A Shabby Genteel Story

A Shabby Genteel Story is an early and unfinished novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. It was first printed among other stories and sketches in his collection Miscellanies. A note in Miscellanies by Thackeray, dated 10 April 1857, describes it as "only the first part" of a longer story which was "interrupted at a sad period of the writer's own life" and never subsequently completed. He also describes it as being written "seventeen years ago", therefore c. 1840. This was the period when Thackeray's wife became mentally unstable, throwing his personal life into confusion.

Plot summary[edit]

After a brief preliminary chapter outlining the early life of certain characters the story begins in England in the winter of 1835. A well-born but impoverished gentleman calling himself "George Brandon" is hiding from his creditors in the out-of-season seaside town of Margate. He finds cheap lodgings with a family consisting of James Gann, a bankrupted small businessman; his termagant and socially pretentious wife, Juliana; her two elder daughters by her first husband, Rosalind and Isabella Wellesley Macarty; and her downtrodden youngest daughter, Caroline Gann.

Though he despises the entire family as ridiculously vulgar, Brandon plans to amuse himself by seducing one or other of the elder girls, who are local belles; but though at first they find him attractive they soon realise he is mocking them and their social milieu. Thereafter they treat him with scorn, and so Brandon irritably switches his attentions to the youngest, Caroline. She responds by conceiving a passionate first love for him, and he begins a covert flirtation with her – in part to irritate another lodger who adores her. This is the handsome, vain, deluded young artist Andrew 'Andrea' Fitch.^[1] From being at first an amusement to Brandon however Caroline eventually becomes an obsession, for although desperately in love she makes it clear she will not sleep with him unless he offers marriage: and this Brandon cannot do, as his financial future depends on his making a good match with a wealthy wife. As he grows increasingly frustrated with Caroline he becomes more and more furious with her admirer, Fitch, who suspects his designs on the girl and thwarts them where he can. Brandon finally insults Fitch, who then grandiosely challenges him to a duel. With the help of two of Brandon's friends visiting from university (a dissipated young nobleman called Viscount Cinqbars and his toady, Rev. Thomas Tufthunt) the 'duel' takes place, though the pistols in fact are not loaded.(Thackeray uses a similar plot device in The Luck of Barry Lyndon). The "duel" is interrupted anyway by the arrival of a wealthy lady previously besotted with Fitch, who impetuously carries him off with her. Brandon by this time is so intent on having Caroline that he allows the Rev. Tufthunt to marry them, and they run away together. There the story ends.

In his note to the earliest edition Thackeray hints at how the plot was to have developed: "Caroline was to have been disowned and deserted by her wicked husband: that abandoned man was to marry somebody else: hence, bitter trials and grief, patience and virtue, for poor little Caroline, and a melancholy ending – as how should it have been gay?"