Vanity Fair Summary: Thackeray's Novel Without a Hero
What it is about
Vanity Fair is a satirical novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, published as a nineteen-part monthly serial between 1847 and 1848 and then as a single volume in 1848. The serial carried the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, a nod both to its mockery of early nineteenth-century Britain and to the many illustrations Thackeray drew himself. The single-volume edition arrived with a different subtitle: A Novel without a Hero. That second phrase is the better guide to what follows.
The book tracks two young women from the moment they leave school in London in 1814, through the Napoleonic Wars and the years after. Rebecca Sharp, known as Becky, is the daughter of an art teacher and a French dancer. She has no money, considerable wit and a clear plan to climb. Amelia Sedley, known as Emmy, is good-natured, simple-minded and comes from a wealthy London family. Their fortunes move in opposite directions and then cross again.
Thackeray frames the whole thing as a puppet show at a fair. The preface and the coda set up this device, and the narrator appears inside the story at points, sometimes as a showman, sometimes as a writer. He is not entirely reliable. Much of what he reports is gossip passed along at second or third hand, which means the reader is constantly being nudged to wonder how much to believe. The cover illustrations of the serial parts showed not the characters but a troupe of comic actors at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park.
The main characters
Becky Sharp is strong-willed, cunning and entirely without money, and she treats society as a problem to be solved. After school she stays with Amelia, where she meets Amelia's brother Joseph, a rich, clumsy and vain civil servant home from the East India Company. Becky tries to secure him and fails. She then takes a post as governess to the daughters of Sir Pitt Crawley, a crude and profligate baronet, and manages the household so well that Sir Pitt proposes marriage to her after his second wife dies. He is too late. Becky has already married his second son, Captain Rawdon Crawley, in secret.
Amelia is engaged to Captain George Osborne, who is dashing, self-obsessed and quick to tire of her. George's friend Captain William Dobbin loves Amelia too, but wants only her happiness, and her happiness runs through George. Dobbin's long patience is one of the spines of the book.
Around them sits a cast of relatives doing arithmetic on each other's deaths. The rich spinster Miss Crawley holds a fortune and the whole family competes for her favour. Later, the Marquis of Steyne becomes Becky's powerful patron in London, and Lady Jane Sheepshanks, who marries Sir Pitt's eldest son, provides a measure of decency against which Becky's conduct is judged.
The themes
Money is the engine of almost every relationship here. When Napoleon escapes from Elba the stock market turns jittery, Amelia's stockbroker father goes bankrupt, and George's rich father immediately forbids the marriage. Dobbin persuades George to go ahead anyway, and George is disinherited for it. Affection and income are never far apart.
Ambition is treated without easy moralising. Becky is ruthless, a cold and distant mother, and she profits from the panic at Waterloo by selling her carriage and horses at inflated prices to the fleeing Jos. She is also the most alive person in the book, which is part of Thackeray's point. Amelia's virtue, meanwhile, shades into something passive and self-defeating as she spends years in genteel poverty devoted to a husband's memory that does not deserve it.
Class is the third subject. Becky is presented at court to the Prince Regent and charms him at a game of charades. The novel shows how thin the membrane is between social triumph and ruin, and how much of fashionable life runs on credit. When the Crawleys live grandly on money they do not have, the people who pay are those who trusted them, including an old family servant who was their landlord.
Why it still matters
The serial was both a popular and a critical success, and the book is now considered a classic. It is sometimes called the principal founder of the Victorian domestic novel. It has been adapted repeatedly for film, television and audio, and it gave its name to the British lifestyle magazine first published in 1868, which became known for its caricatures of Victorian and Edwardian figures. In 2003 it placed at number 122 in the BBC's Big Read poll of the UK's best-loved books.
Its durability comes from the refusal to supply a hero. Readers who want to be told who deserves what will find the narrator unhelpful on purpose. That is a modern-feeling stance for an 1848 novel, and it is why Becky Sharp remains one of the most argued-over characters in English fiction.
How it ends (spoilers)
George Osborne is killed at the Battle of Waterloo. Dobbin and Rawdon survive. Amelia bears a posthumous son, also called George, and Dobbin quietly pays her a small annuity before going to India with his regiment for years. Becky rises through post-war Paris and then London under the patronage of the Marquis of Steyne. At the height of that success, Rawdon is arrested for debt, possibly with Becky's help. One detail is held back until the final pages: at the ball in Brussels, George had passed Becky a note asking her to run away with him.
