Vanity Fair

Chapter 1 Reasoning

The entire world, in every social class, is simply a Vanity Fair, where people compete for money, power and status. Like Thackeray rightly says, hypocrisy is the main cement keeping society whole. If we told the truth to each other all the time, we couldn't live together. On the contrary, though we all speak ill of all the rest, we tolerate each other. This book is a treatise on worldly philosophy, cynical but profoundly realistic.

Though the subtitle is "A Novel Without a Hero" (apt, since all of the male characters subvert the idea of what we would deem "heroic"), Amelia and Becky can perhaps be considered the novel's heroines, as it is their stories that make up the narrative drive of the book. Amelia certainly embodies the typical beautiful, romantic, helpless Victorian heroine, but even more so is the character of Becky, of whom Thackeray himself said: "I like Becky in that book. Sometimes I think I have myself some of her tastes." Utterly ruthless, heartless, witty, charming and determined, Becky is still as much of an enigma today as she was in Thackeray's day, though by contemporary standards it is rather easy to admire Becky for her intelligence and survival tactics.

"Vanity Fair" is not for the faint-of-heart reader; it is long, complicated and sometimes tedious. However, there are rewards for those that stick with it - it is frequently hilarious, often fascinating, and leaves you with a distinct feeling of melancholy unease, especially if you yourself are living in Vanity Fair. Thackeray's characters you see, are doomed to live out their lives in that hollow and ultimately meaningless place - and their lives stand as a testament and a warning as to going there yourself.

“Ah! Vanitas vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?—Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.” (Vol. II, ch. 27)

Chapter 2 Introduction

Vanity Fair was a turning point in Thackeray's life and career. A gentleman by birth and education, Thackeray was forced to earn his living by writing because most of his money had been lost in a financial crash. The articles, reviews, essays, and sketches he produced for magazines and newspapers did not provide sufficient income either to support a gentleman's status or to provide for the futures of his two daughters. In addition, writing for a living made his status as a gentleman somewhat tenuous. The serialization of Vanity Fair, which was a financial success, quickly established Thackeray's literary reputation. Thackeray was jubilant, "There is no use denying the matter or blinking it now. I am become a sort of great man in my way--all but at the top of the tree: indeed there if the truth were known and having a great fight up there with Dickens." Though Thackeray's novels never sold at the rate of Dickens's novels (in the tens of thousands), he became financially secure with Vanity Fair. Also his social status as a gentleman was assured because of his acknowledged genius; he was no longer an amusing, talented hack writer, just one of a crowd of London journalists.

Contemporary reviewers and novelists appreciated the brilliance of the novel. John Forster wrote, "Vanity Fair is the work of a mind, at once accomplished and subtle, which has enjoyed opportunities of observing many and varied circles of society . . . his genteel characters... have a reality about them... They are drawn from actual life, not from books and fancy; and they are presented by means of brief, decisive yet always most discriminative touches" (1848). Charlotte Bronte, whose admiration for his genius was boundless, called him "the legitimate high priest of Truth":

The more I read Thackeray's works, the most certain I am that he stands alone--alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling (his feeling, though he makes no noise about it, is about the most genuine that ever lived on a printed page), alone in his power, alone in his simplicity, alone in his self-control. Thackeray is a Titan, so strong that he can afford to perform with calm the most Herculean feats; there is the charm and majesty of repose in his greatest efforts; he borrows nothing from fever, his is never the energy of delirium--his energy is sane energy, deliberate energy, and thoughtful energy.(1848) Not all reviewers and readers agreed. Some were repelled by his realism and his focus on society's moral corruption. Robert Bell complained:

The people who fill up the motley scenes of Vanity Fair, with two or three exceptions, are as vicious and odious as a clever condensation of the vilest qualities can make them. The women are especially detestable. Cunning, low pride, selfishness, envy, malice are scattered amongst them with impartial liberality. It does not enter into the design of Vanity Fair to qualify these bitter ingredients with a little sweetness now and then; to show the close neighborhood of the vices and the virtues as it lies on the map of the human heart, that mixture of good and evil, of weakness and strength, which in infinitely varied proportions, constitutes the compound individual. (1848) From Thackeray's day to the present, Vanity Fair has generally been regarded as a masterpiece and as his best novel. What has changed is the flaw Thackeray, as well as Vanity Fair, is most commonly charged with. Critical readers of his day called him cynical and even depraved; comparable readers today call him sentimental and even cloying. Vanity Fair, as A.E. Dyson says, "one of the world's most devious novels, devious in its characterization, its irony, its explicit moralizing, its exuberance, its tone.