INTRODUCTION
What kind of a novel is Vanity Fair? Given the bewildering variety of responses that it has elicited since its publication began in January 1847, we might assume that at no time since Thackeray’s serial first gained public notice has the answer to that question been obvious. To the novel’s first readers, Thackeray’s aim seemed puzzling. G. H. Lewes, one of the Victorian period’s most able critics, wondered whether Vanity Fair was too embittered to be truly humorous, and too uniformly skeptical to be effectively satirical; Charlotte Brontë, however, dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray, whom she had never met, and in the process compared the effect of Vanity Fair to that of a Hebrew prophet admonishing the kings of Judah and Israel. That dilemma—whether Vanity Fair is the work of a moral satirist, or a worldly cynic retailing gossip for the diversion of his audience—has haunted efforts to understand Thackeray ever since. In our own time the pendulum has swung closer to the latter sentiment, thanks in no small part to the efforts of more recent novelists and critics to discredit Thackeray’s method; E. M. Forster, in his Aspects of the Novel (1927), compared Thackeray’s interruptions of his narrative to that of a bar patron offering to buy you a drink in return for some attention to his not quite lucid stories. There have, however, been intriguing testimonies to the contrary. The Trinidadian historian, social critic, and activist intellectual C. L. R. James attested to reading vanity Fair regularly starting at the age of eight, learning the workings of the British class system while feeling their persistence in his own West Indian milieu; as James later commented, it was to Thackeray, even more than to Marx, that he owed his vocation.
Worldly cynic, righteous prophet, tiresome companion, proto-Marxist social anatomist: the appellations are as contradictory as they are vivid and plausible. What unites these disparate accounts of the novel’s effect, however, is their attempt to describe its voice—a narrative style that speaks in a manner utterly unlike the usual Victorian novel. Vanity Fair is Thackeray’s masterpiece, his most ambitious and colorful effort, full of characters and scenes memorable in a way his later work could only occasionally recapture; but its most important element, the fact of its presentation that accounts at once for its brilliance and its undeniable difficulty, is the voice of its narrator. Amid a babble of distinctive accents—Becky Sharp’s light, cutting wit, Jos Sedley’s ponderous inanities, William Dobbin’s plain, gentlemanly eloquence—the narrator stands out as the most continually entertaining, and continually protean, of voices. The voice of Vanity Fair’s narrator is its great contribution to the history of the English novel, while being nonetheless the most difficult of the novel’s aspects to describe fully or accurately. Without the pyrotechnic virtuosity of Dickens’s style, or the measured gravitas of George Eliot, Thackeray’s narrator speaks with a mixture of tones that might perhaps be the most distinctively modern among the styles of the Victorian novel.
Most evident of all this voice’s traits is its undeniable worldliness. As the narrator frequently advertises, he (for this voice is always a male one) has seen the insides of gentlemen’s clubs, society dining rooms, auction houses where the effects of bankrupts are sold, foreign courts, respectable and not-so-respectable theaters, boarding schools, tourist hotels, coaching inns, even the chambers of servants. A Londoner, evidently, this narrator can know even the secrets whispered in female drawing rooms; “every person who treads the Pall Mall pavement and frequents the clubs of this metropolis,” he blandly announces, “knows, either through his own experience or through some acquaintance with whom he plays at billiards,” as much as one need know about the kind of disreputable female who dresses too showily in public and who women refuse to meet (p. 364). True to his worldly awareness, Thackeray’s narrator refuses to spell out the full implications of his description—how might these women earn the money to afford those dresses?—preferring instead to let implication, and a knowing smile, do the work. The innocent and ignorant, “the apprentices in the Park” or “the squire’s wife in Somersetshire, who reads of their doings in the Morning Post,” will remain uninstructed in this curious aspect of metropolitan society. As for the narrator and his readers, surely they know enough without being explicitly instructed. “Men living about London,” we are told, “are aware of these awful truths.” (p. 365) We are in the hands, therefore, of a discreet and rather jaundiced narrative voice, acquainted with—and perhaps already tired of—all the restless machinations of urban strivers. Vanity Fair is a novel full of scandal, including fraud, petty deceit, extramarital complications, and (possibly) murder, but these putative outrages to Victorian notions of social decency are never narrated as surprises. Instead, Thackeray presents them to us with a half-amused, half-disgusted species of boredom, as if to say: Surely you weren’t so naive as to pretend this wasn’t the case?
Of course, as legions of magazine writers and gossip columnists have since discovered, nothing is so compelling as being introduced to the seamier side of existence by bored habitués who do us the honor of pretending that we are as beyond shock as they affect to be. The game of sophistication—pretending to a knowingness whose open secret is a desire to learn what everyone else seems to know—is by now a familiar part of the cultural landscape, and Thackeray can play this game as well as any of his countless imitators. It is no accident that a well-known American celebrity magazine takes its name from the title of Thackeray’s novel, an irony Thackeray himself surely would have relished. But this most “sophisticated” of Victorian novelistic styles is more complex than just a kind of prurient romp through the unscrupulous greeds and lusts of mid-Victorian society—or, put another way, that journalistic prurience is only part of what it is up to. Alongside this voice’s slightly leering knowingness is a persistent strain of melancholy that mixes in curious ways with its more antic moments. If, in other words, Vanity Fair is the closest English fiction comes to the sensationalistic sweep of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, which remains the nineteenth century’s preeminent example of melodramatic social anatomy, it differs particularly in its constant retreat to a melancholic solitude.
Consider the novel’s extraordinary opening sequence, “Before the Curtain.” Presenting the first image of “Vanity Fair”—“not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy”—Thackeray positions his narrator as the “Manager of the Performance,” looking on not with any mirth or satisfaction at the bustling scene before him, but instead with “a feeling of profound melancholy” that will reverberate throughout the novel. Imagining next a “man with a reflective turn of mind” strolling through the fair, watching the performers eat dinner with their families, Thackeray proclaims that “the general impression is one more melancholy than mirthful” (p. xxxvii). Public boisterousness and frivolity—the stuff of the Fair—is matched throughout with a private desolation. “This, dear friends and companions,” the narrator will later interject, “is my amiable object—to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; and that we should all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be perfectly miserable in private” (p. 182). As a description of what a novel is meant to do, this is simply unparalleled in Victorian fiction; we are seemingly told that we will be temporarily entertained by some public, social bustle and comedy, only to be left, like the narrator, to a bleak solitude without consolation. What could be the meaning behind this melancholic strain?
If we extend this odd dynamic—a barren private world relieved occasionally by trips through the almost hysterical activity of the Fair, or society—to the characters of the novel, we might get a clearer glimpse of how this narrative voice works. We might very quickly see, that is, how often Vanity Fair depicts its characters in states of rather miserable, or pathetic, solitude. If Dickens’s novels describe a generally garrulous, sociable crowd of eccentrics, and if George Eliot’s novels show us individuals consoled for their social and vocational failures by rich inner lives, Thackeray’s characters retreat from their social per
formances to private emptiness. The examples are numerous, and always handled with a gentle touch: Jos Sedley driving himself alone through Hyde Park, and dining alone in fashionable restaurants, not quite fooling himself into believing that the joys of London society are his; his sister Amelia, spending days forlornly gazing out of her Russell Square bedroom, waiting for the arrival of George Osborne, her unenthusiastic suitor; Sir Pitt Crawley, slowly dying after what seems to be a stroke, ignored by the family and servants who had once been at his command; Amelia’s unrequited lover Dobbin, pacing the pavement at Chatham, watching the lights go out in the bedroom she now shares with her husband George. Thackeray is prone to offer his characters pity for one thing only: their unremitting loneliness. In one of his truly chilling images of solitude, Thackeray shows us the forlorn spinster Jane Osborne, doomed to be tyrannized over by her father well into middle age, spending her days trapped in an empty, vulgarly furnished drawing room: “The great glass over the mantelpiece, faced by the other great console-glass at the opposite end of the room, increased and multiplied between them the brown holland bag in which the chandelier hung; until you saw these brown holland bags fading away in endless perspectives, and this apartment of Miss Osborne’s seemed the centre of a system of drawing-rooms.” (p. 419) It is no unimportant fact that Thackeray’s own illustrations, which so aptly accompany his text, often depict his characters by themselves, in states of reverie, absorptive thought, or mere sadness, rather than in the comic-melodramatic group tableaux that Dickens and his illustrators preferred.
Vanity Fair, like so many other Victorian novels, is crowded with characters; but the novel’s crowd is a crowd of isolates. What Thackeray’s voice, with its characteristic mixture of melancholy and sophistication, evokes for us is the very condition of contemporary urbanized existence: the feeling of being alone in company, of being alone in a crowd. It is no ecstatic, revelatory solitude, like that of the Romantic poets, no escape into a Self bigger than its social outlets; the melancholy of Thackeray’s voice is the awareness that in the midst of so much complex social machinery, and so much barely comprehensible historical change, the individual dwindles into merely a repertoire of social skills and performances—into, that is, only an attitude. What is more, Thackeray’s voice never fools itself into thinking its attitude (that of a knowing, slightly jaundiced sophistication) is anything more profound than a way of fighting off the shocks of social existence, a way, so to speak, of getting through the day. It never exempts itself from the phenomena it describes; the rhetorical move of tu quoque (you too, you are another one) is one of his constants, except that in his hands it usually means “me too” as well. Lest we protest that we would never accept an invitation from the great, and cruel, Lord Steyne, Thackeray reminds us that we would—as would he. Lest we feel condescending pity for the failed merchant John Sedley,Thackeray reminds us that our own prosperity is no more solid. Do not pretend, this voice admonishes us, that our individual modes of confronting the world (what we call our “personality”) are anything but a cover for the emptiness that awaits us when alone.
Thackeray, that is, is not interested in solitude per se but in the strange mixed condition of modern solitude, an aloneness that is situated squarely in the midst of a multitude. The novel is, after all, multitudinous, a vast panorama that takes in a wide range of geographical and social sites. Socially the novel traverses the range from the titled great—Steyne and his hangers-on—to the rural gentry, represented by the Pitt Crawleys, to the fashionable layers of London upper-middle-class society (which Thackeray delineates with great care), to the upwardly mobile middle-class elements within the city, to murkier layers of financial privation encountered by shopkeepers, small landowners, and even servants. Compared to Tolstoy’s similarly panoramic War and Peace, Thackeray’s social range is wider, his effort to encompass as many social layers as possible greater. Geographically the novel is far more cosmopolitan than most of its Victorian competitors: We are exposed to rural Hampshire, the tourist sights of Brighton, to Continental haunts of British émigrés such as Boulogne, to the small, fictional German principality of Pumpernickel, to wartime Brussels and post-wartime Paris, to imperial British outposts such as Madras—not to mention, of course, a wide variety of London settings, extending from posh Mayfair houses through respectable, if drearily bourgeois, Bloomsbury, to decidedly shabby purlieus like Fulham, where the Sedley family retreats after their bankruptcy. Even smaller social microclimates, such as the Anglo-Indian neighborhood around Fitzroy Square where Jos Sedley buys a house, or the bohemian settings of Soho that bequeath Becky to London society, are charted with care. The novel is, in short, crowded: crowded with incidents, with social and physical detail, with constantly intermingling characters, all of which makes the isolation suffered by its inhabitants—and expressed by the narrative voice—even more profound.
Therefore the facade of sophistication that Thackeray’s voice so winningly keeps up is an act of courage—a kind of willed suspension of the melancholy that awaits each of its characters; and therefore the voice is never consistent, never in just one mode, always switching from one to the next. If we catch the voice feeling sentimental, we immediately catch that sentiment curdling into something more sour. If we catch it being cynical about any possible morality, we immediately feel taken in by our willingness to agree to its cynicism. When Becky muses that she could be a good woman if she only had five thousand pounds a year, Thackeray agrees: “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 and an honest woman? If you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than his neighbour?” So far, so good: we hear the comfortable accents of confidential honesty, a kind of unbuttoned, after-dinner tone of agreeable amoral consensus, or, perhaps, an economic determinism. But then Thackeray concludes: “Becky consoled herself by so balancing the chances and equalizing the distribution of good and evil in the world” (p. 414). Are we to believe the narrator when he agrees with Becky, or are we to take that agreement as an only sarcastic mimicry of what might be a sordid, and self-deceiving, rationalization on Becky’s part? Small as this moment is, it is repeated throughout the novel in numerous ways. Reading vanity Fair is often the task of learning to minutely discriminate between the narrator’s shifting tones, of learning to become a connoisseur of Thackeray’s mood changes, of the small modulations in this most mercurial of narrative voices. Weary cynic, stern moralist, jovial companion, urban sophisticate, and social taxonomist all meet in Thackeray’s style, which mixes so many modes of contemporary discourse—journalistic prurience, intellectual gamesmanship, nostalgic lament—that his style seems sometimes to be, unlike so many other Victorian styles, modernity itself.
It was a style, however, that grew out of a rigorous and protracted literary apprenticeship. By the time that he began writing Vanity Fair, sometime in the period of late 1844 or early 1845, Thackeray had already undergone a decade of miscellaneous journalistic work that had honed his writing into the stylistically hyperaware prose of his later novels; Vanity Fair was the novel, however, that would propel him from the ranks of the hack writer of serial ephemera into an eminent novelist, worthy of mention alongside Dickens. While a background in journalistic or serial writing was by no means uncommon for Victorian novelists, no major novelist of the nineteenth century had as deep an immersion in journalistic forms as Thackeray. As sketch-writer, parodist, composer of brief social anatomies, sometime foreign correspondent, and illustrator, Thackeray had tried his hand at almost all the major forms of occasional writing open to young men of education, talent, and metropolitan connections. He had also known the species of pressure native to the hack writer; by the late 1830s Thackeray was caring for two daughters alone, while his wife, Isabella Shawe, gradually retreated into a mental illness that would eventually lead to her removal to a series of asylums and, finally, a private boardinghouse in Camberwell. His marriage irreparably marr
ed, his period of youthful promise rapidly coming to an end, his stamina declining, and his finances precarious, Thackeray could not but have felt, by the mid-1840s, that the remaining opportunities to make his name and secure his fortune were few.
The child of a successful East India Company official and a charismatic mother from an equally respectable Anglo-Indian family, Thackeray was destined for a social position with a considerable amount of ambiguity; educated as a “gentleman” in Charterhouse and Cambridge, but without many of the connections that would save him from career difficulty, and without any as yet notable talents, Thackeray would enter adult life both tethered to, and estranged from, the upper-middle-class codes that so many of his acquaintance could take for granted. Failed attempts at law and art further endangered his social position, which was perched uneasily between a kind of urban bohemia and respectability. The instability of his social profile, however, was eventually a boon to his journalism. It sharpened his sense of the minute and constantly shifting distinctions between classes, and it provided him with a unique compound of desire for and instinctive rejection of respectable society. More than any other major Victorian novelist, Thackeray had the ability to anatomize codes of respectability from within; his anomalous social position, both inside and outside the boundaries that both entranced and repelled him, gave him a set of analytic tools to pry open the secrets of early Victorian propriety, and made him an accomplished writer of the sort of satirical, but not radical, pieces that a burgeoning British press would require.
Where he found his first literary homes were in two notable periodicals, Fraser’s Magazine and Punch. Fraser’s represented an unusual and volatile compound of intellectual ambition (it serialized Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, one of the icons of early-nineteenth-century social philosophy, in 1833 and 1834), Tory political opinionating, and witty, if often scurrilous, celebrity-mongering. Its proprietor, the magnetic and unreliable William Maginn, was one of Thackeray’s first literary mentors, and Thackeray seems to have taken well to the syncretic range of interests Maginn and Fraser’s offered; even more important, he seems to have learned from the tone of Fraser‘s, a kind of offhand, cutting sophistication aimed somewhere between outright bohemia and smug respectability. The knowingness Fraser’s presented—one that both celebrated, and surreptitiously ridiculed, well-known cultural or political figures—would leave its imprint on Thackeray’s style. Punch, later on, offered him a venue for satire more securely rooted in the prejudices of a growing middle class, a slightly more seamless combination of humor and bourgeois decency, as if the erratic tone of Fraser’s had been tamed for a wider readership without sacrificing its devotion to witty cultural allusiveness. Punch helped gain Thackeray some modest fame; more significant, it gave him a relationship with Punch’s owners, the publishers Bradbury and Evans, who were concurrently issuing the highly successful early novels of Dickens.
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