How Thackeray commenced his connection with Fraser's Magazine I am unable to say. We know how he had come to London with a view to a literary career, and that he had at one time made an attempt to earn his bread as a correspondent to a newspaper from Paris. It is probable that he became acquainted with the redoubtable² Oliver Yorke, otherwise Dr. Maginn, or some of his staff, through the connection which he had thus opened with the press. He was not known, or at any rate he was unrecognised, by Fraser in January, 1835, in which month an amusing catalogue was given of the writers then employed, with portraits of them, all seated at a symposium³. I can trace no article to his pen before November, 1837, when the Yellowplush Correspondence was commenced, though it is hardly probable that he should have commenced with a work of so much pretension⁵. There had been published a volume called My Book, or the Anatomy⁶ of Conduct, by John Skelton, and a very absurd book no doubt it was. We may presume that it contained maxims⁷ on etiquette⁸, and that it was intended to convey in print those invaluable⁹ lessons on deportment which, as Dickens has told us, were subsequently given by Mr. Turveydrop, in the academy kept by him for that [Pg 63]purpose. Thackeray took this as his foundation for the Fashionable Fax and Polite Annygoats, by Jeames Yellowplush, with which he commenced those repeated attacks against snobbism¹¹ which he delighted to make through a considerable portion of his literary life. Oliver Yorke has himself added four or five pages of his own to Thackeray's lucubrations; and with the second, and some future numbers, there appeared illustrations by Thackeray himself, illustrations at this time not having been common with the magazine. From all this I gather that the author was already held in estimation by Fraser's confraternity. I remember well my own delight with Yellowplush at the time, and how I inquired who was the author. It was then that I first heard Thackeray's name.

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