Scope and arrangement
This is a synthetic collection consisting of manuscripts, typescripts, notebooks, correspondence, financial documents, portraits, pictorial works, realia, and forged manuscripts and correspondence. The collection includes original portraits by Samuel Laurence, John Leech, and George Robert Lewis, as well as self-portraits in pen-and-ink, water color, and pencil. Also included are pen-and-ink, pencil, and water color portraits and illustrations by Thackeray. The manuscripts include holograph poems, essays, lectures, portions of novels, notebooks, and diaries for 1845 and 1860, as well as miscellaneous manuscript materials relating to the author. The correspondence includes letters by Thackeray, from [1828]-1863, to William H. Ainsworth, Lucy Baxter, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sir Henry Bulwer, Mr. Chapman, Chapman and Hall, Sir Henry Cole, George Cruikshank, Charles Dickens, Edward Fitzgerald, John Forster; to the committee of the Garrick Club, to Catherine Frances Gore, Leigh Hunt, Mrs. William Milbourne James, Sir William Knighton; to the Reverand Charles De la Pryme, to William D. Robinson, to the Reverand A. J. Scott, William Wetmore Story, Mrs. Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, and others. There are also letters, from 1846-1937, relating to the author between various correspondents including Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Horace Greeley, Charles Dickens, Sir Leslie Stephens, and others. There are letters to Thackeray from Jane O. Brookfield, the Rev. W. H. Brookfield, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Cruikshank, Charles Dickens, Edward Fitzgerald, James Hannay, Bryan Waller Procter, Alfred Tennyson, and Frances Trollope, dating from 1843 to 1863.
The William Makepeace Thackeray collection of papers are arranged in five series: