Vanity Fair

A very readable tale that had me up late in the night to arrive at the very satisfactory ending. The novel is tightly structured, with some fabulous 'set pieces' and sparking dialogue. Thackeray himself is very present; he introduces himself at the very beginning of the book as 'the Manager of the Performance' and certainly doesn't leave the reader in any doubt as to his thoughts on his characters. They are by no means simply as good or bad as they first seem and his star creation, Becky Sharpe, is quite clearly intelligent, vital, entertaining and is cheerful in any and every circumstance in which she finds herself. Some of the worst slurs on her character actually don't ring true and she clearly comes to despise High Society just as show more she achieves her greatest triumphs in it. He finds her as fascinating as does almost every other character in the novel and though he never refers to it directly (no doubt due to the sensibilities of the time) we imagine she gets nearly as low as a lady possibly can. His asides on Becky's seemingly angelic friend Amelia, also show he loses patience with her martyrdom on many occasions.
We can see Vanity Fair as an allegory or moral fable that reveals certain universal truths about the human condition. Many of the minor characters actually have names that denote their personal circumstances or moral attributes. For instance, Tom Eaves, a gossip, is a combination of 'peeping Tom' and 'eavesdropper'. The Crawleys are prepared to do just that to gain admittance to the rank of society above the small gentry where they find themselves. Meanwhile, some of the names of the families over in the European phase of the novel are just plain hilarious in their pomposity.
But it is Becky Sharpe that is the star of the show. She is one of the great female characters in English literature. She may be wicked but it is difficult not to forgive her, to see that sparkle in her eyes and be dazzled by her vitality. 'She runs away with the author's intention (and) steals the show'. (Gilbert Phelps, from the introduction of my very ancient Pan edition of Vanity Fair) show less

I found this book to be truly wonderful, perhaps my new favorite. Thackeray makes his characters come alive, and the story is just so well told with its twists and turns. It's also interesting to have a central character--especially a leading woman in a 19th Century novel--who is so rotten. Becky is a sociopath but, as a friend also reading the book pointed out, she is the product of a sociopathic culture.

Amelia and Dobbin I cared about deeply, although, again, Amelia isn't an Elizabeth Bennet who the reader can get behind wholeheartedly--she's too weak-willed for that.

These fascinating, flawed, characters will stay with me for a long time. Despite Thackeray's 900 pages, I still long to know more!

I will add, however, that there was at show more least one passage where I just wanted to get past the description and back to the characters I was so fascinated by. I suspect, however, that Thackeray's long description of Germany in the last 10% of the book is meant to build the reader's anticipation for the denouement of the book. show less

In discussing the origins of The Bonfire of the Vanities, his brilliant satire of the social and economic mores of New York City in the 1980s, Tom Wolfe was always quick to cite Thackeray’s Vanity Fair as his inspiration. Wolfe seemed particularly taken with that earlier work’s subtitle--A Novel Without a Hero--which he took to be a perfect characterization for the story that he himself wanted to tell. He even went so far as to arrange to have his work published in serial form in a magazine (Rolling Stone in Wolfe’s case), just as Thackeray did with his magnum opus a century and a half before. There can hardly be higher praise than that for one author to give to another.

Vanity Fair itself owes a considerable debt to a classic work show more that preceded it by 150 years, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. In that religious allegory, a person on the path to Heaven first had to pass through the town of Vanity in which there was a fair that appealed to all the basest traits of humanity: greed, infidelity, deceit, avarice, envy, duplicity, and so on. Thackeray saw this as an apt metaphor for his story of the state of English society at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the dawn of the Victorian Age. In fact, the frame that begins and ends Vanity Fair has two young girls putting on a puppet show during which all of the action in the book takes place. Toward the end of the novel, the author even reveals himself to be the narrator of the tale, and a most unreliable one at that.

If that level of historical detail is not absolutely necessary to summarize Vanity Fair, it is perhaps useful context for a prospective reader to understand what taking on this tome will entail. Because, make no mistake, this book requires a significant investment of time and attention to get through it to the end. It is indeed a meandering and occasionally sprawling tale, written in the style of a time far removed from what the modern audience is used to. But it is also remarkably observant about the human condition as well as wickedly funny; those two things alone make reading it today well worthwhile. Further, in the character of Becky Sharp, Thackeray has created an anti-heroine for the ages—with her resilient and scheming nature, she could hold her own now just as well as she did back then.

How the specific events in the story transpire is not the most important thing about the novel, serving as they do as the backdrop for the societal skewering that was the author’s true purpose. In short, Becky comes from an impoverished background in a culture where that is a serious impediment to advancement. Her school friend Amelia Sedley is from a well-to-do family, but she herself is a rather simple and unambitious girl. Both of these friends enter into disappointing marriages, Becky to a rich but rough-hewn fellow whose family disapproves of her while Amelia devotes herself to a philandering cad and ignores the less-dashing colleague who truly loves her. When Amelia’s family falls on hard economic times, it sets off chain of events that takes several hundred pages to unfold. In those pages, though, there is some real literary gold as Thackeray uses his razor-honed wit and gentle word play to expose a multitude of vanities and foibles as he saw them. I certainly can recommend this book, but only for those who understand what they are getting into first! show less

This novel makes example of Becky's story as a demonstration that she can be the more interesting character versus Amelia; that is, that a reader will be most intrigued by whichever character is most active and eventful, rather than merely the most moral. If this helped widen the door to authors introducing more wicked protagonists in future, so much the better. Charlotte Bronte deeply admired this work and author, so I wonder how she didn't see this parallel with her sister Emily's "Wuthering Heights" which only seemed to trouble her.

Perhaps the humour is the difference. Vanity Fair is almost entirely filled with unlikeable characters (Captain Dobbin is the reader's life preserver in this morass, and Amelia to a lesser extent), but at show more least we can laugh at them, and the author acknowledges their faults by inserting some amusing commentary, ostensibly in their defence. His base argument is that such is life, and only a fool would expect nothing but Amelia to represent the real world around us. We do get a handful of more serious interludes, centred on war and death. I found Mr. Osbourne strangely sympathetic (when he wasn't encouraging his grandson to be a bully). Thackeray can be poignant when he isn't purposely undermining it.

PS - I'm mildly sorry I didn't read Tom Jones prior to this, since Thackeray apparently borrowed much from Henry Fielding's authorial style; and here I'd thought the name Vanity Fair was Thackeray's invention, but discover he rented it from "Pilgrim's Progress" and that society by Thackeray's time had already embraced it as an expression to encompass our world entire. show less

No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles—military and domestic—are fought, fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honourable figure in this corrupt world is Dobbin with his devotion to Amelia, bringing pathos and depth to Thackeray's gloriously satirical epic of love and social adventure.

This was a reread for me of a book that I know I loved the first time around but could remember almost nothing about. As I read, the plot came back to me, but much of it was pretty unfamiliar. Fortunately, my remembrance of loving it held true.

This is a novel of contrasting characters. There is the steadfast, honest, naive Amelia vs. the smart, conniving, enigma Becky Sharp. There is the all-show, no substance George vs. the loyal, talented, but modest William Dobbin. How these characters and the substantial supporting cast of parents, brothers, friends, and family interact composes this novel.

You can't read this Victorian novel without comparing to Dickens (at least I couldn't!) and I felt that it came out very favourably. I found the show more characters, especially the supporting ones, to be of much more substance and less of caricature than Dickens's characters. I also appreciated that the saintly Amelia is shown at the end to have been not so innocent in her treatment and usage of the faithful Dobbin and that though Becky is often the villian, she is a character that I loved to hate.

I found a lot of depth to go with the entertainment found in this book. It is a book that I will most likely reread again at some point. show less

When I was in junior high school (The Age of the Dinosaurs), I read “Gone with the Wind” for the first time, and was raving about Scarlett O’Hara to an English teacher I greatly admired. She said Scarlett was but a poor imitation of The Original Anti-Heroine, Becky Sharp, and if I wanted the real thing, I should read “Vanity Fair”.

I believe I may have attempted to do so, and gave up fairly quickly. Five decades have now passed, and I actually read Mr. Thackeray’s classic this month.

Well, I read about 75% of it. Toward the end there, when Thackeray’s wordiness overwhelmed me and all I wanted to do was to finish the d*d thing, I admit to skimming his incredibly wordy, repetitive, and dull lists of who was at which party and show more what their ancestry was and how their great-grandfather cheated somebody else’s great-grandfather out of the ancestral manse, etc etc etc…… (The work originally appeared in serialization, and Thackeray may have been paid by the word. That would certainly explain much of his meandering.)

Mark Twain said that a classic is “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” He may well have been talking about “Vanity Fair”.

Lord love a duck, it’s dreary. Though sometimes considered the "principal founder" of the Victorian domestic novel, it is terribly dated. And it’s very much a novel of its time, repeatedly reminding the reader of the delicacy of womankind, bless her kind little heart and dull little intellect. Amelia Sedley, the literary foremother of Melanie Hamilton is so sappy that the modern reader really, really wants to smack her upside the head. Her frenemy Becky Sharp is certainly manipulative, avaricious, duplicitous, and all the negative things Scarlett O’Hara also represented, but without Scarlett’s stubborn resourcefulness or passionate tango with the dashing Rhett Butler.

"Vanity Fair" also presents itself as a biting indictment of the falseness of British society in the 19th century, with its emphasis on titles, elaborate social codes, and fascination with wealth and status. Unfortunately, the humor doesn’t age well, either, as much of it (as with any satirical work) depends on the reader’s familiarity with the milieu it skewers.

Sprinkled with phrases in French, German, Latin, and Greek, and full of now-archaic language, the modern reader will need a very comprehensive dictionary at hand, as well as a phrase book of the common non-English terms with which the text is ornamented. Thackeray’s tendency to step back and address the reader directly is yet another stylistic choice which (fortunately) largely disappeared along about the middle of the 20th century.

All in all, reading "Vanity Fair" may itself be an exercise in vanity for the modern reader, who can now say “I’ve read it.” The same reader would probably be stretching the boundaries of truth to say “I enjoyed it.”

The convoluted plot involves the interplay among Rebecca (Becky) Sharp, Amelia (Emmy) Sedley, and begins as the girls leave finishing school. Becky, the orphaned daughter of an itinerant portrait-painter and a French dancing girl, is in line to begin a position as governess in a baronet's household, but plans a brief visit with her school friend Emmy, first. Emmy’s family is well-off, her father doing something that apparently involves stocks or banking or somesuch. (He makes money. ‘Nuff said.) Becky hopes to leverage this visit into a marriage with Emmy’s elder brother Joseph, a sadly ridiculous figure, pompous, self-important, and dim, but nevertheless the heir to Sedley’s estate. Emmy’s marriage prospects are fixed on George Osborne, the son of her father’s business partner and a foppish young man without much moral character, though he looks quite dashing in his military uniform. Emmy is too dim (and well-bred) to see the emptiness behind George’s pretty face. (Apparently, dimness runs rampant in the Sedley genes.)

The Becky/Joseph pairing never gets off the ground and Becky goes off to her governess position at roughly the same time Emma’s father is cheated out of his business share by George’s father. The young sweethearts, in defiance of the elder Osborne’s command, run off and are married, laughing gaily at the old man’s obdurate insistence that he will disown George, which he does. Becky, meantime, has now set her lacy cap at one Rawdon Crawley, the second son of her baronet employer. Rawdon is also a military man, and while the title will never be his, he is the favorite of a wealthy spinster aunt, thus making him prime marriage material in Becky’s eyes. It’s all very gay (except that George is already beginning to letch for Becky) and the two newlywed couples, accompanied by Osborne’s good buddy William Dobbins, are having a gay old time until Napoleon Bonaparte escapes his exile and once again begins ravaging across Europe and – dash it all – the young soldiers are actually expected to take up arms, leaving their pregnant brides after a bare six weeks of marital bliss.

George is inconsiderate enough to die at Waterloo, leaving Emma the bereaved widow, doting on the son born after his father’s death, and eking out a living by moving in with her also-impoverished parents. Dobbins, who has loved her all along, does The Honorable Thing, and she spurns him, preferring the untarnished (and highly embroidered) memory of George, so William is forced to sneakily provide a small living for Emma and the baby. Becky’s husband fares better, but the avaricious little imp, attempting to worm her way into the graces of the Rich Old Spinster Aunt, manages to piss off the old broad so thoroughly that she leaves all her money elsewhere. This is highly inconvenient to Becky, whose husband has left the military and supports them with his gambling skills which, alas, are not consistent, and the young couple learns how to Live Well on Nothing, mostly by sponging off friends and stiffing the various landlords, grocers, and milliners who provide them with their surface prosperity.

This state of affairs goes on for about 600 pages, with Emma being poor but gracious and Becky being sinful and scheming until she is caught en flagrante (or as close to en flagrante as the literary conventions of the day will allow) with one of her wealthy “sponsors”, and her husband kicks her out and goes off to be the governor of some miserable tropical locale. Emma feels sorry for her and believes Becky's edited version of events in which she is the totally innocent victim. It seems that Becky may yet rise from the ashes, but – worse luck! – Emma discovers what a rotter George really was and how close he came to running off with her friend. Eventually, the faithful devotion of Dobbin makes an impression on her, and they are married to live happily ever after while Becky sinks irretrievably into sin. Not to worry, though – her husband eventually dies and leaves her a small pension. We assume she toddles off into old age with a dashing young buck on each arm, and the exhausted reader finally shuts the cover of this massive and overwrought tome.

If you’re really interested in more, there’s a movie. Reese Witherspoon is in it. It’s three bucks (used) on eBay. show less