Vanity Fair was written by William Makepeace Thackeray and first appeared as a serially-published novel in nineteen monthly parts from January 1847 to June 1848. Thackeray (1811-1863) was an English novelist who in his lifetime was ranked behind only Charles Dickens and George Eliot but whose stock has fallen considerably and who is now known primarily for Vanity Fair.

Rebecca “Becky” Sharp and Amelia Sedley are friends as schoolgirls, despite being very different–Becky sharp and cynical, Amelia nice and soft. When the pair leave school Amelia takes Becky into her home, where Becky schemes to capture the heart of Amelia’s fat brother Jos. But fortune plays Becky false, and Jos. returns to India instead of marrying her. Becky leaves for the Crawley household as a governess, where she wins over the head of the household, Sir Pitt Crawley, and ensnares Pitt’s son Rawdon as a spouse–thereby outraging Pitt’s sister Miss Crawley, who sees Rawdon as having married below himself, and who cuts off Rawdon and Becky from any money in her will.

Amelia’s husband (who Becky was carrying on a flirtation with) dies at Waterloo, while Rawdon does not. Rawdon and Becky live together in penniless extravagance, first in Paris and then in London. Becky gains a rich, elderly admirer, Lord Steyne, and climbs the social ladder, eventually even being presented in court. Becky has a son (who she ignores and treats shabbily) and carries on the social life, but when Rawdon is imprisoned for debt Becky refuses to pawn her jewelry and has Lord Steyne pay off Rawdon’s debts–but when Rawdon returns home he finds Lord Steyne in a compromising situation with Becky, and Rawdon thrashes Lord Steyne, thereby leading to Becky’s social downfall. Rawdon leaves his wife, and Lord Steyne and Becky’s other enemies spread stories (mostly true) about her scandalous conduct. Becky falls lower and lower on the social scales, and is found by Amelia and Jos. at a very low point. Becky ensnares Jos., and when Jos. dies under ambiguous, mysterious circumstances Becky is the recipient of his life insurance policy. Becky spends the rest of her days on the Continent.

On the short list of the great Victorian novels, Vanity Fair is a comic satire which is panoramic in its scope and scale. It has an oversizedness which can be intimidating to students, who may view not only its size with alarm but the critical terms used to describe it. Daniel Burt’s “Vanity Fair expanded the novel’s usual focus on a few central characters to chronicle the full range of society itself,"¹ while true, may be off-putting to readers, who might be daunted at the thought of starting a fictional edifice like Vanity Fair. That would be a shame, because Vanity Fair is in its way as delightful a reading companion as Eliot’s Middlemarch, and as deserving of claims of greatness.

There are two different planks for analysis of any book: is it worth reading, and is it worthy reading? Which is to say, is it readable, and is it any good? Vanity Fair, more than nearly any work covered in this book, is both of those, in abundance (one might even say excess).

To understand Thackeray’s achievement one must understand the state of British fiction itself when he wrote Vanity Fair. Silver Fork fiction had reigned supreme in the marketplace for twenty years, with the Newgate Novel (see: Proto-Mystery) a close second. Dickens, though popular, was still in his early phase, having only published (of his major works) The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol. The novel was still bound and limited in the genres in which it could acceptably appear.

Thackeray, and Vanity Fair, changed all of that. As a critic, Thackeray quarreled with Bulwer Lytton and satirized the Newgate Novel genre in the pages of Punch in 1846 as part of the critical storm that ended the genre. And Thackeray, via the satires of his Dukes and Dejeuners (1847) and Vanity Fair, helped to put paid to the Silver Fork genre. (In the words of critic Ellen Miller Casey, Vanity Fair is “both a repudiation of the silver fork genre and its apex”²). What replaced them both was the domestic novel, of which Vanity Fair was the principal work before Middlemarch. (Bulwer Lytton’s The Caxtons (1849) was immensely popular but not was not the first domestic novel; Bulwer Lytton merely capitalized on the current trend).

The domestic novel was in John Sutherland’s words “scarcely a ‘school’,” being more of a “well-defined anti-type.”³ It was a novel about real life, a novel without heroism and without villainy, but instead ordinary people doing ordinary things–domestic by name and domestic by deed. It gave the reader ordinary stories, akin to what Balzac (Father Goriot) and Stendhal were doing with French literature, but without the (to Victorian readers) distasteful aspects of sex and sin. Domestic fiction gave readers stories of the everyday, stories and characters to which they could relate. Readers, and writers, loved this. Vanity Fair was a runaway bestseller as a serial, even before it was finished, and single-handedly established the domestic novel and realism as a dominant novelistic mode–a mode which the Sensation novelists reacted against (as Sutherland puts it, the domestic novel “gave the sensation novelists of the 1860s a sense of their identity”⁴) but which outlasted them and became accepted as the primary (or sole) mode in which fiction should work, an acceptance which still holds true today. Vanity Fair did that.

If that was all Vanity Fair had done, it would be celebrated. But Thackeray accomplished so much more in Vanity Fair. There is its incisive satire of British society, from small to large, from the poor to the aristocracy–Thackeray wields his literary knife with force and with precision. There is the comedy which accompanies the satire, which may not make modern readers laugh out loud but will make them smile, whether from rueful recognition or from appreciation of Becky Sharp’s wit. There is the overwhelming sense that Thackeray has let the characters take the reins of the novel and live out their lives according to their wills rather than manipulating them for the ends of the story. If as Daniel Burt says we regard “elaborately structured works” with a “tighter dramatic focus”⁵ as the superior approach, Thackeray stands as a rebuttal to that approach–his freewheeling approach is jazz to everyone else’s classical music.

There is the narrator, what Burt calls “intrusive, garrulous, and guiding.”⁶ The narrator, omnipresent, omniscient, heavy-handed (even over-bearing), fourth-wall-breaking, and at all times accompanying the reader through the text, is far more present than in most Victorian novels, and modern readers may find it an acquired taste, though the ultimate effect of the narrator is contemplative charm. Thackeray’s use of the narrator (inherited from eighteenth century novelists like Henry Fielding) as a tool with which to tell the story is a writerly reveling in the “possibilities of the novel” and a way in which to show us how Thackeray, the master puppeteer, pulls his puppet’s strings–how the fiction sausage is made in the fiction factory–while making the reader enjoy it.

There is the amount of time spent on not just society, large and small, but various characters, from the protagonists down to minor characters, so that the cumulative effect is truly panoramic, and Thackeray creates an entire world, a world as real in its way as Jane Austen’s Highbury in Emma (1815); the other great panoramic novel of the century, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, was overtly influenced by Vanity Fair, an influence that Tolstoy freely acknowledged.

Vanity Fair is a novel that defies categorization. It is a historical novel–it treats of events thirty years before the writing of the novel–but it disregards the traditional construction of the historical novel. This is part of the novel’s revolutionary status–that accepted conventions are ignored and even exploded. Vanity Fair is a historical novel which largely ignores history. It is a picaresque novel in which the “settled conclusion” of picaresques, the resolution of the novel with the hero’s fortunes settled, is ignored. It is a novel in which the traditional hero is replaced with a most untraditional (but modern, for the time) femme fatale, but also with no hero—as the novel’s subtitle says, Vanity Fair is “A Novel Without a Hero”—a stroke of realism unprecedented in English novels, to create a novel in which there are no overt heroes or sentimentalized caricatures, simply ordinary people. It is a comic satire without a reforming motive—for Thackeray society and human nature cannot be reformed. It is a novel in which there is no poetic justice--just us.

Vanity Fair is not without faults, of course. The novel’s approach to race is unfortunate, to say the least—Thackeray was an out-and-out racist, and his racism appears throughout Vanity Fair. This isn’t a case of an author’s bigotries not affecting the text; the text itself is racist and antisemitic, much more so than other contemporary works. Vanity Fair’s style is a little dated—unsurprisingly, considering how long ago it was written. And as mentioned the narrator is an acquired taste.

But if you can set aside those things--and not every reader can or should--the novel makes for splendid reading. Once the taste for the narrator is acquired by the reader, the reader comes to welcome the narrator’s musings and asides. Vanity Fair is bracingly cynical—appropriate, for a satire—and blasts everyone and everything (not coincidentally including the upper class groups which had wronged Thackeray in real life). The novel has great vitality. The plot is appropriately complex while never being confusing. The characters are appealing while also being appropriately flawed, and Becky Sharp is an all-time great character.

Print: William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003).

Zelma Catalan, “Irony in Vanity Fair.” http://victorianweb.org/authors/wmt/catalan.html

Robert McCrum, “The 100 Best Novels: No 14 - Vanity Fair by William Thackeray (1848). http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/23/william-thackeray-vanity-fair-100-best-novels

John Sutherland, “William Makepeace Thackeray: Racist?” http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/thackeray/

¹ Burt, The Novel 100, 111.

² Ellen Miller Casey, “’The Aristocracy and Upholstery’: The Silver Fork Novel,” in Pamela K. Gilbert, ed., A Companion to Sensation Fiction (Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 20.

³ Sutherland, Stanford Companion, 192.

⁴ Sutherland, Stanford Companion, 192-193.

⁵ Burt, The Novel 100, 109.

⁶ Burt, The Novel 100, 109.