Emmy was very glad in her heart to think that she had written to her husband before she read or knew of that letter of George‘s. ‘I knew it all along,‘ William said;‘but could I use that weapon against the poor fellow‘s memory? It was that which made me suffer so when you—‘
‘Never speak of that day again,‘ Emmy cried out, so contrite and humble, that William turned off the conversation, by his account of Glorvina and dear old Peggy O‘Dowd, with whom he was sitting when the letter of recall reached him. ‘If you hadn‘t sent for me,‘ he added with a laugh, ‘who knows what Glorvina‘s name might be now?‘
At present it is Glorvina Posky (now Mrs. Major Posky), she took him on the death of his first wife; having resolved never to marry out of the regiment. Lady O‘Dowd is also so attached to it that, she says, if anything were to happen to Mick, bedad she‘d come back and marry some of ‘em. But the major-general is quite well, and lives in great splendour at O‘Dowdstown, with a pack of beagles, and (with the exception of perhaps their neighbour, Hoggarty of Castle Hoggarty) he is the first man of his county. Her ladyship still dances jigs, and insisted on standing up to the master of the horse at the Lord Lieutenant‘s last ball. Both she and Glorvina declared that Dobbin had used the latter sheamfully, but Posky falling in, Glorvina was consoled, and a beautiful turban from Paris appeased the wrath of Lady O‘Dowd.
When Colonel Dobbin quitted the service, which he did immediately after his marriage, he rented a pretty little country place in Hampshire, not far from Queen‘s Crawley, where, after the passing of the Reform Bill, Sir Pitt and his family constantly resided now. All idea of a peerage was out of the question, the baronet‘s two seats in Parliament being lost.wg He was both out of pocket and out of spirits by that catastrophe, failed in his health, and prophesied the speedy ruin of the Empire.
Lady Jane and Mrs. Dobbin became great friends—there was a perpetual crossing of pony-chaises between the Hall and the Evergreens, the colonel‘s place (rented of his friend Major Ponto, who was abroad with his family). Her ladyship was godmother to Mrs. Dobbin‘s child, which bore her name, and was christened by the Rev. James Crawley, who succeeded his father in the living; and a pretty close friendship subsisted between the two lads, George and Rawdon, who hunted and shot together in the vacations, were both entered of the same college at Cambridge, and quarrelled with each other about Lady Jane‘s daughter, with whom they were both, of course, in love. A match between George and that young lady was long a favourite scheme of both the matrons, though I have heard that Miss Crawley herself inclined towards her cousin.
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley‘s name was never mentioned by either family. There were reasons why all should be silent regarding her. For wherever Mr. Joseph Sedley went, she travelled likewise; and that infatuated man seemed to entirely be her slave. The colonel‘s lawyers informed him that his brother-in-law had effected a heavy insurance upon his life, whence it was probable that he had been raising money to discharge debts. He procured prolonged leave of absence from the East India House, and indeed his infirmities were daily increasing.
On hearing the news about the insurance, Amelia, in a good deal of alarm, entreated her husband to go to Brussels, where Jos then was, and inquire into the state of his affairs. The colonel quitted home with reluctance (for he was deeply immersed in his History of the Punjaub, which still occupies him, and much alarmed about his little daughter, whom he idolizes, and who was just recovering from the chicken-pox), and went to Brussels and found Jos living at one of the enormous hotels in that city. Mrs. Crawley, who had her carriage, gave entertainments, and lived in a very genteel manner, occupied another suite of apartments in the same hotel.
The colonel, of course, did not desire to see that lady, or even think proper to notify his arrival at Brussels, except privately to Jos by a message through his valet. Jos begged the colonel to come and see him that night, when Mrs. Crawley would be at a soiree, and when they could meet alone. He found his brother-in-law in a condition of pitiable infirmity; and dreadfully afraid of Rebecca, though eager in his praises of her. She tended him through a series of unheard-of illnesses, with a fidelity most admirable. She had been a daughter to him. ‘But—but—oh for God‘s sake, do come and live near me, and—and—see me sometimes,‘ whimpered out the unfortunate man.
The colonel‘s brow darkened at this. ‘We can‘t, Jos,‘ said. ‘Considering the circumstances, Amelia can‘t visit you.‘
‘I swear to you—I swear to you on the Bible,‘ gasped out Joseph, wanting to kiss the book, ‘that she is as innocent as a child, as spotless as your own wife.‘
‘It may be so,‘ said the colonel, gloomily;‘but Emmy can‘t come to you. Be a man, Jos: break off this disreputable connexion. Come home to your family. We hear your affairs are involved.‘
‘Involved!‘ cried Jos.‘Who has told such calumnies? All my money is placed out most advantageously. Mrs. Crawley—that is—I mean,—it is laid out to the best interest.‘
‘You are not in debt, then? Why did you insure your life?‘
‘I thought—a little present to her—in case anything happened; and you know my health is so delicate—common gratitude you know—and I in tend to leave all my money to you—and I can spare it out of my income, indeed I can,‘ cried out William‘s weak brother-in-law.
BECKY‘S SECOND APPEARANCE IN THE CHARACTER OF CLYTEMNESTRA
The colonel besought Jos to fly at once—to go back to India, whither Mrs. Crawley could not follow him; to do anything to break off a connexion which might have the most fatal consequences to him.
Jos clasped his hands, and cried,-‘He would go back to India. He would do anything; only he must have time: they mustn‘t say anything to Mrs. Crawley:—she‘d—she‘d kill me if she knew it. You don‘t know what a terrible woman she is,‘ the poor wretch said.
‘Then, why not come away with me?‘ said Dobbin in reply; but Jos had not the courage.‘He would see Dobbin again in the morning: he must on no account say that he had been there. He must go now. Becky might come in.‘And Dobbin quitted him full of forebodings.
He never saw Jos more. Three months afterwards Joseph Sedley died at Aix-la-Chapelle. It was found that all his property had been muddled away in speculations, and was represented by valueless shares in different bubble companies. All his available assets were the two thousand pounds for which his life was insured, and which were left equally between his beloved ‘sister Amelia, wife of, &c, and his friend and invaluable attendant during sickness, Rebecca, wife of Lieutenant- Colonel Rawdon Crawley, C.B.,‘ who was appointed administratrix.
The solicitor of the Insurance Company swore it was the blackest case that ever had come before him; talked of sending a commission to Aix to examine into the death, and the company refused payment of the policy. But Mrs., or Lady Crawley, as she styled herself, came to town at once (attended with her solicitors, Messrs. Burke, Thurtell & Hayes, of Thavies Inn) ‘32 and dared the company to refuse the payment. They invited examination, they declared that she was the object of an infamous conspiracy, which had been pursuing her all through life, and triumphed finally. The money was paid, and her character established, but Colonel Dobbin sent back his share of the legacy to the Insurance Office, and rigidly declined to hold any communication with Rebecca.
She never was Lady Crawley, though she continued so to call herself. His Excellency Colonel Rawdon Crawley died of yellow fever at Coventry Island, most deeply beloved and deplored, and six weeks before the demise of his brother Sir Pitt. The estate consequently devolved upon the present Sir Rawdon Crawley, Bart.
He, too, has declined to see his mother, to whom he makes a liberal allowance; and who, besides, appears to be very wealthy. The baronet lives entirely at Queen‘s Crawley, with Lady Jane and her daughter; whilst 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 hersel
f in works of piety. She goes to church, and never without a footman. Her name is in all the Charity Lists. The Destitute Orange-girl, the Neglected Washerwoman, the Distressed Muffin-man, find in her a fast and generous friend. She is always having stalls at Fancy Fairs for the benefit of these hapless beings. Emmy, her children, and the colonel, coming to London some time back, found themselves suddenly before her at one of these fairs. She cast down her eyes demurely and smiled as they started away from her: Emmy scurrying off on the arm of George (now grown a dashing young gentleman), and the colonel seizing up his little Janey, of whom he is fonder than of anything in the world—fonder even than of his History of the Punjaub.
‘Fonder than he is of me,‘ Emmy thinks, with a sigh. But he never said a word to Amelia, that was not kind and gentle; or thought of a want of hers that he did not try to gratify.
Ah! vanitas vanitatum!wh Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?—Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
VIRTUE REWARDED: A BOOTH IN VANITY FAIR
ENDNOTES
1 (p. 5) Johnson‘s Dictionary: Samuel Johnson‘s Dictionary of the English Language—originally published in 1755 and reprinted countless times afterward—represents the apotheosis of a certain eighteenth-century style, a formal, balanced, weighty style dimly parodied in Miss Pinkerton‘s less fluid prose. Since Johnson died in 1784, and Becky and Amelia leave the Academy in June 1813, the antiquity of Miss Pinkerton‘s methods is evident. By flinging the Dictionary out of the window of the carriage, Becky rejects eighteenth-century gravity in favor of a newer model of insouciance.
2 (p.17) the carriage arrived in Russell Square: This is a deliberately chosen location. Built in 1804 in the heart of the district of Bloomsbury, Russell Square represents a new, solidly respectable middle-class locale, its proximity to the business districts of the City making it appealing to bankers and merchants. That the Sedleys and Osbornes are both living here at the start of the novel indicates their class equivalence, at least initially; it also indicates their distance from both lower-class penury and aristocratic fashion.
3 (p. 21) read the Arabian Nights: Few fictional texts are as frequently alluded to in vanity Fair as The Arabian Nights‘ Entertainments (also called The Thousand and One Nights). This collection of Arabic tales, assembled in its present form around 1450, is said to have been originally narrated by Scheherazade, the wife of a cruel king whose custom it was to kill his wives after spending one night with them. Scheherazade saved her life by each night telling the king a charming story and withholding the ending until the following night. The tales were first available in English translation in 1713 and were frequently retranslated thereafter. By the nineteenth century numerous editions were available.
4 (p. 48) Vauxhall: The most famous “pleasure garden” in eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain, Vauxhall was faring badly by the time of Vanity Fair‘s publication and would be closed for good in 1859, but in the early decades of the century it attracted a large audience of mixed classes. Located in the Pimlico district, Vauxhall offered illuminated gardens with private walks (with a somewhat dangerous reputation), a Chinese pagoda, supper rooms, concert venues, and a wide variety of entertainers.
5 (p.48) We might have treated this subject in the genteel, or in the romantic, or in the facetious manner: In a playful boast, the narrator alludes to some popular novelistic genres of the 1840s. “Genteel” refers to the vogue for “silver-fork fiction,” idealized narratives of upper-class life, most notably associated with the novels of Benjamin Disraeli or Catherine Gore, while “romantic” most likely refers to the criminal or “Newgate” fiction of W. H. Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The novel‘s first edition did in fact include here lengthy parodies of these styles, which Thackeray, presumably feeling them to be dated, deleted for later editions.
6 (pp. 61-62) Pitt Crawley ... Walpole Crawley ... John Churchill Crawley ... Charles Stuart, afterwards called Barebones Crawley ... Rawdon Crawley: The names of the Crawley family present a montage of inconsistent and generally badly timed political allegiances. Pitt (after Pitt the Elder and Pitt the Younger, ministers in the second half of the eighteenth century), Walpole (after Robert Walpole, minister under George II), and John Churchill (after the great eighteenth-century general Marlborough) span the political spectrum, while the name change from Charles Stuart to Barebones demonstrates a craven desertion of the Stuarts after the execution of Charles I. Pitt and Rawdon (after Francis Rawdon-Hastings, governor general of India from 1813 to 1822) are named after political enemies, reflecting the Crawley family‘s desire to have it both ways at once.
7 (p.69) For them stage-coaches will ha e become romances.... or see the pike-gates fly open any more: Thackeray here looks back from the vantage point of 1847, when railroads had begun their conquest of British transportation, to the stagecoach travel of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The transition, which largely occurred in the 1830s, was one that for Thackeray‘s generation marked the difference between youth and maturity; as a result, nostalgia for coach travel is a recurrent feature of Vanity Fair. Here Thackeray refers to two picturesque, and rapidly vanishing, aspects of coach travel: the coach‘s exterior horn (used as a warning or distress signal) and the toll-gates on early coaching turnpikes.
8 (p. 78) as a man and a brother: A premier example of Thackeray‘s often-perverse irony. The phrase “Am I not a man and a brother?” was a famous abolitionist slogan in the first half of the nineteenth century, usually put into the mouth of a chained slave; its use here seems to ironize the slogan.
9 (p. 83) blood-red hand: A subtle double meaning: All baronets were entitled to bear, as part of their armorial insignia, the red hand of Ulster, which commemorates the fact that the baronetcy was created largely to raise funds for troops in Ulster. However, the “blood-red hand” alludes to the scarcely legal embezzlement and exploitation that characterizes Sir Pitt.
10 (p. 85) Foolish, foolish dream!: The cartoon that concludes the chapter is a self-portrait of Thackeray, strangely poignant and self-mocking at once. The miniaturization here (Thackeray has the face of an adult but the body of a child), along with the removal of a comic mask to reveal a melancholy expression, picks up on images of puppetry and clowning to which the novel continually returns.
11 (p. 87) the history of Mr. Humphrey Clinker: Becky‘s pupils, in other words, are receiving a fine education in eighteenth-century freethink ing and bawdy fiction. Rather than Tobias Smollett‘s History of England (1757-1758), note her pupils read his novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771); to this is added the work of Henry Fielding, author of The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), the latter particularly believed unsuitable for children, as well as the racy fiction of Claude de Crébillon and the skeptical atheism of Voltaire.
12 (p.136) ‘Is he a man in a line-regiment?‘: This is a pointed question. As part of an elite Guard unit, Rawdon is socially more august than Dobbin or Osborne, who form part of a “line” or basic infantry regiment. Here as elsewhere, Thackeray is interested in charting the lines of hierarchy within various social spheres.
13 (pp. 169-170) ‘Napoleon has landed at Cannes.‘ ... were puzzled: Napoleon‘s landing at Cannes, after his escape from the island of Elba, occurred on March 1,1815; by March 20 he had arrived in Paris, and two days later the French army joined the insurrection. The sudden return disrupted the political arrangements of the Congress of Vienna, which was led by Talleyrand (representing Bourbon France), Metternich (representing Austria), Hardenberg (the Chancellor of Prussia), and Londonderry (the British ambassador to Vienna), and which sought a return to pre-French Revolution monarchical rule and stability.
14 (p.193) ‘He ought to be shot, sir-brought to a court martial, and shot, by Jove‘: Sedley here summarizes the dashed hopes, and financial panic, after Napoleon‘s return. He recal
ls the celebrations of summer 1814 (in which Czar Alexander I and the King of Prussia visited London), and remembers his failed investments in the French stock market (“the French fives”) after Napoleon‘s exile. The English commissioner in charge of the Elba confinement, Colonel Neil Campbell, was acquitted of any blame in Napoleon‘s escape, which he had inadequate means to prevent.
15 (p.195) had been mentioned with applause in the Morning Post: The reference is to the primary “society” paper of nineteenth-century London, detested by Thackeray for its vapid coverage of West End entertainment. Here and elsewhere Thackeray provides an embedded map of nineteenth-century journalism and its class connections, from the high-brow quarterlies (such as the Edinburgh Review) to the bankruptcy-and-death notices of the Gazette.
16 (p. 205) ‘I‘m not going to marry a Hottentot Venus‘: George‘s description is specific. The “Hottentot Venus” was Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman who was displayed in a series of exhibitions or freak shows in London and on the Continent from 1810 to 1815; her most famous attribute was her large posterior, which received much prurient commentary in the press. Baartman died of syphilis in 1816, at the age of twenty-six, although parts of her body were exhibited in Paris at the Musée de l‘Homme until 1974; in May 2002 her remains were returned to her native South Africa.
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