![]() ![]() ‘That if–that if–the nasty, horrid, odious black Mah-ra-a-a-attahs take the fort, you will put me out of their power.’ ![]() ‘Captain Gahagan,’ sobbed she, ‘Go-Go-Goggle-iah!’ So it is interesting that the theme of racial mixing - of miscegenation - runs like a bright red thread through Thackeray’s work.įor example, in The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan(1838), Gollian Gahagan falls madly in love with a half-breed, the fair and lovely Julie Jowler, daughter of Colonel Jowler and his Indian wife, a “hideous, bloated, yellow creature.” Later on, Gahagan is chased by the lady Puttee Rooge with the “complexion of molasses” and “rendered a thousand times more ugly by the tawdry dress and the blazing jewels with which she was covered.” And at one of the novel’s many crisis points, Belinda Bulcher, 100% white and “dazzling as alabaster” extracts a promise from her hero: Ray in his definitive biography of Thackeray, wrote: “Closely scrutinized, his novels turn out to afford a kind of diary of his intimate life”. Writing for him was a way of coming to terms with human nature, specifically, his human nature. ![]() William Makepeace Thackeray was one of those rare writers who could criticize something without developing a contempt for it. William Makepeace Thackeray: The Indian In The Closet March 29, 2006 / ![]()
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