A STUDY ON ENGLISH SOCIETY IN THACKARAY’S NOVELS

A STUDY ON ENGLISH SOCIETY IN THACKARAY’S NOVELS

       ELENA-MADALINA SIRBU
      CURTEA DE ARGES  2022

The Victorian Age                                                                               pag 1 – 4

An Overview of English Society in Thackeray’s Novels                  pag 5 – 6

Mentalities and conventions in “Vanity Fair”                                 pag 7 – 29

Arthur Pendennis – the prototype of a social climber                   pag 30 – 32

English transitions from monarchical to constitutional
forms in “Henry Esmond”                                                               pag 33 – 36

Thackeray’s literary achievement as a social writer                     pag 37 – 39

          
            The Victorian Age
              The centuries of history do not appear all equally relevant to us, and the impression of relevance itself tends to change. The early part of the nineteenth century had seen Britain consolidate its position as a world power following the defeat of Napoleon. The industrial Revolution was well under way and a new urbanised society was being created. The rest of the nineteenth century was to see Britain reach heights of wealth, power and prestige that were unmatched at any other time in its history. This golden age is often referred to as the ‘Victorian era’ because it corresponded with the reign of one of the country’s best-loved queens, Victoria. Victoria became a symbol of all that was good and glorious in nineteenth century Britain. The process of social development and political reform which had begun earlier in the century continued throughout the Victorian period. At the end of the Victorian era, British people could boast of being better housed, better clothed, better informed and healthier than any other population in Europe.
              The Victorian period was an age of stark contrast and paradoxes. While Britain was at the height of its wealth, power and influence, large sections of its population lived and worked in appalling conditions. Scientific and technological advances paved the way for a better future as traditional religious beliefs began to crumble under the weight of new scientific discovery. Britain enjoyed a surge of national pride and confidence, but many people viewed the future with deepening pessimism. The growing pains, confidence and loss of consensus in Victorian society are all reflected in its literature.
               As the Renaissance is identified with drama and Romanticism with poetry, the Victorian age is identified with the novel. There are several reasons for the triumph of fiction, but perhaps the most significant is the rapid growth in the middle classes who, since the eighteenth century, had been avid consumers of this form of literature. The Victorian age also abounded in journals, periodicals and pamphlets. Many early Victorian novels first appeared in serialised form in periodicals. Publication in serial form influenced the writing process: writers had to keep the readers’ interest high in order to encourage them to continue buying their work. The closeness between the novelist and his readers was a distinguishing feature, particularly of the early Victorian realism observed and documented everyday life, drew its characters from all social classes and explored areas of life usually ignored by the arts.
             A good deal of nineteenth-century writing is concerned with the refutation of inadequate notions of man and of society. As he would expect at such a time of upheaval and reorganization, there is a good deal of discussion of democracy and individualism, of nationalism and liberalism, of the growth of population and the need for controls or for emigration. Education becomes a general concern, and the place of religions teaching in a national system of education is bitterly debated. The dominant temper of the early and middle Victorian periods was intensely moralistic, heavy with responsibility and society.
            The peaceful evolution of democratic forms of government could not be ascribed to any two or three factors, but amongst the numerous explanations of the non-fulfilment of Marx’s prophecies must be counted the very real fear that the contagion of revolution might spread from the Continent: and also the sheer momentum of social change. Religion, of course, of a rather self-saving kind, counted for a great deal, as did the natural ‘deference’ of an insular people involved in a successful enterprise. Though the century produced a large number of theories of society, of party, and of government, the peacefulness of social evolution must also be ascribed to the empirical, unideological, tradesmen like qualities of the rising middle class.
            Part of the drama of the nineteenth-century history lies in the struggle of the ascendant middle class to shape the turbulent lower levels of society in its own image, by example, by preaching, and by propaganda. The moralizing, self-satisfied tone of much Victorian writing needs no other explanation. We should not, however, regard this self-conscious respectability, this moralizing attitude of mind, as characteristic of the middle class only in Victorian times.
           With the Victorians we reach the age of photography. That fact alone may at first suggest new possibilities of clarity, precision, and certainly in our estimates of  Victorian writers. Later, the disadvantages of being close to the object, and of possessing masses of information about it, make themselves felt, especially when we attempt to review the achievements of the period summarily Virginia Woolf, when she tried to detach the Brownings from their legend, came to the conclusion that “they have to become two of the most conspicuous figures in that bright and animated company of authors, who, thanks to our modern habit of writing  memoirs and printing letters and sitting to be photographed, live in the flesh, not merely as of old in the word; are known by their hats, not merely by their poems. What damage the art of photography has inflicted upon the art of literature has yet to be reckoned.”
                  Nearly all Victorians wrote copiously and had little regard for eighteen-century ideals of terseness and epigrammatic point. The mounds of unsatable sermons and black-bound homiletic writing which, even now, make corners of second-hand bookshops look like ossuaries, remind us pungently of the special interests and demands of the expanding Victorian reading public. Both poets and prose-writers were aware of a taste for propaganda in its various forms, and this is one reason for the sheer bulk of Victorian writing and its respetiveness. Another complication is that some Victorian novelists and thinkers are still current in a way very few earlier writers are. Family book-cases may contain their neglected rows of English classics, but Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope and Hardy are read, and the names of Carlyle, Ruskin and John Stuart Mill mean something to the man-in-the-street, especially in the north. Victorian poetry has now lost most of its popular hold. The modern reader is usually unconscious of his allusions to Tennyson’s lines and phrases are still a convenient short-hand for the attitudes, ‘spectres of the mind’, pangs of nature, ‘honest doubt’ and ‘larger hope’ of the  fairly recent past.
               Even the developments in poetry during the last forty years have entirely undermined this sort of attitude, inadequate as it is, to Wordsworth, whose verse continues to speak to us with a piercing immediacy unlike that of any other nineteenth-century poetry. The processes initiated in the Romantic Age have certainly not yet worked themselves out. It is probable that in time the titles “Romantic” and “Victorian” will be dropped and the whole of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries come to be described as a single epoch, manifesting one special effort and tendency.
              The Victorian period now appears a time when the large middle-class public was engaged in trying to adjust itself to, and catch up with, that special ‘growth of the mind’ recorded by Romantic poets.
             It is not easy to decide how much territory was won or lost by Victorian writers. Their preoccupation with evolution and the intense pessimism – or optimism- associated with it now seems to date and parochialize their work, whereas much Romantic poetry retains its universality undiminished.
            Not so long ago, the Victorian period was considered one of literary decline, derivativeness, and disintegration, its literature was heavily penalizing for its sentimentality and sanctimoniousness, it seemed a period of cultural provinciality. Now it is being acclaimed, in some quarters, as a time of great achievement in literature, even as the greatest in English literary history. This ‘whirligig of taste’ is very confusing even to those with leisure and inclination to work out their own judgements of value. If, however, we look carefully at the rediscoveries and reappraisals we find much with which to check the general reader’s scepticism about critical objectivity. Variations of emphasis there must be so long as a literature continues to matter to a large number of people, but criticism must always work for agreements about what is fine, about those works which give substance and meaning to all the qualitative words in the language.
              We find some rediscoveries are of such authors as George Eliot or Disraeli or Leslie Stephen, who have never before received detailed attention and who need to be made to count more distinctly. Then there are those writers such as Tennyson, Browning, Thackeray, Meredith, and others who, after much acclaim during their lifetime, went out of favour a generation or two ago, and are now ready for the normal process of reconsideration.

             An overview of English Society in Thackeray’s novels

            Thackeray’s success as a novelist is inseparable from his exploration, tenacious and assured, of certain effects of England’s expanding economy in the early and middle nineteenth century. He is not the first novelist of his age to fix the way in which middle-class forces translated superior animal cunning and luck in speculation into success confirmed by religion. He is not the first to describe their upward as being in all its many forms gross and obsequious.
            But he is the first novelist who, hating rank and privilege in his bones, sinks bull-dog teeth into very single abuse of rank and privilege: self-defeating miserliness in a Dir Pit Crawley; unearned privilege stupidly and criminally abused in a Sir Francis Clavering; in Rawdon Crawley the prodigality of the bloods and dandies; the  mediocrity of mind and talents that governed a great nation with a growing empire, exemplified in Mr. Pitt Crawley, extreme brutality, in Lord Steyne, trading on its prerogatives.
           That struggle includes not only major representatives in each class. In Thackeray’s work it comprises many dependents over a large area: the Church, the army, the civil service, the government, the fashionable public school, the governess and domestic class, the small tradesman, Fleet Street and Bohemia.
           Thackeray’s world is the world of London Society – and its extension into rural community. But the world of London spreads to the Continent and even to India, with Thackeray in pursuit.
          Thackeray’s preparation for Vanity Fair, his one undoubted success, was a long, highly varied, and with the exception of the anonymous Book of Snobs (1846 – 1847) for Punch, a generally unsuccessful career in journalism. Yet it was a career distinguished for no servile puffery and no lowering of standards to satisfy public taste. He earned the right to speak honest common sense in “Pendennis”. In this period, Thackeray turned his hand to the stock-in-trade of such journalism: book reviews, art and dramatic criticism, parodies, travel sketches, poetry (mostly ballads and light poetry), political articles and fictional sketches.

        
               Mentalities and conventions in “Vanity Fair”
   
               Vanity Fair was published in monthly parts in 1847 and 1848 and is set at the time of the Napoleonic wars. It is a  vast satirical panorama of a soulless, materialist society which Thackaray intended to be applied also to his own times.
               Vanity Fair was Thackeray’s masterpiece. Subversive, funny, complex and serious, it is the work of an intellectual athlete at the height of his powers. It has been called “the only English novel (of the nineteenth century) which, in theme and range, challenges comparison with War and Peace. Attempts to categorize the book and its author have been made repeatedly: they always fails, for the novel evades and transcends classification. Satire, realism, parody, history and morality tale: Vanity Fair includes them all but is far too enjoyable to be trapped in any one genre. Part of the delight of  reading it for the first time is the sense of discovery that each reader experiences.
             Yet Vanity Fair very nearly miscarried: publishers where wary of it. Thackeray submitted a draft of the early part of the novel to three or four, all of whom rejected it, before Bradbury and Evans, Dickens’ publishers, took it in 1846. Even then publication was delayed for eight months. Apparently, Bradbury and Evans were themselves uncertain whether the public would take to the book, and it was not until the success of Thackeray’s The Snobs of England in Punch and his Christmas Book for 1846, Mrs Perkin’s Ball, that they finally went ahead. In her biographical introduction to Vanity Fair Thackeray’s daughter recalled, “I have always been told that it was Mrs. Perkin’s Ball which played the part of pilot or steam tug to that great line-of-battleship Vanity Fair, and which brought it safely off the shoals”.
              Vanity Fair was launched at last in monthly numbers on 1 January 1847. Thackeray was thirty-five publications in ‘numbers’ at a shilling each was the method pioneered by Dickens, whose green paper covers were by now familiar to the reading public. Vanity Fair appeared, by contrast, in yellow covers, with Thackeray thought gaudy. Dickens, a year younger than Thackeray, already had an unassailable position as the foremost English novelist, with a string of best-seller to his credit, beginning with The Pickwick Papers in 1836. His latest success, Dombey and Son, had an advantage of three month over Vanity Fair, and for ten month it seemed that the publishers’ caution over Thackeray’s novel was justified. It attracted a good deal of notice, but it did not sell. The public did not what to make of it, as one reader recalled after Thackeray’s death.
       Thackeray was acutely aware of the problems he faced in attempting to reach a public used to the broader effects of Dickens. Just after the second number of Vanity Fair was issued, he read the latest instalment of Dombey and Son, containing the death of Paul Dombey. "There is no writing   against such power as this - One has no chance “he exclaimed in despair. It was not until    October, after the publication of the powerful Waterloo number   that success was assured. Even so some of the early reviewers were doubtful, acknowledging the book's power, but finding it unpleasantly cynical and misanthropic: "the atmosphere of the work is overload with these exhalations of human folly and wickedness ", Dicken ' s friend John Forster complained in his review of the novel.
        Thackeray had to create the taste by which his work   could   be appreciated. Vanity Fair was the important novel he had been promising himself for years to write: he poured into it both the accumulated experiences of his life, and the proficiency of a miscellaneous writer, who had practice in many genres, and was skilled in the use of varied literary masks and voices. But much as he wanted a critical success, and needed a financial one, he was unable to compromise. The book did, in the end, win him fame and security: but its unique quality came from his own understanding of insecurity. Vanity Fair is a searching and pitiless investigation of lives balanced on the edge of moral, social and financial disaster perhaps only a man well acquainted with precariousness, the fall from prosperity as well as the struggle up to it, could have written it.
Thackeray had been born into a comfortably secure upper-middle-class family and reared to expect the leisured life of a gentleman. However, partly through bad luck and bad financial advice, partly through his own profligacy in early youth - he was at Cambridge and for some   years afterwards a compulsive gambler - he had been left with nothing to rely on but this brains and energy. He dreamed of writing a great novel: but he was well aware that while: he dreamed and dawdled, writers whom he despised, such as Bulwer-Lytton, were writing best-sellers.
Writing had not been his first choice of profession. To please his mother, he spent some tedious months studying law, but his earliest ambition was to be a painter. He studied art in London and Paris before deciding that his talent was too small for him to be anything but an amateur painter, though he continued to draw professionally, and illustrated most of his own novels. He then turned to journalism. In 1836, while he was still struggling to make his way, he married a penniless girl of eighteen, in the face of her mother's fierce opposition.
With considerable courage, Thackeray began to make  a living for his growing family from miscellaneous contributions to any newspapers- and periodicals that would take his work. Often, he did not know where the next five pounds was coming from. Isabella Thackeray gave birth to three   daughters, the second of whom died in infancy, but after the birth of the third, in 1840, she   became incurably insane, and had to be cared for away from her family for the rest of her long life - she outlived her husband by over thirty years.
This tragedy deeply affected Thackeray. It was, too, an additional financial burden, and for some years he was forced to part with his daughters, who were brought up by his mother in France, while he struggled to make a living in London, still chiefly by journalism. His chances as a novelist seemed poor: his short novel Barry Lyndon, published serially in Fraser's Magazine in 1844, made so little impression on the public that it was not published in book from until twelve years later.
However, by December 1843 Thackeray had   found a new source of income, as a regular staff contributor to the new magazine   Punch, which paid double the rates of other periodicals, by 1846 he was able to leave his simple bachelor lodgings, lease a house in Young Street, Kensington, and reclaim his children. Punch was in its early days a far more satirical and hard-hitting magazine than it later became, and the work Thackeray did for it was an apprenticeship that helped to shape him as a novelist. He was valued at Punch    as an all-rounder, a draughtsman as well as a writer, who could be relied on for cartoons illustrations to other writers' articles as well his own. The facility he gained in drawing for wood­ blocks, and the use of small drawings as silent, satiric   commentaries on the articles they accompanied, were   of obvious value when he came to create the illustrations for Vanity Fair. He was a regular contributor of reviews, short pieces and more extended satires and burlesques. The Snobs of England (later re-published   as The Book of Snobs), his most successful contribution   to Punch, made fun of many of his objects of satire in Vanity Fair. The last numbers of The Snobs of England published in Punch from February 1846 to February 1847, were being written concurrently with the earlier sections of Vanity Fair. The narrative impulse was becoming stronger as the novel took over his imagination; he could not resist creating a narrative out of the later Snobs papers as the series developed.
In spite of his successes in Punch, Thackeray   had become increasingly discontented by such ephemeral work. By 1846 he felt it was imperative for him to make his bid to establish himself as a major writer. He had been thinking about a novel set in the Napoleonic period, since 1842 when he cross questioned an army captain who had taken part in the 1815 campaign and written a history of it. But the project took shape only gradually; it was repeatedly postponed by the demands that journalism made on this time. Though the days of extreme poverty were over, he was still burdened with debt.
A draft of the early chapters of Vanity Fair was written, at the latest, by the spring of 1845. At the stage Thackeray was perhaps thinking more of an episodic comic satire than a novel with fully rounded characters. His first working title for the book, Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, suggest something closer to his work for Punch.
When the novel eventually began to appear in print almost two years later, the original title was kept as a subtitle, but the scope had been broadened and deepened. Most importantly, he added the character of William Dobbin, central to the final from of the novel. The shift perhaps began with Thackeray's adoption of a second working title, A Novel without a Hero, which suggests he intended to undermine novelistic assumption. A Novel without a Hero became the subtitle when the first volume edition was published.
The final title Vanity Fair   came to Thackeray in the middle of the night, when he was staying at the Old Ship Inn, Brighton, in the autumn of 1846. "I jumped out of bed, and ran three times round my room, uttering as I went, Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair". His characters also visit Brighton, and stay at the Ship Inn, in the early scenes of the novel.
Thackeray's inspired title was of course borrowed from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a book familiar from childhood to Thackeray's first readers. As Bunyan is less often read nowadays, the relevant passage is worth quoting
... they presently saw a Town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity and at the Town there is a Fair kept, called Vanity Fair: it is kept all the yearlong;... at this Fair are all such Merchandise sold as Houses, Lands, Trades, Places, Honours, Preferments, Titles, Countries, Kingdoms, Lusts, Pleasures and Delight of all sorts, as Whores, Bawds, Wives, Husbands, Children, Masters, Servants, Lives, Blood, Bodies, Souls, Silver, Gold, Pearls, Precious Stones, and what not...
And moreover, at this Fair there is at all times to be seen Jugglings, Cheats, Games, Plays, Fools, Apes, Knaves, and Rogues, and that of all sorts.
Here are to be seen, too, and that for nothing, Thefts, Murders, Adulteries, False-swearers, and that of a blood-red colour.
Now, as I said, the way to the Celestial City lies just through this Town where this lusty Fair is kept; and he that will go to the city, and yet no through this Town, must needs go out of the World. (John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, Everyman’s Library 1954,pp.89-90).
Bunyan's vision becomes the controlling   metaphor of the novel. Everything in Bunyan's Fair is to be found in Thackeray's novel, and also in the real world of his readers, as Thackeray repeatedly reminds them. When his characters arrive at Brussels before the Battle of Waterloo, they find   "all the Vanity Fair booths were laid out with the most tempting liveliness and splendour. Gambling was here in profusion and dancing in plenty; feasting was there to fill with delight that great gourmand of a Jos... there was a theatre... beautiful rides... a rare old city... to delight the eyes of little Amelia... 11 • The chapter is called, in Fieldingesque mock­ heroic, in which Amelia invades the Low Countries. The inevitability of passing through Vanity Fair: "he that will go to the city, and yet not go through this Town, must need go out of the World" is part of Thackeray's theme. Even Amelia and the other supposedly virtuous characters are not immune.
"Of course, you are quite right about Vanity Fair and Amelia being selfish", Thackeray wrote to his mother after six monthly numbers had appeared.
My object is not to make a perfect character or anything like it. Don't you see how odious all the people are in the book (with the exception of Dobbin)-behind whom all there lies a dark moral, I hope. What I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world (only that is a cant phrase) greedy pompons mean perfectly self-satisfied for the most part and at ease about their superior virtue. (Letters and Private Papers of W. M. Thackeray, II, p.309)
Thackeray wrote in a similar vein to a number of correspondents at the time he was writing the novel, and shortly after it had appeared. Even William Dobbin, the only sincere man in the novel, was not always allowed to escape without criticism. Like George Eliot and Trollope after him, Thackeray came to believe that the novelist was a 'week-day preacher’, his calling as serious as 'the parson's own'.
Bunyan took the name of his town from Ecclesiastes. “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity". "Vanitas Vanitatum" was one of Thackeray's favourite phrases: it brings Vanity Fair to a close, and late in his life he wrote a poem on the theme. In the novel the two shades of meaning, 'vanity' as love of self and of the things of the world, and 'vanity' as emptiness and world-weariness, are shown to be two sides of the same base coinage. He brought the two together skilfully in the image of the looking glass, the instrument of vanity in the worldly, self-regarding sense, which also gives back to poor Tom Fool, in the frontispiece added for the book edition of 1848, the melancholy reflection of his comic fade.
The looking-glass image which pervades Vanity Fair is an adaptation of Swift's definition of satire: “a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very flew are offended with it”. In a letter to one of his reviewers, Thackeray underlined his own intention.
Vanity Fair tells the story of two girls from the time they leave school to their middle age, a few years before the date at which Thackeray was writing. "The present century", Thackeray tells us in his opening sentence, "was in its teens so are Amelia Sedley and Rebecca Sharp, whose lives we are to follow". "Vive la France! Vive l'Empereur! Vive Bonaparte!" cries the irrepressible Becky, rejecting the staid Augustan age, as she throws Johnson's Dictionary out of the carriage window. The reader is at once alerted: this moment in recent   history, when the world was undergoing dramatic and irrevocable changes, will soon have it effect on the lives of Amelia and Becky.
It was a moment his older readers would have remembered   vividly, and Thackeray was careful to authenticate his story by an accumulation of period detail, building up a lively picture of late Georgian and Regency life as a time of fluxed uncertainty. By the late 1840s the world seemed very different; but his readers could see the origins of their own society in Thackeray's pages. Cutting backwards and forwards from the lives of his Characters by a flexible narrative commentary which related past to present, Thackeray was able to show not only the changes in attitudes that had taken place over a generation, but also the underlying similarities.
The structure of the novel's plot is simple. Each girl becomes the focus for a set of overlapping characters, who revolve, with one set rising on the Wheel of Fortune as another goes down. The events of the lives of Amelia and Becky are paralleled on contrasted, until an uneasy equilibrium is reached at the close, when they meet by chance at a Charity Fair- the hypocritical Victorian version of Vanity Fair. This pattern made admirably the publication in monthly parts, without seeming too obviously schematic when the book was as a whole.
Thackeray concentrated on complexity of character, and narrative, rather than plot. The most naive reader is prevented from summing up any of the characters and resting in a comfortable certainty about them. Early readers and some reviewers objected to this. The bad characters, they complained, were too attractive, the good ones stupid and dreary; not only was there no hero, but one of the heroines, had no heart and the other no head. Thackeray's point was that in Vanity Fair very few are blameless and not many are consistently wicked He would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that if the good end happily and the bad unhappily, "That is what Fiction means". The attractiveness of Becky, the dullness of Amelia, therefore, and our reactions as readers to these qualities, are precisely engineered and carefully monitored in every chapter of the book.
This 'novel without a hero' was designed to explode the idea of the hero as a romantic ideal one which Thackeray saw as outmoded and deeply flawed as a model for conduct. The alluring figure of the hero was replaced by the less obviously attractive idea of the gentleman. What is involved in being a gentleman, rather than a hero, a lady, rather than a heroine, is a central theme of the novel. The gentleman, in Vanity Fair, is not identified by breeding, wealth, good looks and polished manners, or elevated status (Thackeray repeatedly pilloried George IV, "The First Gentleman in Europe" as a showy vulgarian). The Crawleys, gentlefolk by birth, are all, in their different ways, coarse and insensitive. George Osborne, who is mistakenly taken by Amelia as her hero, repeatedly claims to be a gentleman, and despises Dobbin for not being one. He is shown to be, in Becky's uncompromising words, "that selfish humbug, that low-bred cockney dandy, that padded booby, who had neither wit, nor manners, nor heart". It is   ugly, clumsy William Dobbin, with his   yellow face and lisp, lacking social graces, who is the new model of the true gentleman, even though. This history has been written to very little purpose if the reader has not perceived that the major was a spooney. But his thoughts were just, his brains were fairly goods, his life was honest and pure, and his heart warm and humble. This bundle of unalluring attributes could never be mistaken for a romantic hero.
To be an English lady even fewer attractions are needed; Amelia has neither "just thoughts" nor "fairly good" brains. She is pretty, in a round-faced, insipid way which is, Thackeray tells us, attractive to men though invisible to women. But she is kind to children, and servants, and cares for her poor old parents. Her failing - and it is meant as an enormous flaw in her character - is her elevation of George Osborne into a hero. Her outmoded romanticism gets in the way of good judgement and blights her life, and that of Dobbin. By turning her son into an infirm hero she goes a fair way to ruin him to.
Amelia, then, is a lady but not a heroine, except at brief tragic moments. Becky, her polar opposite, is certainly not a lady. But the average reader, of Thackeray's day our own, feels an overwhelming desire to cast her as the heroine of the novel. This temptation is made difficult to resist. Becky is self-seeking, hypocritical and hard-hearted. She is very probably a murderess. But she has a lazy good-nature and an irrepressible and attractive capacity to take life as it comes. After her fall from society's good graces, she relishes the raffish life of exile if anything more than the heights of social success, which quickly bore her. One of the chief obstacles to her social ambitious,  is her inability to tolerate boredom. Her reverses come about through her urge to take risks: like her creator, Becky is a gambler who needs the stimulus of danger. Her quick verbal wit and her talent to amuse keep her afloat, for a while, in the moral world that has, perhaps, nu particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.
Becky upsets the stereotypes of good and wicked women, for she can perform-and perform better than the more honest Amelia - the duties expected of a woman in the society of her time. She knows how to make men happy and comfortable, providing good dinners and witty conversation. When it suits her own ends she can be useful and practical: she is an efficient sick-nurse to Miss Crawley, who has "seventy thousand pounds in the five percents". Becky is even capable of moments of almost disinterested kindness, singing to poor Lady Steyne the Mozart sacred songs she loves best, and, in the end, telling Amelia, with "contemptuous kindness" the hard but much-needed truth about her husband.
The reader's sympathy is repeatedly solicited for Becky, first by the account of her upbringing; the dismal precocity of poverty had made her a woman since she was eight years old. Her husband-hunting is predatory, sometimes ridiculous, but comments the narrator, "If a person is too poor to keep a servant, though ever so elegant, he must sweep his own rooms: if a dear girl has no dear mamma to settle matters with the young man, she must do it for herself ". Becky is made attractive, above all, by her own self-knowledge and self-mockery. Becky tells lies to everyone else, but she does not tell lies to herself.
It isn't difficult to be a country gentleman's wife Rebecca muses, strolling round the garden at Queen's Crawley I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year. I could dawdle about in the nursery and count the apricots on the wall. I could water plants in a greenhouse and pick off dead leaves from the geraniums. I could ask old women about their rheumatisms and order half a crown's worth of soup for the poor. I shouldn't miss it much out of five thousand a year. (V.F.p.448)
This is irresistible, and Thackeray knows it. 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 an honest woman?
But Becky Sharp is not meant to be read as a heroine. She is often closer to a parody version of a hero, in a novel dedicated to the demolition of the species. Thackeray had always found the romantic search for self-realization distasteful. He wrote of Byron, "That man never wrote from his heart. He got up rapture and enthusiasm with an eye to the public". In the character of Becky, the consummate actress, he created a female Byron, laying bare and profound cynicism and selfishness that he felt were at the worm-eaten heart of romanticism. The qualities that make her attractive are those traditionally attributed to men: intelligence, courage, self-reliance and a lack of concern for other people's feelings.
To admire Becky is to fall into the trap of hero worship. Becky herself does so at the one moment when she admires her husband Rawdon. She despises him for his selfless love for her and their child, but when he discovers her in ‘flagranto delicto’ and strikes her lover, Lord Steyne: "She stood there trembling before him. She admired her husband, strong, brave and victorious", Thackeray later said: "when I wrote the sentences, I slapped my first on the table ", and said "That is a touch of genius!". For once Becky is forced into a true engagement with the nineteenth century female role: a whole-hearted admiration of aggressive masculinity. It is the moment at which she loses everything she has played for.
A less subtle novelist might have made Becky's story one of inexorable and miserable decline from this point, three quarters of the way through the novel. But one of the lessons of Vanity Fair, for characters and readers alike, is the danger of judging from one episode, and Becky still has surprises in store for the reader. Even in the context of the whole novel (and by implied extension a whole life) it is not easy to reach a considered judgement. Whenever we find Becky attractive, Dobbin a bore, or Amelia dull and stupid, we can be sure that Thackeray is there before us, pointing it out, but also altering our perceptions. Amelia, the narrator comments, "wasn't what you call a woman of spirit". Why? because she sympathizes with Miss Briggs "as with all neglected or gentle people". It is because we are never allowed to remain at ease in an amused or superior contemplation of folly and vice, that we end the book with a feeling of satisfaction. The realism of the qualified ending has been earned by author and reader alike.
For Thackeray teaches us how to read by the extraordinary gymnastic performances of the narrative. The characters and their story are surrounded by a complex structure of narrative commentary, which deconstructs the familiar process of storytelling, puts in question the reliability of the narrator, and replaces absolute truths by relative ones. Instead of a single narrative voice which can be relied on to tell us the tale and mediate our responses to it, we are presented with a bewildering array of possible narrators, who, we come to realize, are as self-contradictory and unreliable as the characters they describe. Sometimes the narrator complacently tells us the characters’ thoughts or actions. We are given far more access to Becky's thoughts than to Amelia's for example.
At some points the voice is authorial and seemingly detached, at others he is a distinctly characterized part of the action. Near the end of the novel, he suddenly intrudes into the story, telling us that he met Dobbin, Joseph Sedley, Amelia and her son, at Weimar. "It was on this very tour that I, the present writer of a history of which every word is true, had the pleasure to see them first, and to make their acquaintance ". The narrative pulls back, and we are shown the characters we have come to know intimately as if they were a group of strangers. They are “Colonel Dobbin's party”, with " the little boy” and " the lady in black, the boy's mamma ", whom the narrator seems to know less well than the reader does. The date, winter 1830, is that at which Thackeray himself was in reality at Weimar, and this section draws heavily on his own memories of the place: history, reminiscence and fiction coalesce. 
In the preface of Before the Curtain, added after the serial publication was completed, Thackeray introduces several possible candidates for the post of narrator. Is he "The Manager of the Performance ", contemplating Vanity Fair, in which his play is only one of the entertainments on offer? Or is he the "man with a reflective turn of mind”, the outsider walking through the Fair, but not taking part in its antics? Or is he, as the cover illustration would suggest. "Poor Tom Fool", tolerated while he entertains the crowds, but ignored when he attempts to preach? And who-or who-is the author, who illuminates the scene with his own candles?
The uncertainties are of course intended. The narrative voices of Vanity Fair constitute an unnamed but ever-present cast of characters who surround the ‘real’ characters of the story. In a way that Victorians found more difficult and disturbing than a post-Modernist reader does, Thackeray repeatedly undermines the status of fiction as a representation of reality, telling us, for example, that the story might have taken quite a different turn.
If Rawdon Crawley had been then and there present, instead of being at the club nervously drinking claret, the pair might have gone down on their knees before the old spinster, avowed all, and been forgiven in a twinkling. But that good chance was denied to the young couple, doubtless in order that this story might be written, in which number of their wonderful adventures are narrated adventures which could never have occurred to them if they had been housed and sheltered under the comfortable uninteresting forgiveness of Miss Crawley. (V.F.p.159)
Direct appeals to the reader's own experience draw him into the action, and dissolve the boundaries between past and present, fiction and truth. When the Crawleys hover subserviently round their rich relation, the generalizing comment, "What a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the bank!" rapidly modulates into a complicity of narrator and reader.
We say (and with perfect truth) I wish I had Miss MacWhirter's signature to a cheque for five thousand pounds. She wouldn't miss it, says your wife. She is my aunt, say you, in an easy careless way, when your friend asks if Miss MacWhitter is any relative... What a good fire there is in her room when she comes to pay you a visit, although your wife laces her stays without one! The house during her stay assumesa festive, neat, warm, jovial, snug appearance not visible at other seasons... Is it so, or is it not so? I appeal to the middle classes. Ah, gracious powers! I wish you would send me an old aunt — a maiden aunt-an aunt with a lozenge on her carriage, and a front of light coffee — coloured hair- how my children should work workbags for her, and my Julia and | would make her comfortable! Sweet, sweet vision! Foolish, foolish dream! (V.F.p.86)
Thackeray claimed that indirection was forced upon him by his public “If I was to write as I would like”, he once said, “I would adopt the style of Fielding and Smollett; but society would not tolerate it “Again and again in his fiction he complains of censorship, but the way he phrases his complaints is instructive. Readers of Vanity Fair have to remain alert, their assess ears pricked for subtle changes in tone, or a dropped hint that can create a blacker picture in the mind than the most open description of depravity.
The times are such that one scarcely dares to allude to that kind of company which thousands of our young men in Vanity Fair are frequenting every day, which nightly fills casinos and dancing-rooms, which are known to exist as well as the ring in Hyde Park or the congregation at St. James’s — but which the most squeamish if not the most moral of societies, is determined to ignore (V.F.p.521)
The apparent antithesis-casinos and dancing-rooms against Hyde Park and St James’ — is false. The true antithesis is between the immorality accepted by society, and that it condemns. Famous courtesans flaunted themselves in the ring in Hyde Park- Becky, at the height of her fashionable success cuts Mrs. Washington White in the ring because “one mustn’t be seen with doubtful people “- and the congregation at St James’s, Piccadilly, was fashionable rather than pious. The famous description of Becky Sharp as a mermaid is another example of Thackeray saying more by saying less.
... it has been the wish of the present writer, all through this story, deferentially to submit to the fashion at present prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody’s fire feelings may be offended. I defy anyone to say that our Becky, who has certainly some vices, has not been presented to the public in a perfectly genteel and inoffensive manner. In describing this siren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster’s hideous tail 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, l ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish immoralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie? (VF. p.685)
Our perception of Becky as an amusing, amoral, lazily good-tempered opportunist, is here sharply corrected. Now the narrator holds up the mirror to the “squeamish immoralist” who has been evading reality. Yet he also irresistibly suggests that he is himself a hypocrite; and hypocrisy is one of the besetting sins of Vanity Fair. Reader and narrator are held in a fictive complicity.
Throughout the novel initial assumptions are ironically by such narrative strategies. But after the first impression has apparently been replaced with a truer view, the narrative often doubles back to destroy that “truth” in its turn. Chapter XXX, “The Girl I left Behind me”, may serve as an extended and powerful example. Part of the Waterloo number at the centre of the novel, it shows the reactions of three married women to the parting from their husbands before the Battle of Waterloo. This situation, a conventional focus for emotion, as the chapter title reminds us, is one in which women are supposedly powerless. War is a male province, and one that Thackeray personally despised and detested.
We are shown first the sensible preparations of the wife of Major O’Dowd, hither to seen only as a figure of fun, to ensure her husband’s comfort. She prepares his kit, packs his valise, and wakes him with a comfortable cup of coffee at the appropriate time. There is an explicit criticism of emotional and sentimental women like Amelia in the narrative comment,
And who is there will deny that this worthy lady’s preparations betokened affection as much as the fits of tears and hysterics by which more sensitive females; exhibited their love, and that their partaking of this coffee, which they drank together while the bugles were sounding the turn-out... was not more useful and to the purpose than the outpouring of any mere sentiment could be? (V.F. p.308)
The mock-heroic title to Thackeray’s illustration “Venus preparing the Armour of Mars “only reinforces the message that a comic character can also be an admirable one.
But the reader is not allowed to rest there in a simple opposition of sense and sensibility. The comment on sentimentality is taken a stage further, in the chilling portrayal of Becky’s calm selfishness.
Knowing how useless regrets are, and how the indulgence of sentiment only serves to make people more miserable, Mrs. Rebecca Wisely determined to give way to no vain feelings of sorrow, and bore the parting from her husband with quite a Spartan equanimity. Indeed, Captain Rawdon himself was much more affected at the leavetaking than the resolute little woman to whom he bade farewell. (V.F. p.305)
The revulsion from Becky’s coldness prepares the reader for the parting between George and Amelia one of the great scenes of the book. The reader is already aware that Amelia’s passionate love for George is-based on wilful self-deception. She knows perfectly well that he is selfish, unfeeling, and very probably unfaithful. The marriage, urged on by Dobbin for reasons which are not entirely disinterested, is a disaster. Amelia’s emotion is dishonest. Yet it is also real and powerful: we are caught up and possessed by it. Practical matters are swept aside; the admirable and enduring affection of the O’Dowds becomes irrelevant.
Thackeray achieves by showing us Amelia through the eyes of the man who truly loves her, William Dobbin. Throughout the novel he is shown as feeling that his love for her is in some way guilty. Here he seems almost party to a rape.
Dobbin had the opportunity which his heart coveted, and he got a sight of Amelia’s face once more. But what a face it was! So white, so wild and despair-stricken, that the remembrance of it haunted him afterwards like a crime, and the sight smote him with inexpressible pangs of longing and pity. She was wrapped in a white morning dress, her hair falling on her shoulders, and her large eyes fixed and without light. By way of helping on the preparation for the departure, and showing that she too could be useful at a moment so critical, this poor soul had taken up a sash of George’s from the drawers where on it lay, and followed to him to and from with the sash in her hand... She came out stood, leaning at the wall, holding this sash against her bosom, from which the heavy net of crimson dropped like a large stain of blood. Our gentle-hearted captain felt a guilty shock as he looked at her. “Good God”, thought he, “andisit grief like this I dared to pry into 7” ... He stood for a moment and looked at her, powerless and torn with pity, as a parent regard an. infant in pain. (V-F. p.311).
The strength of this passage convinces us, as it does Dobbin, of the truth of Amelia’s emotion. It is because Dobbin has seen Amelia’s parting from George, and her near insanity after his death, that he remains doggedly and unreasonably devoted to her, asking nothing, giving everything, until even his fidelity is worn out at last. The clear case made out later against the romantic stereotype of the woman who gives her heart for life to an unworthy man is inevitably tested in the reader’s mind against her tragic feelings, false as we know them to be. Later, Amelia’s unselfishness in giving up her son for his own good balances her unthinking selfishness to Dobbin. Do we admire Amelia, or despise her? Is Dobbin a donkey or a perfect gentleman? Was Becky “guilty or not?” There are no absolute answers in the intricate world of Vanity Fair; there are only questions that expand in the reader’s mind, leading to other questions: an infinite regress through fiction to reality.
Thackeray’s major strategy for the total organization of Vanity Fair is his use of  Becky Sharp as the pivotal figure. His lesser strategy is one that employs Becky too but this plan fails to ignite successive explosions along the way; and son becomes very prolonged and tedious fizzle. I refer, of course to Vanity Fair as a study in contrasted destinies: Becky Sharp versus Amelia Sedley.
The essential felicity of Becky is a critical commonplace. But critics have failed to appreciate the degree to which Becky enables Thackeray to offer a powerful indictment of his society that is yet, cooly controlled to the point, almost, of ostensible negligence? In the first place, Becky has a density that derives in large measure from the way in which Thackeray makes his full society gravitate around her tenselitle figure. Other characters gain vitality from Becky as her own kind of formidableness ignites a responding play of strongly defined character. Thackeray creates her cumulatively as a figure, beginning easily with her departure from Miss Pinkerton’s school. His satirical skill shows in dramatic particularity from the outset. He offers quick and vivid flashbacks to her tough preparation in the world of her Bohemian father and in the early skirmish with Rev. Mr. Crisp. Then he takes us step through the graded challenges of Jos. Sedley, Sir Pitt, Rawdon and Steyne, through the different challenges of George Osborne, Miss Crawley, Mrs. Bute Crawley, Mr. Pitt Crawley, and the world of Pumpernicket: each with proliferating or connected social extensions.
Moreover, ‘balance’ in Becky saves the novel. ‘Balance’ in Amelia saves Thackeray only from the grosser excesses of sentimentality. Thackeray’s conception of Becky carries the full weight of the theme. He employs all his technical resources in giving her joy in jostling, elbow-room in surveying and planning, zest in the social games it is played.
Becky has, also, resiliency, and she has good humour in defeat, so that something spills over by way of an exuberance in living that is quite unrelated to Thackeray’s satirical purpose. She figures, therefore, as an indispensable distancing agent. Above all other characters she keeps Thackeray’s cool ferocity in check.
Part of Becky’s superiority over others lies in the absence of ill-humour, meanness or savage intensity in herself-interest, an attitude urged on her by a situation in which she begins with nothing, has nothing to lose and everything to gain, positively enjoys the game of duplicity, and doesn’t much mindslipping back into the dingy Bohemia of her origins. Unlike the others, Becky is at her best when she miscalculates seriously, is able to laugh at disastrous miscalculation and then bounce right back. She is able to maintain an attitude of detached relish even in the scene where Rawdon discovers her with Steyne. She carries her resilient slipperiness to Pumpernickel, so that the reader is hardly surprised at her good fortune, irony and all, at the end.
In fact, Thackeray has almost an affection for the Becky puppet. Compared with the figures she detests, Thackeray shows little animus towards her. Her sins, the most terrible sins in Thackeray’s code, ate that she is incapable of affection, love or loyalty. But he does not make her suffer deeply. On the other hand, he visits old Osborne with the death of his only son, with a gloomy and joyless life fe, and with a gloomier and more joyless death. He pursues old Sedley and his wife step by inexorable step through a broken, ruined and ignominious beggary. He portrays in Sir Pitt an animality, a self-defeating miserliness, at once dirty and malevolent. He makes him inhabit rotting, gloomy surroundings, reflecting a state of mind. And he reduces him in the end to a helpless, maniacal infant. He registers every detail of Miss Crawley’s suffering from overeating.
Later the family gnaws away at her inheritance. The Gaunt family is made to suffer from “a mysterious faint of blood: the poor mother had brought it from her own ancient race”. Thackeray fills in as many precise details to this prelude to suffering, decay of powers, and madness in Steyne as is permissible to a Victorian novelist. | He shows a refinement of savagery in creating Mr. Pitt Crawley as a highly successful mediocrity, with only enough shrewdness to compromise gentry principles with middle-class ascendancy and ‘climbing. But Becky, after a pleasurably dirty relapse into the Bohemian world, suffers no such fate:
... Rebecca, Lady Crawley, chiefly hangs about Bath and Cheltenham, where a very strong party of excellent people consider her to be a most injured woman. She has her enemies. Who has not? Her life is her answer to them. She busies herself in works of piety. She goes to Church, and never without a footman. Her name is in all the Charity lists. (V.F.)
Not only — and it is one of his finest touches — does Thackeray make Becky disinherited; he makes her a governess, with the impetus to advance herself particularity when she is convinced early on that she is the superior of most of the aristocracy whom she encounters. At Miss Pinkerton’s, Becky is able to show up the fashionable boarding-school: its parasitism on real learning, its finely discriminated adjustment to every single degree of snobbery, its calculated preparation for “class” function, and, most of all its educational aim, one that is concerned principally with the marriage market. The collapse of John Sedley’s fortune in effect collapses George Osborne is affection for Amelia, as Becky proves so easily. Becky’s own marriage with Rawdon proves to be an almost successful calculation, and her relation with Steyneis self-interest in all its purity.
Rawdon’s marriage to Becky is the superlative of imprudence, and he is punished; accordingly, while the full weight of Osborne Senior’s bourgeois ethic comes down inexorably on his son for a similar imprudence. Birth signifies an upbringing in an ambitious morality of pushing ahead. Children become the mere instruments for their parents, goals, and death is the leaving or the not leaving of money and property. Fathers are despised by sons or sons or fathers as each succeeds
or fails in these terms. Personal relations between man and man, man and woman, and woman and woman leave virtually no scope for disinterested friendship or love. The relation of Amelia and Dobbin, and Dobbin and George Osborne prove the point powerfully by pitiful exception.
Through Rawdon Crawley we witness the degree of sinecurism, incompetence, and cowardice in the army, while bravery is made as ineffectual there, and as overwhelmed, as in life. Indeed by the time Thackeray is through with Rawdon and General Tufto (the later already economically and effectively rendered in the Book of Snobs ), and with Brussels as an ironic backdrop-one of the finest touches in the novel-against which the war is being fought~;.the reader begins to wonder what in fact motivates these men to fight at all.
There is also the detail, forceful because presented so matter-of-factly, of Rawdon’s sinecure appointment as governor of the fever-ridden Coventry Islands: Rawdon is an illiterate and an administrative incompetent. Politics is only an elaborate game of sinecurism.
Above all, the Churches are to be distinguished from the practice of the laity only in their greater cant. Thackeray pursues them like a moral bloodhound: Anglicans represented by Bute Crawley and his wife; Evangelicans by Mr.Pitt Crawley and Lady Southdown; Disinteres by Osborne Senior and these relatives of Briggs. After the shocking affair of Becky and Steyne, even the Bishop of Ealing “went and wrote his name down in the visiting-book of Gaunt House that very day”. Vanity Fair is so contrived that every professed man of religion is a dupe, or else uses that religion to palliate or to compound the evils that Thackeray sees around him. And all the people that Thackeray condemns — even Miss Crawley, with her revolutionary surfaces, even Becky — profess religion. Thackeray seems to have kept his respect for the clergy in the real life, and to have used his novels to hit at abuse. At the same time, it is clear that in the age of Newman, Clough, and Arnold, Thackeray appears to have been virtually untouched by the spiritual question.
                  At any rate, that is the invariable pattern — pattern that allows, of course, for considerable variety and for some subtlety. Yet after a while the comparative rigidity of the patterns begins to tell on the reader. It tells even with Becky. She is too much of the same thing. We know all her stratagems and her subterfuges early in the book. We watch them repeated in scene after scene, with only a change of opposing personality and different social setting to relieve those tricks. Soon the pattern of Victorian vanities becomes all too predictable, so that the last section, devoted to Becky at Pumpernickel — even a good part of the section in which Becky rises in Steyne ‘s world — is very tedious indeed.
If Thackeray had not seemed to offer particular forms of personal and familial decency to stand as pinpoints of resistance against the hydra headed evils of an acquisitive society, we might have little reason to come down heavily on Vanity Fair. But he is so aroused, apparently, by his sense of encompassing vanity that, to drive his intention home, he contrives to inject weaknesses into those characters of whom we are, ina general way, to approve: Amelia and Dobbin. The effect is, clearly, to betray our intelligence.
Thackeray archives in good measure the very intention of Vanity Fair : that is to make Amelia and Dobbin ineffectual creatures. No one can gainsay the deliberately inserted weakness of both. Amelia is a “silly thing” who “would cry over a dead canary bird : or over a mouse, that the cat haply had seized upon ; or over the end of a novel, were it ever so stupid...” (V.F.) Thackeray gives