Thackeray constantly mixes up real with fictitious names in his descriptions. Some disguise was often necessary, and sometimes even compulsory. He could not be as explicit or as literal as Dickens, because most of his characters represented a very different class. The latter could draw in detail the house he selected as most appropriate for the occupation of Sairey Gamp, because the actual tenants were not likely to find him out, or, if they ever read his description, to quarrel with it. But many of the clients whom Thackeray had to provide with dwellings were great people, and could only be placed in great neighbourhoods, where the houses are large, conspicuous, and easily distinguished. He either had to omit any descriptive detail, or to mask the actual place he had in mind by locating it in some street or square with a fanciful name. Any student of his works will have no difficulty, however, in finding Gaunt House, Gaunt Square, and Great Gaunt street, if he makes a personal search for them in Mayfair, though they are not indicated in any map or directory.

Mayfair (let me say for the benefit of my readers who are so unfortunate as not to knew London) is one of the three most fashionable neighbourhoods of the great metropolis, and of the three it is the most aristocratic and most ancient. It is, as nearly as possible, a square, about half a mile wide and three-quarters of a mile long, bounded at one end by Oxford street, with its shops and plebeian traffic, at the other end by the most delightful of London streets, Piccadilly; at one side by Bond street, and at the other by Park Lane, the houses in which overlook the beautiful expanse of Hyde Park. The names of some of its streets have become synonymous with patrician pomp and the affluence of inheritance. It is the highest heaven of social aspiration, the most exalted object of worldly veneration. This is the house of the Duke of Hawksbury; this of the Earl of Tue-brook; that of Viscount Wallasey, and that of Lord Arthur Bebbington. It is preËminently the region of the “quality.” But let not the reader suppose that it is a region of exterior splendor, of spacious architecture, of brilliant appearance.

Belgravia is far grander to look at, and seems to possess greater riches, and to use them more lavishly. Even Tyburnia, the neighborhood to the north of Hyde Park, is more suggestive of social eminence. Mayfair displays none of the signs of the rude enjoyment and proud assertiveness which spring from recent prosperity. It is old-fashioned, un-changing, and dull. It is little different from what it was at the beginning of the century, except that it is nearer decay, and that febrile irruptions of modern Queen Anne architecture occasionally vary the sombreness of its original style. The physiognomy of its houses expresses a sort of torpor, as if familiarity with honours were as wearisome as continuous association with misfortune. They have an air of funereal resignation. Many of the streets are short and narrow: many of the houses are dingy. The ornaments are of a sepulchral kind, such as urns over the door-ways, and funeral wreaths about the porticoes. The blazoned heraldry of the hatchments has been nearly extinguished by the smoke. At some doors there are two incongruous obelisks, joined to the iron railing which screens the basement, and the portico is extended to the curb. But ornaments even as unsatisfactory as these are not common, and most of the houses, with high fronts of blackened brick and oblong windows, are unadorned, except by a few boxes of flowers on the sills. The lackeys, with crimson knee-breeches, white stockings, laced coats, buckled shoes, and powdered hair, blaze in this gloom with a pyrotechnic splendour. Occasionally, the uniform rows of smoky brick and pointed stucco houses are overshadowed by a larger mansion, shut within its own walls, and some of the streets enter spacious squares, where there are sooty trees and grass and chirping sparrows.It is possible that Thackeray had no exact place in mind when he wrote of Gaunt House and Gaunt Square, but it is not likely. The creatures of his imagination were flesh and blood to him, too vital to be left without habitations. “All the world knows,” he says in Vanity Fair, “that Gaunt House stands in Gaunt Square, out of which Great Gaunt street leads . . . Gaunt House occupies nearly a side of the square. The remaining three sides consist of mansions which have passed away into dowagerism. . . . It has a dreary look, nor is Lord Steyne’s palace less dreary. All to be seen of it is a vast wall in front, with rustic columns at the great gate.” Berkeley Square almost exactly corresponds with this description. Here are the gloomy mansions, looking out on grass and trees which seem to belong to a cemetery, and here, immediately recognizable, is the palace, filling nearly a side of the square, and shut within high walls to hide what they inclose from the prying eyes of the passers, though the upper stories can be seen from the opposite side of the way. Here is the very gate, with heavy knockers, though the rustic columns of Thackeray’s text have been replaced by new ones of a different shape. We do not find in the middle of the square the statue of Lord Gaunt, “in a three-tailed wig, and otherwise habited like a Roman emperor,” but we can identify almost every other detail of the picture. Now, as this palace has long been occupied by a noble family, it would not be just for us to mention the name of the house, lest some undeserved reproach should thereby fall on the tenants; for, while Thackeray described the locality with such faithful elaboration it is not to be inferred that he drew the character of Lord Steyne from an actual person living in the neighbourhood; nothing indeed, could be less probable.

He also speaks of the square as Shiverley Square, and briefly mentions it in describing Becky’s drive to the house of Sir Pitt Crawley: “Having passed through Shiverley Square into Great Gaunt street, the carriage at length stopped at a tall, gloomy house, between two other tall, gloomy houses, each with a hatchment over the middle drawing-room window, as is the custom in Great Gaunt street, in which gloomy locality death seems to reign perpetual.”

Great Gaunt street is undoubtedly Hill street, which he mentions specifically in another place as the home of Lady Gaunt’s mother. Sometimes it was necessary for him to invent a name, and when he did so he was peculiarly apt. Gaunt Square seems a more fitting and descriptive name than Berkeley Square, but he frequently varied the real with the fictitious name with playful caprice.

It was in another of these queer old streets in Mayfair that that wicked old fairy godmother, the Countess of Kew, lived, and there (in Queen street) Ethel Newcome visited her, and was instructed in the rigourous social code which unites fortune with fortune, or fortune with rank, and which is by no means limited to Mayfair or Belgravia, but finds expositors and adherents under the bluer skies of America. Ethel herself lived with her mother in Park Lane, the western boundary of Mayfair, and assuredly the most attractive part of the region. Park Lane has all of Hyde Park before its windows,—all the variegated and plentifully stocked flower-beds of the Ring Road, the wide sweep of grassy playground, and the knots of patriarchal trees which give the Park one of its greatest charms. Unlike most of the region behind it is cheerful; or, if not exactly cheerful, it has not the mopish signs of withdrawal from all natural human interests which are seen in many of the houses in Gaunt Square and the tributary streets. Some of the houses are small, with oriel windows, and little balconies filled with flower-pots; some of them are palatial in size and decoration; but all of them are fashionable, and elderly bachelors are known to give incredibly large prices for the smallest possible quarters under the roof of the meanest of them. The exteriors are not of the sooty brick which characterizes Hill street, but of plaster, which is annually repainted in drab or cream colour at the beginning of each season. What with the flowers of the Park and the gardens which lie before some of the houses, Park Lane seems a fitting abode for those who are fortunate both in birth and in wealth; it is as patrician as any other part of Mayfair, and it relieves itself of the gloom which seems to be considered an inevitable accessory of respectability elsewhere.

In one of these houses—which one it is not easy to say, as Thackeray has given us no clue—Lady Ann Newcome lived, and at it Mrs. Hobson Newcome looked from afar with an envy which betrayed itself in her constant reiterations of her contentment with her own circumstances. Mrs. Hobson lived in Bryanston Square, a dingily verdant quadrangle north of Oxford street, near which Clive had a studio; and J. J. Ridley, Fred Bayham, Miss Cann, and the Rev. Charles Honeyman, lodged together in Walpole street, Mayfair. The Rev. Charles Honeyman’s chapel was close by, and before the story of Vanity Fair reached its end there was a charitable lady in the congregation who wrote hymns and called herself Lady Crawley, and from whom William Dobbin and Amelia Sedley, now united, shrunk as they passed her at the fancy fair, recognizing in that altered person the dreadful Becky.

In the eyes of the lover of Thackeray, no character of history or fiction has lent more interest to Mayfair than Becky, to which neighbourhood she came with her husband some two or three years after their return from Paris, establishing herself in “a very small, comfortable house in Curzon street,” and demonstrating to the world the useful and interesting art of living on nothing a year. There is more than one small house in Curzon street, but among them all Becky’s is unmistakable. It is on the south side of the street, near the western end, and only a few doors farther east than the house in which Lord Beaconsfield died. It is four stories and a half high, and is built of blackish brick like its neighbours, with painted sills and portico. Its extreme narrowness, compared with its height, especially distinguishes it: the front door, with drab pilasters and a moulded architrave, is just half its width, and only leaves room for one parlour window on the first floor. One can see over the railings into the basement and through the kitchen windows. Phantoms appear to us in all the windows—the ghost of Becky herself, dressed in a pink dress, her shapely arms and shoulders wrapped in gauze; her ringlets hanging about her neck; her feet peeping out of the crisp folds of silk—“the prettiest little feet in the prettiest little sandals in the finest silk stockings in the world.” It was in this cozy little domicile that the arch little hypocrite entertained Lord Steyne, whose house in Gaunt Square is only a few hundred yards distant, and Rawdon fleeced young Southdown at cards. No one can help smiling at the remembrances that come upon him in looking at those basement windows. No one who has read Vanity Fair is likely to forget the picture of the sensual marquis gazing into the kitchen and seeing no one there just before he knocks at the door, where he is met by Becky, who is as fresh as a rose from her dressing-table, and who excuses her pretended dishabille by saying that she has just come out of the kitchen, where she has been making pie, to which palpable lie the marquis gives an audacious affirmation by adding that he saw her there as he came in!

This little house was chosen for that scene in which Thackeray’s genius rises to its highest point of dramatic intensity; and so many literary pilgrims come to peep at it that the tenants must be annoyed, though the policeman on the beat has become so accustomed to them that he no longer eyes them cornerwise or suspects them of burglarious intentions.