Recollections of a Secretary

Abstract

(1) from Thackeray’s Haunts and Homes (1897) pp. 23–4, 52–6; (2) from With Thackeray in America (1893) pp. 34–5, 45–7, 110–11, 171–3. Thackeray became intimate with the family of Eyre Evans Crowe (1799–1868), historian, novelist and Paris correspondent of the Morning Chronicle, during his mid-1830s sojourn in Paris; he used to visit them and play with the children every Saturday, joining in Mrs Crowe’s musical At Homes, where a song from him was regarded as the highlight of the evening — Sir Joseph Crowe, Reminiscences of Thirty five Years of My Life (1895) pp. 10–11. In his later and more prosperous days, he remained very friendly and was able to help two of the Crowe boys, Joseph (1825–96) and Eyre fils (b. 1824); and their sister Amy (1831–65) was for eight years a member of Thackeray’s household, after her mother’s death and until her marriage in 1862. Eyre fils, struggling to become an artist — eventually he became an A.R.A. — was engaged as his amanuensis and researcher while he was writing Esmond, and in 1852 was persuaded to accompany him on the American Humourists lecture tour. ‘I dont think you’d make the best and cutest Secretary that a man could find anywhere,’ Thackeray wrote to him: ‘yet to me you would be valuable as you know from old affection and entire confidence wh I couldn’t give to a stranger who might be a hundred times more spry than you’ (LPP, iii, 79).