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In his own day, William Makepeace Thackery was considered the one great Victorian novelist who could be mentioned in the same breath as Dickens. Both had a string of highly admired novels and were well-known public figures on the lecture circuit, and each grudgingly admired the other’s work in print. So admired was Thackery in his day that Charlotte Bronte actually dedicated her novel Jane Eyre to “the author of Vanity Fair.” The posthumous history of the two rivals, however, has been quite different. While Dickens has a dozen novels that are still highly regarded—Bleak House, Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Hard Times, just to name a few—most people are hard put to name another Thackery novel. A few people might think of The Luck of Barry Lyndon because of Stanley Kubrick’s film version of 1975. But most are unlikely to think of Pendennis, Men’s Wives, or The History of Henry Esmond, let alone Rebecca and Rowena, his 1850 parody sequel to Ivanhoe. The only novel Thackery is still widely remembered for nowadays is the one so loved by Bronte: Vanity Fair. Considered by the Observer as one of the 100 greatest world novels, by the Guardian as one of the 100 greatest novels in English, and by the Sunday Times as one of their “100 Books to Love,” Thackery’s masterpiece ranked as number 41 on The Daily Telegraph’s list of the “Top 50 Books,” 39 on Penguin Classics’ list of the “100 Must-Read Classics” as chosen by their readers, and as number 10 on the BBC’s list of the “100 Greatest British Novels,” as chosen by a poll of book critics outside the UK (in order “to give an outsider’s perspective on the best in British literature”). The OCLC ranked it as number 75th most commonly held book on the world’s library shelves, and on the Daily Mail’s list of “A Hundred Novels to Change Your Life,” Vanity Fair was ranked as number one.
The book’s title is an allusion to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, where “Vanity Fair” refers to fair in the town of “Vanity” created by the devils Apollyon and Beelzebub. In Bunyan’s Christian classic, Vanity Fair represents the vanities of the world—those things that entice us and flatter our pride but that, in the end, only distract us from the true path toward Christ. In Thackery’s novel, Vanity Fair is British society—the things that are important but ultimately empty and meaningless: who’s in, who’s out, and who cares?
Thackery’s classic, set during the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century, follows the intertwined lives of two very different women—the wealthy and good-hearted Amelia “Ellie” Sedley, and the poor but ambitious (and conniving) adventuress Becky Sharp—and depicts the rise and fall of one paralleling the fall and rise of the other. Their friends and families, the men they marry and those they would like to, all spend time on stage in this long and often delightful narrative. First published in 19 installments in Punch magazine from 1847 to 1848, the novel was originally subtitled Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, for Thackery, who had notions of being an artist at one point, did include a number of his own (unremarkable) sketches in the novel’s installments. But the subtitle referred as well to his satirical verbal sketches of a wide variety of types from British high society, as well as society wannabes of the mid-nineteenth century. When it came out in book form in 1848, Thackery changed the subtitle to the even more suggestive A Novel Without a Hero.
The idea of “the hero” was certainly in the air in the late 1840s. In 1841, Thomas Carlyle had published an extremely influential book, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, in which he talks about the heroes or “great men” who have affected the evolution of human history both as examples to be imitated by others, and also as initiators of a new stage of human development. Carlyle’s ideas interested a number of significant thinkers over the course of the century, including Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Bernard Shaw. Dickens, beginning David Copperfield, wrote “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” And Copperfield ultimately becomes a “hero” in one of Carlyle’s senses: “the hero as the man of letters.”
Thackery, three years before Copperfield, eschews the idea of the hero, at least in the “vanity fair” of British society. Becky Sharp, though one of the most remarkable female protagonists in all literature, is certainly no hero. There is nothing admirable about her—she is a poor girl who is trying to move up in society, first by enticing her friend Amelia’s big (very big) brother Joseph “Jos” Sedley, a wealthy self-important East India nabob (an enticement that doesn’t quite happen), then by flirting with the nobleman (Sir Pitt Crawley) with whom she obtains a position as governess until he proposes to her—but it turns out she has already married his wastrel of a son, Captain Rawdon Crawley. Rawdon is a gambler and a spendthrift with more debts than prospects, but Becky marries him believing he will be the heir of his rich old aunt. But in fact the marriage turns the aunt against the couple and not a penny ever comes from her. She has a child whom she essentially ignores, to her husband’s chagrin, and engages is a questionable relationship with a rich and unprincipled nobleman, Lord Steyne, to her husband’s even greater chagrin. And she is forced to pile falsehood upon falsehood to survive and to maintain the position in society she’s dissembled her way into. The Narrator says
When one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every day.
There’s no doubt that Becky is the novel’s most memorable character, but she’s certainly no hero.
Amelia Sedley is engaged to Captain George Osborne, and their two families have been close since her childhood. But after Amelia’s father loses all his money when, at the news that Napoleon has escaped from Elba, the stock market crashes and all his investments are ruined, George’s father cancels the engagement. On the chance vicissitudes of Fortune the Narrator remarks:
The hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the destinies of mankind is pleased so to humiliate and cast down the tender, good, and wise; and to set up the selfish, the foolish, or the wicked. Oh, be humble, my brother, in your prosperity! Be gentle with those who are less lucky, if not more deserving. Think, what right have you to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success may be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor’s accident, whose prosperity is very likely a satire.
George, never completely committed to the wedding and now interested in finding a more wealthy bride, is fine with the new situation, but his friend Captain William Dobbin, a socially awkward but essentially decent fellow officer, persuades George to honor his commitment to Amelia. George marries Amelia and is disowned by his father, but his faithfulness is quite temporary. He is about to desert Amelia for Becky on the eve of Waterloo.
The battle occurs almost precisely halfway through the novel. George, Rawdon and Dobbin go to battle (Jos, however, tries to flee Brussels as the battle approaches, even purchasing two opportunistically overpriced horses from the exploitative Becky for that purpose). Thackery doesn’t take you to the battlefield—that is not a part of vanity fair—but he does show us the shocking result of the battle, at the end of which, we are told
No more firing was heard at Brussels—the pursuit rolled miles away. The darkness came down on the field and city, and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.
But George is no hero either; though he’s died for his country there was nothing admirable in his private life. Amelia, however, spends the next decade remembering him as a faithful and flawless husband, and it seems she can never love again. The faith she blindly keeps in a man not in the least worthy of her devotion make her seem pathetic, not heroic.
The one character in the novel who might be said to rise to heroic heights is Captain Dobbin, who loves Amelia from the moment he sees her, and sacrifices his own love for her on the altar of her misplaced love for George, first by ensuring her marriage, later in the book by paying for her upkeep as George’s father stubbornly refuses to support her or his own grandson, and even encouraging her in her widow’s devotion to her worthless dead husband. His self-sacrifice may be noble, but his unwavering support of Amelia and her son to the point where she takes thoughtless and insensitive advantage of him makes him seem ludicrous. No, there are no heroes in Thackery’s Vanity Fair. The novel, in fact, does not even admit the possibility of heroism. Thackery implies that nearly all human actions are motivated by self-interest at worst, or gullibility at best, and that people are not simply good or bad, but are bundles of conflicting emotions and instincts, by which their characters are governed, and not by noble principles or rational precepts. At times characters surprise us completely, as Becky does near the end of the novel providing a jolting denouement that I will not spoil here.
This might be a depressing summation of human nature in other hands. In Thackery’s, it’s often humorous and entertaining. Certainly up until the midway point of the novel, George’s death at Waterloo, the narrator’s voice is wittily ironic, often breaking off to address the reader directly in a way that echoes the Fieldingesque narrator of Tom Jones, so that we generally laugh at Becky’s amoral conniving and at the pretentiousness and gullibility of other characters. For example, the Narrator says:
A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face. What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardonable? What dullness may not red lips are sweet accents render pleasant? And so, with their usual sense of justice, ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool. O ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor wise.
As the novel goes on, that comic irony seems to drift more and more toward a satiric lambasting of human vice rather than folly. About Becky he says late in the novel:
[T]hough Miss Rebecca Sharp has twice had occasion to thank Heaven, it has been, in the first place, for ridding her of some person whom she hated, and secondly, for enabling her to bring her enemies to some sort of perplexity or confusion; neither of which are very amiable motives for religious gratitude.
The narrator himself, we realize, is not always reliable, and seems to be passing along gossip that we can’t necessarily fully credit. Even he is not a hero. Nevertheless, the narrator is more or less omniscient, and even depicts himself as the presenter of an entertaining puppet show at a fair (Vanity Fair?) who presents a drama for our consumption, and at the end says “Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.” Doesn’t this raise some suspicions about the veracity of the story? But the narrator also, near the end of the novel, asks us as readers to accept his completely fair and decorous presentation, even of the memorable Becky, the apparent “villain” of the drama:
In describing this syren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all around, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster’s hideous tale above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses; but above the water-line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous…?
There have been a number of adaptations of Vanity Fair: four silent film versions were made between 1911 and 1923, and two more in the 1930s, with Myrna Loy starring as Becky in the 1932 “updated” version. Then 80 years later, in 2004, Indian director Mira Nair shot a new version starring Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp with Rhys Ifans as William Dobbins and Gabriel Byrne as the Marquess of Steyn. No film version, however, can do justice to a novel as long and complex as Vanity Fair. Two television miniseries—one from 1998 (with six episodes) and one from 2018 (seven episodes)—have been better received, and the 2018 version starred Monty Python’s Michael Palin as William Makepeace Thackery—a brilliant take on the Narrator-as-Character/Commentator that Thackery makes such entertaining use of in the novel. But you really need to read the novel itself to get the full experience, particularly of Thackery’s idiosyncratic narrator. This is a gem of a novel that you shouldn’t miss.