Between worlds: Race, empire, and otherness in the writings of W. M. Thackeray

This study considers William Makepeace Thackeray's position as an author whose life was initially defined by English colonialism and identifies how his relationship with Empire shaped the way he thought, wrote about, and questioned the determinants of both Englishness and Otherness. Thackeray's experiences as an Anglo-Indian child assimilating to Englishness, his connections to outsiders (such as his Eurasian half-sister and niece), and relationships with others ambiguously positioned within English culture (such as his Anglo-Indian parents and Anglo-Irish wife) granted him a perspective unusual to most nineteenth-century writers. Identifying with both colonized and colonizer, oppressor and oppressed, and those on the periphery, Thackeray possessed a double vision of the British Empire. Through his fictions, he sought to reveal the complicated realities of British colonialism and inspire his English readers to reevaluate and question the imperial and racial ideologies that shaped the Victorian era.;Thackeray used his observational style of writing to describe and explore non-English peoples and locales, and employed his double-edged satire to expose stereotypical definitions of Otherness that promoted English superiority. Furthermore, the level of "detachment" he attained as an "outsider made insider" allowed him to objectively reconsider other nations' social, political, and economic models (particularly those of the United States) that might benefit the stagnant hierarchies of England. By considering Thackeray's biography, letters, and illustrations alongside his writings, I demonstrate that the author's seemingly vacillating and often biting portrayals of outsiders (particularly Irish Catholics, Indians, Americans, blacks, and Jews) reflect his gradual re-evaluation of the qualifiers of Otherness; Thackeray graduated from adopting and repeating the imperial ideologies of his era to sympathizing with non-Europeans and non-Christians, ultimately exposing the speciousness of English prejudicial thinking. This dissertation tracks the author's lifelong investigation into the nature of Otherness, one that led to his ultimate espousal of a more inclusive definition of Englishness.