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London as a System of Signs in Thackeray's The Newcomes

The Newcomes is among the most richly allusive novels in English. One of its many allusive strains is urban; indeed, in The Newcomes Thackeray shows himself to be worthy of comparison with Dickens, Balzac, and Zola in the evocation of a great city's complex cultural life. As with everything else in his fiction, Thackeray's evocation of London oscillates between romance and reality, eternal recurrence and present singularity. Though a recognizable historical place, his London is also an elaborate construction of social imagination. At the beginning of The Newcomes, Thackeray presents a "farago of old fables" to underscore his proposition that "all types of all characters march through all fables" including novels, that the thing that has been is that which shall be, and that there is nothing new under the sun. On this level of narration, he resorts to the Hogarthian moral progress, identifying Thomas Newcome, the founder of the family fortunes, both with Hogarth's virtuous apprentice (see the headletter for Chapter 2) and with Dick Whittington: "Like Whittington and many other London apprentices, he began poor; and ended by marrying his master's daughter, and becoming sheriff and alderman of the City of London" (18). The city as a cluster of intertexts is realized further in the images of paradise with which the novel begins, first among the young rakes of the Cave of Harmony, and second in the description of the religious gravity of the Newcome estate in Clapham, "a serious paradise" where even the head gardener is "a Scotch Calvinist, after the strictest order, only occupying himself with the melons and pines provisionally, and until the end of the world" (221