“As for the man himself who has lectured us, he is a stout, healthful, broad-shouldered specimen of a man, with cropped grayish hair, and keenish gray eyes, peering very sharply through a pair of spectacles that have a very satiric focus. He seems to stand strongly on his own feet, as if he would not be easily blown about or upset, either by praise or pugilists; a man of good digestion, who takes the world easy, and scents all shams and humours (straightening them between his thumb and forefinger) as he would a pinch of snuff.”—1852.

“Good portraits of Thackeray are so common, and so many of your readers saw him in the lecture-room, that I need not describe his person. The misshaped nose, so broad at the bridge and so stubby at the end, was the effect of an early accident. His near-sightedness, unless hereditary, must have had, I think, a similar origin, for no man had less the appearance of a student who had weakened his sight by application to books. In his gestures—especially in the act of bowing to a lady—there was a certain awkwardness, made more conspicuous by his tall, well-proportioned, and really commanding figure. His hair, at forty, was already gray, but abundant and massy; the cheeks had a ruddy tinge, and there was no sallowness in the complexion; the eyes, keen and kindly even when they bore a sarcastic expression, twinkled through and sometimes over the spectacles. What I should call the predominant expression of the countenance was courage—a readiness to face the world on its own terms, without either bawling or whining, asking no favour, yielding, if at all, from magnanimity. I have seen but two faces on which this expression, coupled with that of high and intellectual power, was equally striking—those of Daniel Webster and Thomas Carlyle. But the former had a saturnine gloom even in its animation, and the latter a variety and intensity of expression which was absent from Thackeray’s.”

“In stature he was tall and commanding, and he walked erect. With gray eyes—not over luminous—and a noble brow, his appearance was confident, but never conceited or aggressive. He wore long hair, and, but for a small whisker, shaved clean. His features, if anything, were immobile; the nose, which had been fractured in youth at the Charterhouse, was, like Milton’s, ‘a thoughtful one,’ and the nostrils were full and wide, as are those of all men of genius, according to Balzac.”