In brief
Two girls leave a Chiswick school around 1813. Amelia Sedley is rich, sweet and stupid about men. Becky Sharp is poor, brilliant and unencumbered, and as the carriage pulls away she throws her parting gift, a Johnson’s dictionary, into the garden. Over the next two decades one climbs to the King’s drawing-room and falls, the other is widowed at Waterloo and lives on a memory, and a clumsy officer waits eighteen years to get what he wants and finds it smaller than he thought. The real subject is wanting, and the whole of English society from baronet to butler is shown to be at it.
Thackeray called it a “Novel without a Hero” (ch. 6) and meant the phrase as a charge. It is cruel, digressive and often hilarious, with a narrator who keeps stepping in front of the action to remind you that he, too, has dined out on all this.
The argument
The title comes from Bunyan, whose pilgrims pass through a town where everything is for sale. Thackeray keeps the fair and removes the pilgrims. Nobody here is on the way anywhere better, and the preface says so before the story starts: “not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy”. Sir Pitt Crawley gets the cry in its plainest form: “Vanity Fair—Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read”, and he is a baronet and a Member of Parliament (ch. 9).
The sharper claim is about virtue. Becky, playing the country lady at Queen’s Crawley, reflects: “I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year” (ch. 41). The narrator takes her side, or seems to: “And who knows but Rebecca was right in her speculations—and that it was only a question of money and fortune which made the difference between her and an honest woman?” If morals are a function of income, the comfortable reader’s goodness is no credit to her. Becky’s own early statement of the case is the shortest: “Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural” and “I’m no angel” (ch. 2).
Against this the novel does not set a good character who is rewarded. Amelia’s goodness is shown to be partly a kind of selfishness, and Dobbin says so to her face. When he finally gets her, the narrator waves him off with a joke about the novel’s own form: “the summit, the end—the last page of the third volume” (ch. 67). The last words of the book are the argument in full: “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.”
The shape of the book
Thackeray runs two plots in counterpoint, one rising as the other falls. Becky goes up through the Crawley family while Amelia’s father is bankrupted by Napoleon’s return from Elba (ch. 18). The stories meet at Brussels in 1815, part for almost thirty chapters, and meet again at a small German court at the end. Old Osborne strikes his son from the family Bible (ch. 24) when George marries the ruined girl. Dobbin has arranged that marriage (ch. 20), which is the mistake his life is spent paying for.
The famous set piece is the one he refuses to write. “We do not claim to rank among the military novelists. Our place is with the non-combatants” (ch. 30). So Waterloo happens as noise in the distance while the action stays in Brussels: Jos shaves his moustache in terror, and Becky sells him her horses at a ruinous price because every nobleman in town is trying to get out. Then, at the end of the chapter, one sentence: “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” (ch. 32). The whole first half has been heading for that full stop.
The second half is looser and wider, and that is the serial form showing. Thackeray was writing month by month and could wander to Madras (ch. 43) or spend a chapter on a Hampshire estate. The climax in ch. 53 is as tightly staged as anything in Victorian fiction, and he then lets the book run on for fourteen more chapters into a shabby continental coda, which is exactly right. Nothing in Vanity Fair ends on a climax.
The voice
The narrator calls himself “the manager of the Performance” and his characters puppets: “The famous little Becky Puppet has been pronounced to be uncommonly flexible in the joints, and lively on the wire” (Before the Curtain). Then he goes on to treat them as people he has met, gossip he has heard at clubs, and sometimes as people he cannot quite vouch for. He will pause to discuss how the same scene would go “in the genteel, or in the romantic, or in the facetious manner” (ch. 6).
The trick is that he won’t stand still. He turns sentimental: “By heavens it is pitiful, the bootless love of women for children in Vanity Fair” (ch. 50) is sincere, and comes in the same voice as the jokes. He admits to enjoying what he condemns: “It is all vanity to be sure, but who will not own to liking a little of it?” (ch. 51). And at the crucial moment he declines to know. When Rawdon finds Becky with Lord Steyne, the narrator asks “Was she guilty or not?” and answers: “She said not, but who could tell what was truth which came from those lips, or if that corrupt heart was in this case pure?” (ch. 53). Readers have been trying to settle it since 1848. The text is built so they can’t.
In ch. 64 he gives away the method. He has kept things decent, “the monster’s hideous tail” under water, and any reader who likes may look down and see it. Victorian propriety becomes a joke he shares with you at the expense of the people who insist on it.
Nothing a year
Thackeray is as exact about money as a bailiff, and the novel’s best comedy is financial. Chapter 36 is called “How to Live Well on Nothing a Year”, and it and ch. 37 are a working manual: how to rent a house in Curzon Street and pay no rent, and how to dine, dress and entertain on cards, billiards and the belief of tradesmen that a fashionable colonel must be good for it.
Then Thackeray presents the bill. The landlord is Raggles, a former butler of the Crawley family who put his life’s savings into the house, and he ends (ch. 37) “utterly ruined by the transaction, his children being flung on the streets, and himself driven into the Fleet Prison”. The narrator’s summary is one of the most chilling sentences in the book: “somebody must pay even for gentlemen who live for nothing a year”. Becky’s other victim is Briggs, her companion, whose small capital she sets out to get (ch. 44). You have spent a whole chapter delighted by the swindle, and that is the point of it.
Money also carries empire into the drawing-room. Jos is “the Collector of Boggley Wollah”; Mr Osborne wants George to marry Miss Swartz, the “good-natured young mulatto girl” with West Indian plantations (ch. 20, ch. 21). The racial contempt around her is something the novel half mocks and half shares. Everyone’s income comes from somewhere the novel rarely visits.
The people
Becky Sharp
The daughter of a drunken drawing-master and a French opera-girl, she shouts “Vive la France! Vive l’Empereur! Vive Bonaparte!” on her way out of an English school (ch. 2). She has only wits to live on and she is the one person in the book who is never bored. She is also a liar, a neglectful mother who hits her small son for listening to her sing (ch. 44), and possibly a murderer. Readers have always liked her better than they should. That is the trap Thackeray set, and I think he fell into it himself.
Amelia Sedley
Modern readers tend to find her unbearable, and they are not supposed to like her as much as the narrator seems to. She worships a dead man who was about to betray her, and she keeps a good one waiting on the strength of it. Her one great act, giving up her son to his grandfather because she cannot feed him (ch. 50), is real tragedy. Becky ends her illusions at last with a torn old note: “that selfish humbug, that low-bred cockney dandy, that padded booby” (ch. 67). The cruellest thing anyone does to Amelia is also the kindest.
William Dobbin
Big feet, a lisp, a grocer’s son, and the only person with a conscience. He buys the Sedleys’ little piano at their bankruptcy sale (ch. 17) and Amelia assumes for years that George sent it, until the truth reaches her (ch. 59). His speech in ch. 66 is the moment the book’s hero-shaped hole almost closes: “I know what your heart is capable of: it can cling faithfully to a recollection and cherish a fancy, but it can’t feel such an attachment as mine deserves to mate with”. He walks out, and comes back. The fifteen years he names here has become eighteen one chapter later; Thackeray’s arithmetic was never his strength.
Rawdon Crawley
The best surprise in the book. A stupid, gambling guardsman, a bully’s bully, who falls in love with his wife and then with his son, and turns into someone you would trust. He strikes Steyne “twice over the face with his open hand” and flings him “bleeding to the ground” (ch. 53), and even then Becky “admired her husband, strong, brave, and victorious”. He dies of yellow fever on Coventry Island, in a post Steyne’s influence obtained for him (ch. 67).
Lord Steyne
The most frightening man in the novel, a great lord with no illusions. He amuses himself by humiliating his wife and daughter-in-law at Gaunt House (ch. 47). His death at Naples, with a list of titles a paragraph long, is given in a mock-gazette (ch. 64). He was generally taken for a portrait of the Marquess of Hertford, and a woodcut of him was suppressed under threat of a libel suit.
How it was made
Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811, the son of an East India Company official, and was sent to England after his father’s death in 1815. He ran through much of his inheritance on gambling and failed newspapers and lost more in the collapse of two Indian banks. He tried art school in Paris, married Isabella Shawe, and then lost her too to a mental illness from which she never recovered. He lived by journalism under comic pen names like Michael Angelo Titmarsh, in Fraser’s and then Punch, where the Snob Papers trained him in the social anatomy he would use on a larger scale. He knew from the inside what it was to be a gentleman without means.
The book appeared in yellow-covered monthly numbers from January 1847 to July 1848, first subtitled Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, with his own drawings. It was his first big success and put him in the same league as Dickens. The one-volume edition of 1848 took the subtitle A Novel without a Hero. His drawings are part of the text, and Gutenberg’s plain edition lacks them: the picture of Becky behind a curtain at the end, captioned as her second appearance as Clytemnestra, is the strongest evidence for the suspicion about Jos, and you should look it up.
Readers and critics
Thackeray told his mother while he was writing that everyone in the book but Dobbin was odious, a set of people living without God in the world. Charlotte Brontë admired him so much that she dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him, and was embarrassed when gossip connected that book’s mad wife with his own. In the Quarterly Review Elizabeth Rigby reviewed the two novels together, praising his and attacking hers.
For decades he was Dickens’s only rival. Then the taste changed. Henry James’s line about “large loose baggy monsters” named a Thackeray novel, The Newcomes, and the Jamesian rule of keeping the author out of sight made the intrusive narrator look like a fault. The recovery came in the 1950s, with Kathleen Tillotson’s Novels of the Eighteen-Forties and Gordon Ray’s biography. John Sutherland’s Thackeray at Work (1974) showed how much of the effect was improvised against a monthly deadline, and John Carey’s Prodigal Genius (1977) argued for the savage early writer over the respectable later one. Feminist readers have asked the obvious question of what a penniless clever girl was supposed to do instead.
Afterlives
Langdon Mitchell’s play Becky Sharp (1899) named the adaptation after the heroine, as many have since. The 1935 film of that name, with Miriam Hopkins, was the first feature shot in full-spectrum Technicolor. Television has returned to it steadily: the BBC in 1967 with Susan Hampshire, 1987 with Eve Matheson and 1998 with Natasha Little, and ITV in 2018 with Olivia Cooke and with Michael Palin as Thackeray himself. Mira Nair’s 2004 film with Reese Witherspoon softened Becky into a heroine, which is the one thing the book won’t do. Two magazines have used the title.
How to read it
- Find an edition with the drawings. Thackeray illustrated it himself, and the pictures sometimes say what the text won’t.
- Enjoy the narrator, then distrust him. Ask each time he sympathises whether you are being set up.
- Read chapters 29 to 32 straight through. The ball, the note in the bouquet, the flight and the last sentence are the best sequence in the book.
- Do the sums. Thackeray gives the figures for a reason; note who is paying.
- Take the second half slowly. It moves at the speed of gossip, and chapters 51 to 55 repay the patience.
- Decide about Becky twice. Once at ch. 53, and once at the very end (ch. 67).
Read next
- Thackeray, The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844). The earlier experiment: a scoundrel tells his own story and you watch him lie.
- Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette (1846). The same decade across the Channel, with a poor relation’s revenge and a sharper eye still for the price of everything.
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869). The same wars and society on an even larger canvas, with the battle put back in.
- Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875). Thackeray’s subject a generation on, with the credit gone corporate.
- Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (1913). Becky’s American descendant, Undine Spragg, with less wit and no scruples at all.