and the harsh responses of the critics felt like “a degrading ordeal.” Back in Boston in the spring of 1853, as related by Annie Adams Fields, the wife of publisher James T. Fields, “He bravely said he was homesick; and with no other excuse to any one, he stepped on board a Boston steamer, and vanished thus from the centre of his admirers.”

In this section

	Thackeray’s “transformation” playing cards	Thackeray to an unknown correspondent, 25 November 1852.

	Costume sketches for the Baxter family, [1852].	Thackeray to Sally Baxter, 22 December 1852.

	Thackeray to his daughters from Savannah, 14-19 March 1853.	Thackeray’s lecture manuscript of “George IV,” [1855-6].

	Georges Roch brooch given to Annie Adams Fields.	The Virginians (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1857-9).

	Letter to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 16 November 1859.	Confederate imprint of The Adventures of Philip (Columbia, South Carolina: Evans & Cogswell, 1864).

	Thackeray in America, 1850s.