Thackeray's memorials of defeat - author William Makepeace Thackeray

In spite of Thackeray's contempt for symbolism, which he calls 'the same simile fourteen times, but at intervals of two or three pages or so', the small-pox at Castlewood, which takes off the gloss of the past, remains a powerful symbol in Henry Esmond. Upon Rachel, Lady Castlewood, it has the effect of age: 'the delicacy of her rosy colour and complexion was gone: her eyes had lost their brilliancy'. It leaves Esmond's first love, Nancy Sievewright, dead and forgotten, 'whose red cheeks but a month ago he had been so eager to see' (Esmond, Book I, ch. 9). The small-pox also marks the end of Esmond's age of innocence and the beginning of his puberty: he catches it as the result of his first romance. From the small-pox Lady Castlewood herself dates her infatuation with Esmond. After her husband has been killed in a duel, she visits Esmond in jail to expiate at his expense the remorse she feels for having fallen in love with him, although the overt reason for her reproaches is that he seconded her husband. She discloses that she wishes Esmond had died of the small-pox, yet she tells him so 'with a glance that was at once so fond and so sad' (Esmond, Book II, ch. 1). He and the family he worships are reciprocally fatal. Debilitated by fever, confinement and the wounds received in the duel, he faints away. At the end of the novel Thackeray reveals that whilst Esmond is unconscious Lady Castlewood takes one of his cufflinks and ever after wears it in her bosom.

Mme. de Florac would certainly have tried to revive Esmond instead of idolising his cufflink. In spite of the glamour of their wedding and migration to Virginia, one wonders if the union of Henry and Rachel Esmond is happier than that of William and Amelia Dobbin. Always remembering Beatrix, Esmond is no more than 'not unhappy' in America:

A something had occurred in his life which cast a tinge of melancholy over his existence. He was not unhappy...but there had been some bankruptcy of his heart, from which his spirit never recovered. He submitted to life, rather than enjoying it (Virginians, ch. 3).

Like Dobbin and Pendennis, Esmond emerges from disease as a weightier man. Thus, through the workings of a combined transience, past events are distanced from the hero by alterations of circumstance, and he too is distanced from past events by his new seriousness.

Pendennis does not at once rescind the worldly schemes he has plotted with his uncle, the Major. He undergoes a series of transformations (as a fashionable novelist, as the suitor of an heiress, as a prospective Member of Parliament) which take him further and further away from his past at home in Clavering, until at last, having learned to deserve that past, he returns to it in the person of his wife Laura, who is also his foster-sister. The emotional recovery of his past does not, in fact, make him more cheerful. As the narrator of The Newcomes and The Adventures of Philip, Pendennis becomes steadily more melancholy; possibly because the scenes of his youth are being obliterated to finance the recapture of the life of the sentiments associated with it. As an instrument of change the Industrial Revolution works alongside his inner revolution. Already when he comes to London to study Law, to find that the roses no longer bloom in the smoky air of the Temple Gardens, the trout stream at Clavering has been polluted by a factory on its banks. He is able to escape from his life in London by selling his land to the new railway, thus spoiling the little town altogether: 'the once quiet and familiar fields...were flaming with the kilns and forges of the artificers employed on the new railroad works' (Pendennis, chs. 15, 50 and 76).