The Thackerays seem to have affected the Church; but such was not at any period of his life the bias of our novelist's mind.
His father and grandfather were Indian civil servants.

His mother was Anne Becher, whose father was also in the Company's service.

She married early in India, and was only nineteen when her son was born.

She was left a widow in 1816, with only one child, and was married a few years afterwards to Major Henry Carmichael Smyth, with whom Thackeray lived on terms of affectionate intercourse till the major died.

All who knew William Makepeace remember his mother well, a handsome, spare, gray-haired lady, whom Thackeray treated with a courtly deference as well as constant affection.