This was also Morgan’s view of the world. He never mastered the new epoch. You had to look quite a long way down the descending orders of rank to arrive at his actual position in society – though of course his contemporaries could place him after only a few idle questions. This was a second son, educated at Cheam, entered under Mr Wilding at Trinity College, Cambridge, with men who would far outshine him. He was hardly highborn: his great-uncle’s saddlery overlooked the college gates. Later on, in supplying biographical details to year books and the like, he lightly removed his mother from a haberdashery in Cambridge and described the Hovels and all his numerous cousins as ‘of Norfolk’. In the same vein, he once claimed to have been presented at all the Courts in Europe, which was – to put it mildly – stretching the point. This mania for improving the bare facts – and in him it became an actual mania – was passed on to Georgina. There was something very wrong with Morgan Thomas and it seems to have been a wilful attempt to make time stand still or even run backwards. In this he was not alone and there was in his generation a writer only too likely to understand him and his kind.
Thackeray went to Trinity at about the same time as Morgan; and, like him, read law at the Inner Temple. In 1837, he came back from a three-year sojourn in Paris and in that year he too was presented with a daughter, born in London a fortnight after Georgina in much less auspicious circumstances. What distinguished Thackeray from Morgan Thomas and his kind was his energy and, above all, his talent. It was enough for Morgan to be a gentleman of independent means, however shaky those means were. But Thackeray had nothing on which he could fall back: what little he did inherit, he lost at cards in a disastrous evening or two when a student at the Inner Temple. Necessity sharpened his wits. In satirising the likes of Morgan and his foolish wife, he showed himself a man very much in the spirit of the times. The world was moving forward and the gifted man looked outwards and opened his mind and his senses to the new.
Part of the hack work Thackeray did for Frazer’s Magazine was to write the highly popular ‘Christmas Books’, the last of which was published in 1850. He was by now famous through having written Vanity Fair, which some of his contemporaries placed higher than anything by Dickens. At the end of the book the plot is triumphantly resolved when the major surviving characters find themselves thrown together at a Rhineland spa. In the Christmas Book of 1850 Thackeray returns us to the Rhine in the company of a fatuous family called Kicklebury. His satirical portrait of them drew a reproof from The Times. The review, which was written to order by a friend of Thackeray’s called Charles Lamb Kenney, greatly amused its target, enough for him to reprint it in the second edition of the work, with commentary. The one unanswerable point Thackeray had to make about the savaging of the Kickleburys was that the work had sold out. Kenny had written:
From the moment his eye lights on a luckless family group embarked on the same steamer with himself, the sight of his accustomed quarry – vulgarity, imbecility and affectation – reanimates his relaxed sinews, and, playfully fastening his satiric fangs upon the familiar prey, he dallies with it in mimic ferocity like a satiated mouser.
Yes, Thackeray rejoins: and the public loves it. Something is moving, something is in the air: there is no pity for vulgarity, imbecility and affectation. The Times, he indicates with an unruffled assurance, has missed the joke.
Georgina’s arrival did nothing to settle her parents’ position. In the short term, it greatly worsened it. The Thomas family had always found Morgan’s violent temper hard to stomach. Clearly he could not expect to go on living at Tooting Lodge for ever and the question had already been broached more than once as to when he would shift for himself. Georgina’s birth made an issue of it. As soon as it was clear she would not follow her sister into an infant grave, Morgan and Louisa came under pressure to leave. There may have been a second impetus. The family banked with their neighbour William Esdaile, who lay dying in Clapham. For two years Esdaile, who was a very old man but nevertheless the presiding genius of the bank he had built up, had done no business following malarial fever contracted in Italy. At the beginning of 1837 the bank failed. Whether or not the Thomas fortunes went down with it, Morgan was left with just enough unearned income to continue as a gentleman: the challenge was to find a house and a style that would reflect his high opinion of himself. Putting it another way, in the long gallery of snobs, what kind of a snob was he going to be?
Late in life, when the mood of retribution was upon her, Georgina published a letter from her brother Dalrymple. It read in part: ‘If you think to alarm me by threatening to unveil the fact that our grandfather Thomas was a drunken and dissolute lawyer and that Mother was a bastard you enormously mistake yourself.’
Dal was by then a Colonel of Militia straight from the pages of a Thackeray novel. His exasperation was well merited. No one more than his sister had cultivated the legend of glorious Welsh and Scottish ancestry. But he also knew there was truth in at least the second allegation. John Apsley Dalrymple died unmarried. This clashes painfully with the entry in the cherished family copy of Burke’s Landed Gentry, where Louisa is shown as wife to Morgan and ‘only child of John Apsley Dalrymple, Esq., of Gate House in the parish of Mayfield, Sussex.’ The discrepancy is only interesting to us because for Georgina to have learned about it must have been as a consequence of some bitter family accusations. We do not have to look very far for the major culprit. All the cruel candour in the family came from Morgan. As she grew up, it was a style very much to his daughter’s taste. Both parents made her lofty, but she learned her recklessness from him. In her Mémoires, which were a settling of all the scores, Georgina went out of her way to explain to the world how her fearsome and aloof father ended his days in Dr Blandford’s asylum in Long Ditton, restrained night and day by four burly attendants. Without her testimony, this was a secret that might have followed the poor man into the grave. All in all, when the parents gazed down into the crib that first May evening, they were looking unknowingly at a wild child.
Imagine her hand lax and pink against the linen of the crib. Who she is, what she will be is written there in that moist palm as plainly as in any book. Many years later, one sultry afternoon in Paris, the palm reader and psychic Desbarolles, who said so many interesting things to her, was the first to interpret a very pronounced line which ran from her lifeline and ended in a fork or trident under the little finger. ‘Madame,’ the palmist explained, ‘you will write the most celebrated memoirs of the century: and at the same time, useful.’ He repeated this word to her several times, an instance, if any were needed, of his amazing powers. For had she not already begun these memoirs? The word useful rang like a gong in the stuffy room. It was exactly the adjective she herself would have chosen. The nineteenth century had done her wrong, not because she was a ninny, but because she was a woman of genius in a man’s world. There was a vital subtext. The very people who ought to have championed her, her parents, the aristocracy to which she believed she belonged, had cast her aside. Her class had betrayed her. Another palmist, Madame de Thèbes, had also studied the curious branchings and forkings and came up with a different reading, but one which brought the story nearer to home. It was clear to her, she said, before giving Georgina back her mitten, that what the hand indicated was that she would most assuredly be divested of her £27,000 inheritance – if that had not already happened. The glorious thing about palmistry was that both statements were true, one not less than the other.
Until Georgina came along, Morgan was a man who cherished political ambitions. After leaving Cambridge he had gone on a journey through Persia with a friend and this at least showed some enterprise (or was an example of his famous bloody-mindedness) since that country was then at war with Russia. In 1830, with this slight claim to fame and sponsored by his uncle, he stood as a Whig at the Cambridge parliamentary election, where he made an utter fool of himself and was soundly trounced at the hustings. Two years later he went up to Coventry with his mind a little clearer to stand as a Tory in elections to the first Reformed Parliament. His campaign throws great light on his character and helps explain the man he was to his children.
The task before him was a daunting one. Coventry was an uncommonly prosperous