William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 - 1863)

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 - 1863)

Features of his works

His Reputation

While Dickens was in full tide of his success, Thackeray was struggling through neglect and contempt to recognition. Thackeray's genius blossomed slowly, just as Fielding's did; for that reason the fruit is more mellow and matured. Once he had gained the favour of the public, he held it, and among outstanding English novelists there is none whose claim is so little subject to challenge.

His method

"Since the author of Tom Jones was buried" says Thackeray in his preface to Pendennis, "no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to its utmost power a Man. We must drape him and give him a certain conventional simper".

Thackeray's novels are a protest against this convention. Reacting against the popular novel of his day, and particularly against its romanticizing of rogues, he returns to the Fielding method: to view his characters, steadily and fearlessly, and to set on record their failings as well as their merits and capacities. In his hands the results are not flattering to human nature, for most of his clever people are rogues and most of his virtuous folks are fools. But whether they are rogues, or fools, or merely blundering incompetents, his creations are rounded, entire, and quite alive and convincing.

His Humour and Pathos

Much has been made of the sneering cynicism of Thackeray's humour, and a good deal of the criticism is true. It was his desire to reveal the truth and satire in one of his most potent methods of revelation. His sarcasm, a deadly species, is husbanded for deserving objects, such as Low Steyne and to a lesser degree Barnes Newcome. In the case of people who are only stupid, like Rawdon Crawley, mercy tempers justice; and when Thackeray chooses to do so he can handle a character with loving tenderness, as can be seen in the case of Lady Castlewood and of Colonel Newcome. In pathos he is seldom sentimental, being usually quiet and effective. But at the thought of the vain, the arrogant, and the mean people of the world, Thackeray barbs his pen, with destructive results.

His style

It is very near to the ideal for a novelist. It is effortless, and is therefore unobtrusive, detracting in no wise from the interest in the story. It is also flexible to an extraordinary degree. We have seen how in Esmond he recaptured the Addisonian style; this is only one aspect of his mimetic faculty, which in his burlesque finds ample scope.

His work

Thackeray's earlier work, much of it published in Fraser's Magazine and, after 181 in Punch, included both travel sketches and grotesque stories. In The memoirs of Barry Lyndon (1856), Thackeray attempted a rogue's tale in the manner of Fielding's Jonathan Wild. In Catherine (1939-40), he exposed what he saww ass the moral dangers of the Newgate novel as practised b Bulwer-Lytton, Aisworth and Dckens, while in 'Novels by Eminent Hands' (1847), he extended his literary satire to other writers of popular adventure fiction. The Yellowplush Papers (1856) present a sevant's view of fashionable life, but it is The Book of Snobs (1848) that most clearly looks forward to Vanity Fair.

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"Vanity Fair"

The story of William Makepeace Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" is set in the period of the Battle of Waterloo and later. The title reverberates with associations, and should alert us to the fact that the book is a morality. Vanity Fair, in John Bunyans's allegory The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) is where poor Faithful was stoned by Deeth by a worldly and wicked populace. It recalls, too, Ecclesiastes 1: 2: "Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; vanity of vanities, all is vanity". The novel's closing words quote from the Latin of the Vulgate:

"Ah! Vanitas vanitatum! 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 . ."

'Vanity Fair" is based on the medieval concept of the world as stage. Like Jonathan Swift, Thackeray is a master of irony, and none, of his explicit statements should be taken at face value. The words of D.H.Lawrence are relevant: "Never trust the teller, trust the tale".

The tension between tale and teller is a major component of Thackeray's art. His pretence at detachment, derived from his beloved Fielding, has misled readers into thinking that he despised his own tale, along with his characters. Yet he tells us clearly enough, for example in chapter 8, what he is about:

" . my kind reader will please to remember that this history has Vanity Fair for a title, and that Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falseness and pretentions . ."

While Christian, in Bunyan's fable, completes his journey, Faithful is the hero martyred at Vanity Fair. In the novel Dobbin plays the role of Faithful; he does not die, but his reward is too pretty for his deserts.

The novel opens at a demure girls' school in Chiswick, where rich, pampered Amelia Sedley is leaving for home, accompanied by the French instructor, Rebecca Sharp, on her way to become a governess. Amelia is sweet-natured, but insipid and foolish. Critics have tried to argue that Becky is "good-humoured" because Thackeray calls her so, but we are warned early that she is a "dangerous bird". Rebecca's background is not respectable; her father was a drunken artist, and her mother a French opera singer (Victorian shorthand for "loose woman"). "The humble calling of her female parent Miss Sharp never alluded to . . Rebecca is consumed by envy of the privileged boarders, but latches on to Amelia, and sets her cap at Amelia's rich bachelor brother, the gross Joseph Sedley, Collector of  Boggley Wallah in India, but he escapes her clutches. She then goes to work for the family of Sir Pitt Crawley, an uncouth baronet who derives in part from Squire Western in Fielding's Tom Jones, and secretly marries Sir Pitt's younger son Rawdon. The couple is forced to live on their wits not paying bills. Rawdon becomes a professional gambler. He and Becky climb higher and higher in society, with no visible means of support. Becky is even presented to George IV " . there too was Vanity".

Throughout the novel, there is a play on the two meanings of the word vanity: futility and vain conceit. Rawdon is arrested for debt, and when his kind sister-in-law, Lady Jane, gets him out of debtor's prison, he comes home, to find Rebecca with the rich, dissolute Marquis of Steyne. The novelist asks us shyly "Was she guilty or not? She said no but who could tell . if that corrupt heart was in this case pure?"

The innuendo about Becky's "virtue" is resumed in chapter 64, where she is imagined as a mermaid, attractive above the waist, but with a hideous tail under the waterline. She has degenerated from kept woman to common prostitute. Like Swift's Yahoos and Milton's Satan, Becky, through evil, has all the life, while loving plodders like Dobbin represent patient merit spurned by the unworthy. Dobbin marries Amelia, and is disappointed. Just as Dobbin is the true hero, "Lady Jane Crawley, principled and loving", is the true heroine. The imagery throughout is of brilliance and sparkle, true and false lights.

Thackeray has been accused of cynicism on the one hand and sentimentality on the other. Gordon Ray, Thackeray's biographer, has argued that Thackeray's marriage was less happy than Thackeray admitted, and that Amelia is a portrait of the weak-minded Mrs. Thackeray. As evidence, he believes that Thackeray idealizes Amelia at the start of the story and patronizes her at the end. But the novel establishes at once that Amelia is good but too trusting, while Rebecca is hard and vindictive. As the cynicism, his audience recognized that Thackeray was writing about a demi-mondaine. Thackeray's string of apparently innocent questions as to what "really" happened is a strategy for coping with Victorian prudery. He hints expertly at unpleasant facts; we learn that old Sir Pitt became helpless and had to be "fed and cleaned like a baby" - that Sir Pitt became incontinent.

Thakeray regretted the loss of the previous century's frankness. The overcoming of this difficulty has led to much misreading, but in Vanity Fair, Thackeray shows a fine moral attitude and a masterly, playful control of tone.