The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray (good english books to read TXT) 📕

slightest doubt, contributed features to the great portrait, is a certain Andrew Robinson Stoney, afterwards Stoney-Bowes.

The original of the Countess Lyndon was Mary Eleanor Bowes, Dowager Countess of Strathmore, and heiress of a very wealthy Durham family. This lady had many suitors, but in 1777 Stoney, a bankrupt lieutenant on half pay, who had fought a duel on her behalf, induced her to marry him, and subsequently hyphenated her name with his own. He became member of Parliament, and ran such extravagant courses as does Barry Lyndon, treated his wife with similar barbarity, abducted her when she had escaped from him, and then, after being divorced, found his way to a debtors’ prison. There are similarities here which no seeker after originals can overlook. Mrs. Ritchie says that her father had a friend at Paris, “a Mr. Bowes, who may have first told him this history of which the details are almost incredible, as quoted from the papers of the time.” The name of Thackeray’s friend is a curious coincidence, unless, as may well have been the case, he was a connection of the family into which the notorious adventurer had married. It is not unlikely that Thackeray had seen the work published in 1810⁠—the year of Stoney-Bowes’s death⁠—in which the whole unhappy romance was set forth. This was “The Lives of Andrew Robinson Bowes Esq., and the Countess of Strathmore. Written from thirty-three years’ Professional Attendance, from letters and other well authenticated Documents by Jesse Foot, Surgeon.” In this book we find several incidents similar to ones in the story. Bowes cut down all the timber on his wife’s estate, but “the neighbours would not buy it.” Such practical jokes as Barry Lyndon played upon his son’s tutor were played by Bowes on his chaplain. The story of Stoney and his marriage will be found briefly given in the notice of the Countess’s life in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Whence that part of the romantic interlude dealing with the stay in the Duchy of X⁠⸺, dealt with in chapter X, etc., was inspired, Thackeray’s own notebooks (as quoted by Mrs. Ritchie) conclusively show: “January 4, 1844. Read in a silly book called L’Empire, a good story about the first K. of Wurtemberg’s wife; killed by her husband for adultery. Frederic William, born in 1734 (?), m. in 1780 the Princess Caroline of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel, who died the 27th September 1788. For the rest of the story see L’Empire, Ou Dix Ans Sous Napoléon, Par Un Chambellan: Paris, Allardin, 1836; vol. I 220.” The “Captain Freny” to whom Barry owed his adventures on his journey to Dublin (chapter III) was a notorious highwayman, on whose doings Thackeray had enlarged in the fifteenth chapter of his Irish Sketch Book.

Despite the slowness with which it was written, and the seeming neglect with which it was permitted to remain unreprinted, Barry Lyndon was to be hailed by competent critics as one of Thackeray’s finest performances, though the author himself seems to have had no strong regard for the story. His daughter has recorded, “My father once said to me when I was a girl: ‘You needn’t read Barry Lyndon, you won’t like it.’ Indeed, it is scarcely a book to like, but one to admire and to wonder at for its consummate power and mastery.” Another novelist, Anthony Trollope, has said of it: “In imagination, language, construction, and general literary capacity, Thackeray never did anything more remarkable than Barry Lyndon.” Mr. Leslie Stephen says: “All later critics have recognised in this book one of his most powerful performances. In directness and vigour he never surpassed it.”

W. J.

The Luck of Barry Lyndon I My Pedigree and Family⁠—Undergo the Influence of the Tender Passion

Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it. Ever since ours was a family (and that must be very near Adam’s time⁠—so old, noble, and illustrious are the Barrys, as everybody knows) women have played a mighty part with the destinies of our race.

I presume that there is no gentleman in Europe that has not heard of the house of Barry of Barryogue, of the kingdom of Ireland, than which a more famous name is not to be found in Gwillim or D’Hozier; and though, as a man of the world, I have learned to despise heartily the claims of some pretenders to high birth who have no more genealogy than the lackey who cleans my boots, and though I laugh to utter scorn the boasting of many of my countrymen, who are all for descending from kings of Ireland, and talk of a domain no bigger than would feed a pig as if it were a principality; yet truth compels me to assert that my family was the noblest of the island, and, perhaps, of the universal world; while their possessions, now insignificant and torn from us by war, by treachery, by the loss of time, by ancestral extravagance, by adhesion to the old faith and monarch, were formerly prodigious, and embraced many counties, at a time when Ireland was vastly more prosperous than now. I would assume the Irish crown over my coat-of-arms, but that there are so many silly pretenders to that distinction who bear it and render it common.

Who knows, but for the fault of a woman, I might have been wearing it now? You start with incredulity. I say, why not? Had there been a gallant chief to lead my countrymen, instead of puling knaves who bent the knee to King Richard II, they might have been freemen; had there been a resolute leader to meet the murderous ruffian Oliver Cromwell, we should have shaken off the English forever. But there was no Barry in the field against the usurper; on the contrary, my ancestor, Simon de