单项选择题

Thackeray has been born into a comfortably secure upper-middle-class family, and reared to expect the leisured life of a gentleman. However, partly through bad luck and bad financial advice, partly through his own profligacy in early youth-he was at Cambridge and for some years afterwards a compulsive gambler —he had been left with nothing to rely on but his brains and energy. He dreamed of writing a great novel; but he was well aware that while he dreamed and dawdled, writers whom he despised, such as Bulwer-Lytton, were writing best-sellers.
Writing had not been his first choice of profession. To please his mother he spent some tedious months studying law, but his earliest ambition was to be a painter. He studied art in London and Paris before deciding that his talent was too small for him to be anything but an amateur painter, though he continued to draw professionally, and illustrated most of his own novels. He then turned to journalism. In 1836, while he was still struggling to make his way, he married a penniless girl of eighteen, in the face of her mother’s fierce opposition.
With considerable courage, Thackeray began to make a living for his growing family from miscellaneous contributions to any newspapers and periodicals that would take his work. Often he did not know where the next five pounds was coming from. Isabella Thackeray gave birth to three daughters, the second of whom died in infancy, but after the birth of the third, in 1840, she became incurably insane, and had to be cared for away from her family for the rest of her long life—she outlived her husband by over thirty years.
This tragedy deeply affected Thackeray. It was, too, an additional financial burden, and for some years he was forced to part with his daughters, who were brought up by his mother in France, while he struggled to make a living in London, still chiefly by journalism. His chances as a novelist seemed poor: his short novel Barry Lyndon, published serially in Fraser’s Magazine in 1844, made so little impression on the public that it was not published in book form until twelve years later.
After he got married,Thackeray made a living by______.