Vanity Fair (1848)
Plot
The story kicks off in 1813. Two girls leave Miss Pinkerton’s academy and walk into the real world. Amelia Sedley is rich, naive, and hopelessly devoted to her fiancé. Becky Sharp is a penniless, orphaned governess who is brilliant, manipulative, and determined to claw her way into English high society.
Becky moves fast. She secretly marries Rawdon Crawley, a dashing but dim-witted soldier. Meanwhile Amelia’s father goes bankrupt in the panic around Napoleon’s return. Her fiancé George Osborne — vain, snobbish — is about to dump her until his awkward, fiercely loyal friend William Dobbin shames him into going through with the marriage. Dobbin, of course, is quietly and hopelessly in love with Amelia himself.
Then Waterloo. Not as a glorious set piece but as a backdrop for private catastrophe. George dies in the battle, but not before secretly slipping Becky a note asking her to run away with him. Amelia, who has no idea he betrayed her, spends the next fifteen years worshipping his memory. She plays the martyr, sacrifices her own happiness, and completely ignores Dobbin’s patient devotion.
While Amelia mourns in poverty, Becky and Rawdon live lavishly on credit and sheer nerve. Becky charms her way into the highest aristocratic circles and becomes the favorite of the powerful and sinister Marquis of Steyne. Her triumph collapses when Rawdon gets thrown into debtor’s prison, suspects Becky has been hoarding money and letting him rot, escapes, catches her alone with Steyne, thrashes him, and walks out forever. His only real redemption comes through his love for his neglected son.
Years later a ruined, bohemian Becky runs into Amelia, her brother Jos, and Dobbin in Germany. Dobbin finally snaps. He realizes he has wasted his life pining for a woman who clings to a phantom, and he walks away. In a rare flash of usefulness, Becky shows Amelia the letter George wrote begging her to elope. Amelia’s fifteen-year illusion shatters. She calls Dobbin back. They marry, but the victory is hollow — he knows the prize wasn’t worth the chase. The narrator closes by packing the characters away like puppets, reminding us that in this world, getting what you want never actually makes you happy.
What the Book Is About
The core subject is vanity — not personal vanity, but the bigger thing the title points to: the empty worldly pursuits that organize a whole society. Wealth, status, reputation, performance. The book’s closing line says it straight: “Ah! vanitas vanitatum! (‘Ah! vanity of vanities!‘) Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?”
Underneath that is a second theme: selfishness versus love. Young Georgy Osborne, in an essay from Chapter LIX, spells it out: “Of all the vices which degrade the human character, Selfishness is the most odious and contemptible. An undue love of Self leads to the most monstrous crimes.” The novel tests this in both directions. Becky is pure self-interest and she wins materially. Amelia claims self-sacrifice but is really a different kind of selfishness — she demands love without giving it. Dobbin gives love without demanding it and ends up hollow.
There’s also moral hypocrisy and the illusion of society. The preface sets the frame: “The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.” You get out of society what you bring to it. If you bring vanity, society hands vanity back.
The Cast
Becky Sharp. The pragmatic, amoral social climber. Penniless orphan at the start, she uses her wit to reach the top of aristocratic London — even gets presented at Court. After her scandal with Lord Steyne she falls into bohemian drift, then works her way back to comfortable pseudo-respectability through Jos Sedley. Her whole philosophy in one line: “I must be my own mamma.” And the narrator’s summary of her game: “A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES.” She uses Amelia as a stepping stone, Rawdon for his name, Steyne for money, and neglects her own son. She cannot actually love anyone.
Amelia Sedley. The passive, over-sentimental Victorian ideal. Starts as a sheltered rich girl, loses everything to her father’s bankruptcy and George’s death, then spends fifteen years in self-imposed martyrdom worshipping a false memory of George. “George is my husband, here and in heaven. How could I love any other but him?” She’s a victim, but she’s also an unwitting tyrant — she uses Dobbin’s devotion without reciprocating it, until Becky finally breaks her illusions.
William Dobbin. Loyal, quietly heroic, and ultimately a fool for love. Mocked as a clumsy schoolboy, grows into a respected officer, spends his adult life serving George and pining for Amelia. He finally rebukes Amelia’s selfishness, wins her, and realizes it wasn’t worth it: “It was myself I deluded, and persisted in cajoling; had she been worthy of the love I gave her, she would have returned it long ago.”
George Osborne. Upper-class male vanity in concentrated form. Marries Amelia partly to spite his father, quickly tires of her, flirts with Becky, gets killed at Waterloo before he can fully abandon his wife. “I’m a liberal man; but I’ve proper pride, and know my own station: let her know hers.”
Rawdon Crawley. Heavy dragoon, gambler, duelist. Through marriage to Becky he becomes a surprisingly devoted husband and father. His tragic dignity comes when he realizes Becky’s treachery, confronts Steyne, and chooses exile. “You don’t know how fond I was of that one… Damme, I followed her like a footman.”
Symbols
| Symbol | What it means | Where it shows up | Quote |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Fair / The Puppet Show | Society as a shallow, morally bankrupt performance | Preface (“Before the Curtain”) and the novel’s final lines | ”Yes, this is VANITY FAIR; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.” / “Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.” |
| Johnson’s Dictionary | Old 18th-century moral authority, tradition, rules | When Becky leaves Miss Pinkerton’s academy | ”Just as the coach drove off, Miss Sharp put her pale face out of the window, and actually flung the book back into the garden.” |
| The Piano | Unrecognized devotion and blind idolatry — Amelia thinks George bought it, but Dobbin did | The Sedley auction, then years later in Germany | ”I did buy it for you. I loved you then as I do now.” |
Key Debate
The novel sets up a philosophical fight it refuses to resolve. What actually has value in a society run on money, status, and fake virtue? Is success in Vanity Fair worth the moral cost? Is self-sacrificing love noble, or just a destructive delusion?
Becky defends absolute pragmatism — life is a game to be played. Dobbin defends loyalty, self-sacrifice, and moral integrity. Nobody wins. Becky gets the money but ends a moral pariah. Dobbin gets the girl but realizes she was never worth it. The narrator’s closing sigh — “Which of us is happy in this world?” — is the verdict: all worldly desire ends in emptiness. Thackeray refuses to hand you a winner because his whole point is that the game itself is rigged.
How It’s Written
The tone is ironic, detached, melancholic, with a worldly “smartness” that treats the reader as an accomplice. “Men living about London are aware of these awful truths” — the narrator assumes you already know how rotten the world is, he’s just here to name it.
The big technical move is the narrator himself. He’s a first-person omniscient “Manager of the Performance,” and he constantly breaks the fourth wall to mock the characters, address the reader directly, and philosophize about what he’s showing you. He parodies the popular genres of the day — the aristocratic “silver-fork” novel, the crime-glamorizing “Newgate” novel — and structures the whole book as a series of sharp cultural sketches rather than a tight plot.
Historical events get used against type. Waterloo doesn’t show heroism. It shows how history crashes into private lives and ruins them. Napoleon’s return from Elba isn’t a grand political moment in this book; it’s the stock-market crash that bankrupts Amelia’s father.
The book’s shape tells its own story. It opens with the noisy, bustling Fair — the Manager looking out over a crowd of actors and buffoons getting ready to perform. It closes with silence: the Manager packing the puppets back into their box. The illusion has run its course. The show is over. That arc, from chaos to exhausted quiet, is the argument of the novel made structural.
Connections
- William Makepeace Thackeray — His signature move: the ironic omniscient narrator as master of ceremonies, pioneered full-throttle here.
- Bel-Ami — Maupassant’s male Becky Sharp, climbing the same greasy pole thirty-seven years later in Paris; same amorality, less charm.
- Anna Karenina — Tolstoy’s grander answer to the same questions about society, adultery, and what the drawing room does to people; Thackeray mocks, Tolstoy mourns.
- Colonel Chabert — Balzac’s parallel exposure of 1815-era society as a cash-and-status racket; Napoleonic aftermath as a marriage market.
- The Duchesse de Langeais — Another merciless anatomy of the aristocratic salon; Balzac and Thackeray dissecting the same species across the Channel.
- Dead Souls — Gogol’s satirical road-novel of social climbers and hollow gentry; Chichikov and Becky Sharp are the same con artist in different currencies.
Lineage
[[don-quixote|Don Quixote]] (1605) — the ur-model for the ironic narrator dismantling his own hero
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Vanity Fair
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[[bel-ami|Bel-Ami]] (1885) — Becky's male heir climbs Third Republic Paris with the same shamelessness