Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by William Makepeace Thackeray

  Fraser’s and Punch provided him with a decent if unsteady living, and with a position within the London literary world. But the large amount of work he produced in the 1830s and early 1840s is a testament, above all, to the stylistic skills Victorian journalism forced Thackeray to acquire, skills that reach their apotheosis in vanity Fair. First among these is the ability to write in a tone that can best be described by the nineteenth-century term “smart.” The kind of journalism Thackeray practiced required a socially allusive awareness, a keen eye for cultural tendencies, mixed with a prose style that should never become ponderous, orotund, or academic. Instead, the writer of magazine sketches should have the ability to detect nascent trends and to analyze them with some sociological fluidity without ever taking the analysis too seriously; to be “smart” entailed a consistently acute eye for culture expressed in an always slightly ironized, detached tone. In this way the journalistic tone Thackeray took to with such ease could perform many of the same tasks as the essay as practiced by Carlyle, but without the sententiousness of Carlylean rhetoric. “Smartness” meant always keeping a sophisticated eyebrow raised, even over one’s own line of vision.

  Furthermore, the task of the Victorian occasional journalist was often parodic, and not the least of gifts required of the hack writer was the ability to subtly anatomize, and then exaggeratedly caricature, the different writing styles of the day. To “smart,” even in our own day, can mean to feel sharp, quick pain, and part of the job of the “smart” periodical writer was to exact some measure of pain from familiar cultural targets through mocking parody. In essence, the task of the parodist is to understand the conventionality of all style: the tendency of style to become merely repetitive, formal, affected in its gestures. Thackeray, like his puppet Becky Sharp, seems always to have been a gifted mimic, and his parodies in Punch are among the best the Victorian period has to offer. It is certainly the case that, in the early 1840s, he had plenty of worthwhile targets. His series for Punch launched in 1847, “Punch’s Prize Novelists” (later called “Novels by Eminent Hands”), offered blistering parodies of some of the more successful genres of the day, genres that come in for much mockery in Vanity Fair. First among these is the vogue for “silver-fork fiction” that erupted in the 1820s and was associated most notably with Catherine Gore, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Benjamin Disraeli. Devoted to the depiction of fashionable West End manners, or the lifestyles of the aristocratic dandies and heiresses of the day, silver-fork fiction filled a need for a sensationalized, voyeuristic view of leisured society; Thackeray’s parody of this popular mode is always present in vanity Fair, particularly in its more derisive (if equally detailed) presentation of the hand-to-mouth, only-on-credit gentility Becky and Rawdon practice in their Mayfair home. Of equal importance, and perhaps of more moment to Thackeray’s ideas of the ethics of fiction, is his parodic repudiation of another popular genre, the “Newgate novel,” or dashing narrative of criminal activity. Bulwer-Lytton’s greatest successes came in this genre, particularly with Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832), both narratives that—as Thackeray understood it—valorized the person of the murderer or thief, lending them a glamour that no subsequent punishment could efface. If we take Becky Sharp to be the heroine of Thackeray’s own quasi-Newgate novel, we quickly see how Vanity Fair avoids both the easy appeal, and equally easy punishment, that Bulwer-Lytton’s Newgate novels employ.

  Perhaps the specifics behind Thackeray’s dislike of both silver-fork and Newgate fiction—both genres that by 1847 were essentially moribund—are less important than his ability to see inside their mechanisms, and to mimic, and thereby take apart, their elements. What Thackeray learned from journalistic style is how to construct a voice out of a pastiche of styles—how to move effortlessly from one distinct kind of cultural speech to another, or how, in other words, to be a ventriloquist. As a result, Vanity Fair is a stylistic compendium of early Victorian fiction; we may be aware throughout of Thackeray’s unique tone, but we can catch the phrases of a multitude of genres, classes, styles. Many of his early journalistic pieces are written in distinct social voices, particularly those of servants. His servant-narrators-Charles Jeames Yellowplush, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, and others—speak a brand of Cockney that Thackeray seems to have spent considerable time acquiring. Within Vanity Fair, his ability to mimic the letter-writing styles of Sir Pitt Crawley (aristocratic illiteracy), Rawdon Crawley (straightforward, misspelled, masculine slang), and Barbara Pinkerton (antiquated, sententious gentility), testifies to the facility with which he could inhabit widely varying styles. When he brags at the start of chapter VI, “Vauxhall,” that he could treat his subject “in the genteel, or in the romantic, or in the facetious manner” (p. 48), it is no empty boast. Journalistic parodies enabled Thackeray to become an equal-opportunity cultural ventriloquist, with a breadth and acuteness to his mimicry that the English novel would not see again until James Joyce.

  The voices of Dickens’s characters are famously distinct, but their distinctness is quite often an individual distinctness, rooted in the spectacular distortions of modern eccentricity. The distinctness of Thackeray’s characters is derived more from their sociological differentiation; they speak, in other words, and their social position—class, education, geography—speaks through them. The journalistic imperative to understand individuals in broad categories, and to give those categories names, was one of Thackeray’s primary talents, one that Punch nourished. It is to Thackeray, for instance, that we owe the contemporary meanings of the words “snob” and “bohemia.” The category of the snob, which would later (most notably in Proust) become so central to European fiction, was delineated and popularized by Thackeray in a series of sketches issued by Punch from February 1846 to February 1847, entitled The Snobs of England, by One of Themselves (and later called The Book of Snobs). The success of these sketches is quite different in nature from Dickens’s social anatomies, and more properly journalistic; Thackeray’s social categorizations have been much more effective in entering culture at large. Vivid as Dickens’s description of such cognate phenomena as “Podsnappery” is, the word has no larger cultural currency, while the word “snob” has been so thoroughly disseminated that its first real user is entirely forgotten. If Dickens’s talent, in other words, was directed always toward individual distinctness, Thackeray’s talent tended to generate categories, and tended to place individuals within categories that expressed themselves through the individual.

  Lastly, Thackeray’s journalistic apprenticeship taught him modes of im provisatory, purely discursive writing that went under the name “sketch.” The Victorian sketch was essentially an exercise in style—in evoking a likable, recognizable, seemingly effortless voice that could weave meditative, and largely comic, prose out of anything at all. The sketch taught Victorian writers the opposite values of economy and terseness; it taught instead the ability to dilate, to generate a conversational affability that could take any subject and turn it to account. It also taught a largely place-based mode of writing. Many of Thackeray’s sketches are generated by particular cultural locales, and it is no accident that sketches were often touristic in nature (as with Thackeray’s own Paris Sketch Book and Irish Sketch Book). Several of Vanity Fair’s chapters are essentially sketches: smart, sophisticated pieces of cultural reportage, centering on a typical, if rarely noted, contemporary phenomenon rather than any particular character. Chapters XXXVI and XXXVII, “How to Live Well on Nothing a Year,” are a brilliantly fast-paced and vivid account of contemporary methods of living on credit, and offer one of the nineteenth century’s more memorable descriptions of the effects of a credit economy. Chapter LXII, “Am Rhein,” is an entertaining tourist sketch of a typical small German principality populated by a genially ineffective aristocracy and a loose coterie of foreigners, while chapter XVII, “How Captain Dobbin Bought a Piano,” uses a visit to an auction house to flesh out the social forms under which bankruptcy is managed. These brief excursions into cultural
physiognomy are unified not by any narrative—which in vanity Fair is usually somewhat slack—but by the voice of the sketch artist, who looks on with bemusement at the phenomenon he observes. As Thackeray observes with characteristically soured humor, the auction house is available to all, its activities advertised in the daily newspapers, and “all with a taste for moralizing must have thought, with a sensation and interest not a little startling and queer, of the day when their turn shall come too, and Mr. Hammerdown will sell by the orders of Diogenes’s assignees, or will be instructed by the executors, to offer to public competition, the library, furniture, plate, wardrobe, and choice cellar of wines of Epicurus deceased” (p. 161).

  The novel built of sketches was not entirely a new cultural fact by the time Thackeray first started planning vanity Fair—Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836-1837) was the most preeminent forerunner—but Thackeray clearly saw that his talent for sketch composition would have to be bound into something more cohesive, more strictly narrative in nature, in order for a real success to come. In 1845 some early chapters had been completed, and Thackeray shopped the project to various publishers without success. Finally he turned to Bradbury and Evans, his Punch connection, who consented to issue Thackeray’s novel starting in May 1846. As it turned out, other projects, including the completion of The Snobs of England, intervened, and the first issue of the new sketch-novel was postponed to January 1847. At some point in this period the novel’s title had, momentously, changed. At first advertised to prospective publishers as “Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society,” and later “The Novel without a Hero”—titles that linger on in the subtitles of the novel’s serial and book publications, respectively—Thackeray seems to have had an epiphany of sorts in late 1847 during a working holiday in Brighton, when “Vanity Fair,” with its reference to John Bunyan’s Protestant allegory Pilgrim’s Progress (1678,1684) as well as the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, suddenly seemed to summarize his novel. Bradbury and Evans were finally able to advertise, in a Punch issue in November 1847, a “New Work by Michael Angelo Titmarsh / Vanity Fair / By W. M. Thackeray.”

  The story of the novel’s composition and publication is essentially a story of difficulties overcome. The novel did not sell well at first (while Dickens’s Dombey and Son, published by Bradbury and Evans at the same time, was a firm success), and Thackeray’s contract crucially omitted any mention of the length of the serial run; apparently, Vanity Fair could be canceled at any time. The novel’s initial chapters show the strain of attempting to capture an initially uninterested audience. But by the fifth serial number (which describes Becky’s surreptitious marriage to Rawdon Crawley) the novel had caught fire, and Thackeray’s freedom to finish what he started seemed assured. Not that composition became any easier for him. The job of a serial novelist of the Victorian era was a daunting one; text had to be turned in reliably each month, with every serial number providing something in the way of narrative climax and discursive humor, all while supporting the architecture of the plot as a whole. Thackeray added to the strain by illustrating the novel himself, providing two large steel-cut plates per number, alongside numerous woodcuts and pictorial capitals for chapter beginnings. In short, the serial Victorian novelist combined the jobs of countless employees on a contemporary television series: Thackeray needed to be a disciplined writer, a gifted “continuity editor” (as the plot’s complexities had to be kept in mind), a talented artist with an eye for memorable caricature, and a planner responsive to the public commentary that would greet each plot development. His copy was due at the Punch office by the fifteenth of each month; although apocryphal stories of the printer’s boy running to the presses with barely dry manuscript in the final days of the month seem to have been exaggerated, Thackeray did usually need to extend his deadline at least a week in order to complete each number. Every bit of his journalistic experience was necessary for him to carry off his enterprise with such an appearance of ease.

  The result, however, was more than a collection of satirical or socio-logically aware sketches; Thackeray’s tendency to diffuseness was checked by a remarkably concentrated narrative plan. Essentially the story of four intertwined families—the Sedleys, Osbornes, Dobbins, and Crawleys—in the period from shortly before Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 to the very beginning of the Victorian era in the late 1830s, the novel’s plot restrains its impulses to multifariousness by coming back, again and again, to the vicissitudes of two women in particular, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley. However wide-ranging Thackeray’s sketch-gaze could be, the elements of plot in Vanity Fair are reliably simple and restricted: two young women in their passage from late adolescence to motherhood and early middle age, each having made socially unfortunate marriages, each giving birth to a son who seems to be a miniature version of his father, and each attempting to gain a foothold in a society that, by accident, prejudice, or understandable caution, refuses to grant them security. That one of these women is in practice a revolutionary eruption from the streets of London, and the other an unalterably passive model of genteel Victorian femininity, is the novel’s largest and most important structural principle. By returning continually to the Becky/Amelia binary, Thackeray gives his “pen and pencil sketches” a consistent shape, and offers to his satirical eye much opportunity for complexly ironic commentary.

  Vanity Fair is, quite obviously, a historical novel, but few historical novels have given so much trouble to readers trying to discover just what it means to be “historical.” We begin the novel in the middle of 1813, more than thirty-three years prior to its publication, and the novel’s first half moves carefully up to Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his last stand in June 1815 at Waterloo, where the novel’s major characters have traveled as part of the Duke of Wellington’s army. At this point, after the events of Waterloo, we pass quickly to 1816, when—Amelia and Becky both having returned to England—the novel proceeds to detach itself from major historical events. From here Vanity Fair moves more rapidly; key moments in British history of the next two decades (Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the first Reform Bill in 1832) are noted only in passing. With Napoleon’s final defeat, and with the Congress of Vienna’s inauguration of a period of Continental reaction and British national security, history seems no longer to touch these characters, who have largely retreated into the absorbing dynamics of private life. Whereas, prior to the dramatic Brussels chapters, we hear the rumble of international cataclysm behind the noises of the everyday, the second half of the novel seems to resemble a more familiar Victorian multiplot narrative, with its domestic dramas untroubled by threats of invasion or financial chaos. The privilege of private life—to be cordoned off from historical shock—is now, we might say, taken for granted, having been earned for the British middle classes at Waterloo.

  We might account for this split in the novel’s texture in several ways. If we begin with authorial autobiography, we might note that Thackeray, born in 1811, is at his most particular and detailed about historical events that he could not have remembered or known. When we enter the period of Thackeray’s own youth, adolescence, and early adulthood (roughly speaking, 1816 to the mid-1830s), the novel suddenly becomes vaguer about its historical surround, and more particular in its attention to the everyday. Might the careful survey of the denouement of the Napoleonic Wars be Thackeray’s way of accessing a time that was not available to his memory? Or, speaking more generally, might it reflect a nostalgia Thackeray and his generation felt for the period of drama that ensured the relative peace of their own time, much as contemporary baby-boomers feel a continual attraction to the details of World War II? The novel’s youngest characters—little Rawdon Crawley and little Georgy Osborne—are only a few years younger than Thackeray himself, and like Thackeray could be considered part of a postwar generation. We might, that is, be facing a split novel, half intensely nostalgic historicity, half contemporary realism.

  If, on the other hand, we think in macrohistorical terms, we might be inclined to
take the split texture of Vanity Fair at face value, as a more or less accurate description of the experience of the British middle classes in the period between Napoleon’s fall and Victoria’s ascension. If the defeat of French imperial ambitions cleared the way for a century of British financial hegemony in Europe and imperial hegemony abroad, and brought to an end a period of Anglo-French warfare that stretched back well into the eighteenth century, for the individual British bourgeois that victory might very well have been felt as the removal of historical weight. Freed from fears of war, and gradually released from the restrictions on free trade that were such a legacy of the Napoleonic Wars, the middle classes of the Regency and early Victorian era may have felt free as well to turn inward—to family, to social ambitions, to personal projects of various kinds. There is a remarkable narrowing of interests that most of Vanity Fair’s characters undergo after Waterloo: Amelia turns into a reclusive and obsessive mother, while Rawdon, a Regency buck suddenly out of time, becomes a fond father and a kind of exalted valet to his wife. Even Becky, whose field of action had seemed so limitless prior to Waterloo, spends much of the novel’s second half trying to gain entrance to a very small set of society drawing rooms. As for Dobbin, the silent hero of British gentlemanliness, he begins to feel his solitary existence amid the messes and drills of Indian Army life to be a dull routine. In short, the relatively freewheeling life of the earlier Regency, perfectly captured in the “Vauxhall” chapter where social promiscuity, youthful high spirits, and drink mix so effortlessly, metamorphoses into the chilling propriety of early Victorian social distinction that begins, finally, to bore the novel’s characters. Just as Stendhal did in France, Thackeray might be charting the process by which the chaos and promise of European revolution is straitjacketed into the safe, disillusioned bourgeois parameters of the nineteenth century.