Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Summary
Becky Sharp leaves finishing school with no fortune, no family and a total, cheerful willingness to use anyone who can be useful to her, and the novel follows her rise through Regency society by wit, flattery and outright invention, contrasted against her school friend Amelia Sedley, soft hearted, loyal and repeatedly let down by the people she loves. Becky marries Rawdon Crawley in secret for his family's money, then lives glamorously on credit and charm while her husband is eventually pushed aside. Amelia marries the vain George Osborne, who is unfaithful to her in spirit before he dies at Waterloo, leaving her to worship his memory for years while William Dobbin, George's decent, patient friend, loves her without acknowledgment until very late in the book. Thackeray subtitles the whole thing "A Novel without a Hero," and means it: every character here is compromised in some way, and the narrator keeps stepping forward to remind readers that they are watching a puppet show, staged at a fair, rather than a story with anyone to root for unreservedly.
That narrative voice, arch, ironic and constantly undercutting its own characters, is what makes the book distinctive rather than merely a social novel with a large cast. The famous suggestion, made through one ambiguous illustration rather than the text itself, that Becky may have murdered Jos Sedley, Amelia's brother, for his insurance money, is typical of how Thackeray works: implication over statement, letting a reader do the moral arithmetic.
It appeared in monthly parts from January 1847 to July 1848, with Thackeray supplying his own illustrations throughout.
Historical Context & Significance
Contemporary critics offered strong praise mixed with unease at the book's unrelentingly dark view of human motive; Charlotte Bronte, admiring the illustrations, wrote that "if Truth were again a goddess, Thackeray should be her high priest." One plate depicting Lord Steyne was suppressed before publication over fears of libel, a sign of how closely readers matched the novel's schemers to real society figures.
Vanity Fair is now counted among the major achievements of the Victorian novel, ranked 122nd in the BBC's 2003 Big Read poll, and its title lent itself directly to the British magazine founded in 1868 and still published today. Adaptations have continued steadily, from a 1935 Technicolor film through a 2004 version starring Reese Witherspoon as Becky, each one testing how far a filmmaker dares to keep the book's central, unresolved question of how much sympathy Becky deserves.