Vanity Fair (novel)

Amelia, called Emmy, is good-natured but passive and naïve. Not very beautiful, she is frequently ignored by men and women but is well-liked by most men who get to know her because of her personality. This popularity is then resented by other women. She begins the work as its heroine ("selected for the very reason that she was the best-natured of all")[27] and marries the dashing George Osborne against his father's wishes, but the narrator is soon forced to admit "she wasn't a heroine" after all[28] as she remains soppily devoted to him despite his neglect of her and his flirtation with Becky.

After George dies in the Battle of Waterloo, she brings up little George alone while living with her parents. She is completely dominated by her increasingly peevish mother and her spendthrift father, who, to finance one of his failing investment schemes, sells the annuity Jos had provided. Amelia becomes obsessed with her son and the memory of her husband. She ignores William Dobbin, who courts her for years and treats him shabbily until he leaves. Only when Becky shows her George's letter to her, indicating his unfaithfulness, can Amelia move on. She then marries Dobbin.

In a letter to his close friend Jane Octavia Brookfield while the book was being written, Thackeray confided that "You know you are only a piece of Amelia, my mother is another half, my poor little wife y est pour beaucoup".[29][lower-alpha 3][30] Within the work, her character is compared and connected to Iphigenia,[31] although two of the references extend the allusion to all daughters in all drawing rooms as potential Iphigenias waiting to be sacrificed by their families.[32]

Rebecca Sharp, called Becky, is Amelia's opposite: an intelligent young woman with a gift for satire. She is described as a short sandy haired girl who has green eyes and a great deal of wit. Becky is born to a French opera dancer mother and an art teacher and artist father Francis. Fluent in both French and English, Becky has a beautiful singing voice, plays the piano, and shows great talent as an actress. Without a mother to guide her into marriage, Becky resolves that "I must be my own Mamma".[33]

She thereafter appears to be completely amoral and without conscience and has been called the work's "anti-heroine".[34] She does not seem to have the ability to get attached to other people, and lies easily and intelligently to get her way. She is extremely manipulative and, after the first few chapters and her failure to attract Jos Sedley, is not shown as being particularly sincere.

Never having known financial or social security even as a child, Becky desires it above all things. Nearly everything she does is with the intention of securing a stable position for herself, or herself and her husband after she and Rawdon are married. She advances Rawdon's interests tirelessly, flirting with men such as General Tufto and the Marquis of Steyne to get him promoted. She also uses her feminine wiles to distract men at card parties while Rawdon cheats them blind.

Marrying Rawdon Crawley in secret was a mistake, as was running off instead of begging Miss Crawley's forgiveness. She also fails to manipulate Miss Crawley through Rawdon so as to obtain an inheritance. Although Becky manipulates men very easily, she is less successful with women. She is utterly hostile to Lady Bareacres,[35] dismissive of Mrs. O'Dowd, and Lady Jane, although initially friendly, eventually distrusts and dislikes her.

The exceptions to this trend are (at least initially) Miss Crawley, her companion Miss Briggs, and her school friend Amelia; the latter is the recipient of more-or-less the only kindnesses Becky expresses in the work, persuading her to marry Dobbin in light of what Becky comes to appreciate to be his good qualities and protecting Amelia from two ruffians vying for her attentions. This comparative loyalty to Amelia stems from Becky having no other friends at school, and Amelia having "by a thousand kind words and offices, overcome... (Becky's) hostility"; 'The gentle tender-hearted Amelia Sedley was the only person to whom she could attach herself in the least; and who could help attaching herself to Amelia?'

Beginning with her determination to be her "own Mamma", Becky begins to assume the role of Clytemnestra.[36] Becky and her necklace from Steyne also allude to the fallen Eriphyle in Racine's retelling of Iphigenia at Aulis, where she doubles and rescues Iphigenia.[37] In lesser contexts, Becky also appears as Arachne to Miss Pinkerton's Minerva[38] and as a variety of classical figures in the works' illustrations.

Rawdon, the younger of the two Crawley sons, is an empty-headed cavalry officer who is his wealthy aunt's favourite until he marries Becky Sharp, who is of a far lower class. He permanently alienates his aunt, who leaves her estate to Rawdon's elder brother Sir Pitt instead. Sir Pitt has by this time inherited their father's estate, leaving Rawdon destitute.

The well-meaning Rawdon does have a few talents in life, most of them having to do with gambling and duelling. He is very good at cards and billiards, and although he does not always win he is able to earn cash by betting against less talented gamblers. He is heavily indebted throughout most of the book, not so much for his own expenses as for Becky's. Not particularly talented as a military officer, he is content to let Becky manage his career.

Although Rawdon knows Becky is attractive to men, he believes her reputation is spotless even though she is widely suspected of romantic intrigue with General Tufto and other powerful men. Nobody dares to suggest otherwise to Rawdon because of his temper and his reputation for duelling. Yet other people, particularly the Marquis of Steyne, find it impossible to believe that Crawley is unaware of Becky's tricks. Steyne in particular believes Rawdon is fully aware Becky is prostituting herself, and believes Rawdon is going along with the charade in the hope of financial gain.

After Rawdon finds out the truth and leaves Becky for an assignment overseas, he leaves his son to be brought up by his brother Sir Pitt and his wife Lady Jane. While overseas, Rawdon dies of yellow fever.

Rawdon Crawley's elder brother inherits the Crawley estate from his father, the boorish and vulgar Sir Pitt, and also inherits the estate of his wealthy aunt, Miss Crawley, after she disinherits Rawdon. Pitt is very religious and has political aspirations, although not many people appreciate his intelligence or wisdom because there's not much there to appreciate.

Somewhat pedantic and conservative, Pitt does nothing to help Rawdon or Becky even when they fall on hard times. This is chiefly due to the influence of his wife, Lady Jane, who dislikes Becky because of her callous treatment of her son, and also because Becky repaid Lady Jane's earlier kindness by patronising her and flirting with Sir Pitt.

The elderly Miss Crawley is everyone's favourite wealthy aunt. Sir Pitt and Rawdon both dote on her, although Rawdon is her favourite nephew and sole heir until he marries Becky. While Miss Crawley likes Becky and keeps her around to entertain her with sarcasm and wit, and while she loves scandal and particularly stories of unwise marriage, she does not want scandal or unwise marriage in her family. A substantial part of the early section of the book deals with the efforts the Crawleys make to kowtow to Miss Crawley in the hope of receiving a big inheritance.

Her portrayal is informed by Thackeray's time in Paris with his maternal grandmother Harriet Becher.[39]

George Osborne, his father (a merchant, of considerably superior social status to Dobbin's grocer father, albeit self made, and ironically a mere corporal in the City Light Horse regiment of which Dobbin senior, by this time an alderman and a knight, is colonel), and his two sisters are close to the Sedley family until Mr. Sedley (the father of Jos and Amelia, and George Osborne's godfather, from whom the latter takes his middle name of 'Sedley') goes bankrupt following some ill-advised speculation. Since George and Amelia were raised in close company and were childhood sweethearts, George defies his father to marry Amelia. Before father and son can be reconciled, George is killed at the battle of Waterloo, leaving the pregnant Amelia to carry on as well as she can.

Raised to be a selfish, vain, profligate spender, handsome and self-obsessed, George squanders the last of the money he receives from his father and sets nothing aside to help support Amelia. After marrying Amelia, he finds after a couple of weeks that he is bored. He flirts with Becky quite seriously and is reconciled to Amelia only a short time before he is killed in battle.

The best friend of George Osborne, Captain William Dobbin is tall, ungainly, and not particularly handsome. He is a few years older than George but has been friends with him since his schooldays, even though Dobbin's father is a fig-merchant (Dobbin & Rudge, grocers and oilmen, Thames Street, London - he is later an alderman and colonel of the City Light Horse regiment, and knighted) and the Osbornes belong to the genteel class and have become independently wealthy. He defends George and is blind to his faults in many ways, although he tries to force George to do the right thing. He pushes George to keep his promise to marry Amelia even though Dobbin is in love with Amelia himself. After George is killed, Dobbin puts together an annuity to help support Amelia, ostensibly with the help of George's fellow officers.

Later, Major and Lieutenant Colonel Dobbin discreetly does what he can to help support Amelia and her son George. He allows Amelia to continue with her obsession over George and does not correct her erroneous beliefs about him. He hangs about for years, either pining away over her while serving in India or waiting on her in person, allowing her to take advantage of his good nature. After Amelia finally chooses Becky's friendship over his during their stay in Germany, Dobbin leaves in disgust. He returns when Amelia writes to him and admits her feelings for him, marries her (despite having lost much of his passion for her), and has a daughter whom he loves deeply.

Amelia's older brother, Joseph "Jos" Sedley, is a "nabob", who made a respectable fortune as a collector in India. Obese and self-important but very shy and insecure, he is attracted to Becky Sharp but circumstances prevent him from proposing. He never marries, but when he meets Becky again he is easily manipulated into falling in love with her. Jos is not a courageous or intelligent man, displaying his cowardice at the Battle of Waterloo by trying to flee and purchasing both of Becky's overpriced horses. Becky ensnares him again near the end of the book and, it is hinted, murders him for his life insurance.

The style is highly indebted to Henry Fielding.[23] Thackeray meant the book to be not only entertaining but also instructive, an intention demonstrated through the book's narration and through Thackeray's private correspondence. A letter to his editor at Punch expressed his belief that "our profession... is as serious as the parson's own".[44] He considered it his own coming-of-age as a writer[lower-alpha 6] and greatest work.[29]

Critics hailed the work as a literary treasure before the last part of the serial was published. In her correspondence, Charlotte Brontë was effusive regarding his illustrations as well: "You will not easily find a second Thackeray. How he can render, with a few black lines and dots, shades of expression, so fine, so real; traits of character so minute, so subtle, so difficult to seize and fix, I cannot tell—I can only wonder and admire... If Truth were again a goddess, Thackeray should be her high priest."[57]

The early reviewers took the debt to Bunyan as self-evident and compared Becky with Pilgrim and Thackeray with Faithful.[44] Although they were superlative in their praise,[58] some expressed disappointment at the unremittingly dark portrayal of human nature, fearing Thackeray had taken his dismal metaphor too far. In response to these critics, Thackeray explained that he saw people for the most part as "abominably foolish and selfish".[59]

The unhappy ending was intended to inspire readers to look inward at their own shortcomings. Other critics took notice of or exception to the social subversion in the work; in his correspondence, Thackeray stated his criticism was not reserved to the upper class: "My object is to make every body engaged, engaged in the pursuit of Vanity Fair and I must carry my story through in this dreary minor key, with only occasional hints here and there of better things—of better things which it does not become me to preach".[60]

The novel is considered a classic of English literature, though some critics claim that it has structural problems; Thackeray sometimes lost track of the huge scope of his work, mixing up characters' names and minor plot details. The number of allusions and references it contains can make it difficult for modern readers to follow.

The subtitle, A Novel without a Hero, is apt because the characters are all flawed to a greater or lesser degree; even the most sympathetic have weaknesses, for example Captain Dobbin, who is prone to vanity and melancholy. The human weaknesses Thackeray illustrates are mostly to do with greed, idleness, and snobbery, and the scheming, deceit and hypocrisy which mask them. None of the characters are wholly evil, although Becky's manipulative, amoral tendencies make her come pretty close. However, even Becky, who is amoral and cunning, is thrown on her own resources by poverty and its stigma. (She is the orphaned daughter of a poor artist and an opera dancer.) Thackeray's tendency to highlight faults in all of his characters displays his desire for a greater level of realism in his fiction compared to the rather unlikely or idealised people in many contemporary novels.

The novel is a satire of society as a whole, characterised by hypocrisy and opportunism, but it is not a reforming novel; there is no suggestion that social or political changes or greater piety and moral reformism could improve the nature of society. It thus paints a fairly bleak view of the human condition. This bleak portrait is continued with Thackeray's own role as an omniscient narrator, one of the writers best known for using the technique. He continually offers asides about his characters and compares them to actors and puppets, but his cheek goes even as far as his readers, accusing all who may be interested in such "Vanity Fairs" as being either "of a lazy, or a benevolent, or a sarcastic mood".[61] As Lord David Cecil remarked, "Thackeray liked people, and for the most part he thought them well-intentioned. But he also saw very clearly that they were all in some degree weak and vain, self-absorbed and self-deceived."[62] Amelia begins as a warm-hearted and friendly girl, though sentimental and naive, but by the story's end she is portrayed as vacuous and shallow. Dobbin appears first as loyal and magnanimous, if unaware of his own worth; by the end of the story he is presented as a tragic fool, a prisoner of his own sense of duty who knows he is wasting his gifts on Amelia but is unable to live without her. The novel's increasingly grim outlook can take readers aback, as characters whom the reader at first holds in sympathy are shown to be unworthy of such regard.

The work is often compared to the other great historical novel of the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy's War and Peace.[lower-alpha 7] While Tolstoy's work has a greater emphasis on the historical detail and the effect the war has upon his protagonists, Thackeray instead uses the conflict as a backdrop to the lives of his characters. The momentous events on the continent do not always have an equally important influence on the behaviours of Thackeray's characters. Rather their faults tend to compound over time. This is in contrast to the redemptive power the conflict has on the characters in War and Peace. For Thackeray, the Napoleonic Wars as a whole can be thought of as one more of the vanities expressed in the title.

A common critical topic is to address various objects in the book and the characters' relationships with them, such as Rebecca's diamonds or the piano Amelia values when she thinks it came from George and dismisses upon learning that Dobbin provided it. Marxist and similar schools of criticism that go further and see Thackeray condemning consumerism and capitalism, however, largely overstate their case.[65] Thackeray is pointed in his criticism of the commodification of women in the marriage market, but his variations on Ecclesiastes's "all is vanity"[66] are more personal than institutional. He also has broad sympathy with a measure of comfort and financial and physical "snugness". At one point, the narrator even makes a "robust defense of his lunch":[60] "It is all vanity to be sure: but who will not own to liking a little of it? I should like to know what well-constituted mind, merely because it is transitory, dislikes roast-beef?"[67]

Despite the clear implications of Thackeray's illustration on the topic, John Sutherland has argued against Becky having murdered Jos on the basis of Thackeray's criticism of the "Newgate novels" of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and other authors of Victorian crime fiction.[lower-alpha 8] Although what Thackeray principally objected to was glorification of a criminal's deeds, his intent may have been to entrap the Victorian reader with their own prejudices and make them think the worst of Becky Sharp even when they have no proof of her actions.[68]

• Vanity Fair (7 January 1940), the CBS Radio series Campbell Playhouse, hosted by Orson Welles, broadcast a one-hour adaptation featuring Helen Hayes and Agnes Moorehead.
• Vanity Fair (6 December 1947), the NBC Radio series Favorite Story, hosted by Ronald Colman, broadcast a half-hour adaptation with Joan Lorring as "Becky Sharp"[69][70]
• Vanity Fair (2004), BBC Radio 4 broadcast an adaptation of the novel by Stephen Wyatt, starring Emma Fielding as Becky, Stephen Fry as the Narrator, Katy Cavanagh as Amelia, David Calder, Philip Fox, Jon Glover, Geoffrey Whitehead as Mr. Osborne, Ian Masters as Mr. Sedley, Alice Hart as Maria Osborne, and Margaret Tyzack as Miss Crawley; this was subsequently re-broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra in 20 fifteen-minute episodes.[71]
• Vanity Fair (2019), BBC Radio 4 broadcast a three-part adaptation of the novel by Jim Poyser with additional material by Al Murray (Thackeray's actual descendant, who also stars as Thackeray),[72] with Ellie White as Becky Sharp, Helen O'Hara as Amelia Sedley, Blake Ritson as Rawdon Crawley, Rupert Hill as George Osborne and Graeme Hawley as Dobbin.

• Vanity Fair (1911), directed by Charles Kent[73]
• Vanity Fair (1915), directed by Charles Brabin
• Vanity Fair (1922), directed by W. Courtney Rowden
• Vanity Fair (1923), directed by Hugo Ballin

• Vanity Fair (1932), directed by Chester M. Franklin and starring Myrna Loy, updating the story to make Becky Sharp a social-climbing governess
• Becky Sharp (1935), starring Miriam Hopkins and Frances Dee, the first feature film shot in full-spectrum Technicolor
• Vanity Fair (2004), directed by Mira Nair and starring Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp and Natasha Little, who had played Becky Sharp in the earlier television miniseries of Vanity Fair, as Lady Jane Sheepshanks

• Vanity Fair (1956-7), a BBC serial adapted by Constance Cox starring Joyce Redman
• Vanity Fair (1967), a BBC miniseries adapted by Rex Tucker starring Susan Hampshire as Becky Sharp, for which she received an Emmy Award in 1973. This version was also broadcast in 1972 in the US on PBS television as part of Masterpiece Theatre.
• Yarmarka tshcheslaviya (1976), a two-episode TV miniseries directed by Igor Ilyinsky and Mariette Myatt, staged by the Moscow State Academic Maly Theater of the USSR) (in Russian)[74]
• Vanity Fair (1987), a BBC miniseries starring Eve Matheson as Becky Sharp, Rebecca Saire as Amelia Sedley, James Saxon as Jos Sedley and Simon Dormandy as Dobbin.[75]
• Vanity Fair (1998), a BBC miniseries starring Natasha Little as Becky Sharp
• Vanity Fair (2018), a seven-part ITV and Amazon Studios adaptation, starring Olivia Cooke as Becky Sharp, Tom Bateman as Captain Rawdon Crawley, and Michael Palin as Thackeray.[76]

• Becky Sharp (1899), play written by Langdon Mitchell
• Vanity Fair (1946), play written by Constance Cox
• Vanity Fair (2017), play written by Kate Hamill

• Dibattista, Maria (August 1980), "The Triumph of Clytemnestra: The Charades in Vanity Fair", PMLA, vol. 95, Modern Language Association, pp. 827–837, doi:10.2307/461760, JSTOR 461760.
• Harden, Edgar F. (1995), Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, New York: Twayne Publishers, ISBN 978-0-8057-4460-6.
• Heiler, Lars (2010), "Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression, and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective", Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 49–74, ISBN 9780230105997.
• Jadwin, Lisa (1993), "Clytemnestra Rewarded: The Double Conclusion of Vanity Fair", Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, pp. 35–61.
• Milne, Kirsty (2015), At Vanity Fair: From Bunyan to Thackeray, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9781107105850.
• Ray, Gordon N., ed. (1946), The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Sutherland, John (1988), The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, Pearson Education, ISBN 9781317863335, reprinted 2009 by Routledge.
• Taylor, D.J. (2004). "Jane Octavia Brookfield (1821–1896)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/56277. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Wilson, James Grant; et al. (1970), Thackeray in the United States: 1852–3, 1855–6: Including a Record of a Variety of Thackerayana, vol. I & II, New York: Haskell House Publishers {{citation}}: External link in |volume= (help).
• York, Kenneth Galen (1997), Lively Becky Sharp Performs as the Queens of Vanity Fair: A Study in the Mythical & Historical Allusions and Intertexts Employed by William Makepeace Thackeray in Vanity Fair, University of Montana.