Thackeray's memorials of defeat - author William Makepeace Thackeray

'You ain't got young', remarks the old waiter when Major Dobbin, after his long absence in India, returns to Slaughter's Coffee House, where he stayed with George Osborne in the days before Waterloo, at which Osborne was killed. From Slaughter's Coffee House, Dobbin escorted Osborne on the day of his marriage to Amelia, whom Dobbin would have liked to marry himself. The waiter still has a note in his faded pocket-book of some money which Osborne borrowed from him and did not repay. 'Ten years and a fever don't make a man young,' Dobbin replies (Vanity Fair, ch. 58). A longing for lost youth, particularly when that longing is awakened by familiar scenes, pervades Thackeray's novels.

Such returns operate like the secret window at Castlewood when Henry Esmond touches the lock for the first time in sixteen years: 'The spring had not been touched for years, but yielded at length, and the window sank down' (Henry Esmond, Book III, ch. 7). It descended like Esmond's tears, most likely! Through the secret window and in the devastation of his hopes, Esmond enters Castlewood at the end of the novel. First he rides past the places where his future was shaped. The rooks drowse in the elms by the church in the sleeping village. The rooks at Castlewood, which caw throughout the novel, link Esmond's experiences with those of his American grandson, Harry Warrington, when Harry visits Castlewood half a century later in The Virginians; and connect both novels with Thackeray's boyhood in the rook-haunted town of Addiscombe, near Croydon (Ray II, p.180).

The aged Beatrix Esmond loves Harry Warrington for his resemblance to his grandfather, whom she cannot forgive herself for having rejected. Under the same compulsion of recalled ardour, the old folk in The Newcomes contrive to make the youngsters re-enact, more happily, their own first love. Clive Newcome reminds Mme. de Florac of his father, the Colonel; Ethel Newcome reminds the Colonel of Mme. de Florac. It is appropriate that Clive and Ethel meet in the worn antique setting of the garden at the Hotel de Florac, with its decaying busts of the Caesars: 'Caracalla frowning over his shoulder at Nerva, on to whose clipped hair the roofs of the grey chateau have been dribbling for ever so many long years'. The garden suggests exquisite failure. The fountain with its moss-eaten Triton does not play; its basin is arid. The damp faun with a broken nose pipes hopelessly on an unsounding flute. Like the Colonel and Mme. de Florac, the statues of Cupid and Psyche have been on the point of kissing for 'this half-century at least, though the delicious event has never come off' (Newcomes, ch. 47). There is a similar garden in The Adventures of Philip. Arthur Pendennis--of all Thackeray's characters the saddest for the past--revisits Dr. Firmin's house, familiar to him in his boyhood, when 'the yellow fogs did not damp our spirits':

The garden has run to seed, the walks are mildewed, the statues have broken noses, the gravel is dank with green moss, the roses are withered, and the nightingales have ceased to make love (Adventures of Philip, ch. 2).