C.L.R. James once avowed that his moral imagination derived from Vanity Fair. When it came to James’ formation, Thackeray, not Marx, was the Man. I can take a hint so I read Vanity Fair to my son when he was an elementary schoolboy. What a fuckin’ book! (And not just for the adult in the room, though I won’t speak for the youth.)
I was thrilled to find out (recently) the late critic and scholar Barbara Hardy was alive to the artful social criticism in Thackeray’s corpus. Fifty years on, Hardy’s The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray (1972) remains a vital book, thanks to Hardy’s “exuberant” readings. (To borrow an apt characterization by one of her colleagues. See here for more on Hardy’s life and times.) Per Hardy, Thackeray’s acute and precise presentations of the dense details of social surfaces — “all graded, classed, placed, timed and priced” — make his novels more socially informative than the work of more profound artists like Dickens and George Eliot. They are more profound, as Hardy grants…
However…Thackeray’s brilliant understanding of surface, and his abstention from systematic criticism and voiced social ethic, allow society to show itself, astounding, mad, hollow, frightening.
Hardy doubles down on the radical extremity of Thackeray’s bare realities — his fiction amounts to a “shaped exposure of a cruel, cold, mad world.”
It occurs to me that The Exposure of Luxury might be a Sixties thing, since that conjuncture lasted until around ’72, right? I can see C.L.R. James reading The Exposure of Luxury, but I’m guessing it belongs to a time before Graydon Carter’s climb. (While Carter took the title of his mag from Thackeray, its snotty puddings have never had radical themes.)
Hardy upholds the savage social critic in Thackeray, teaching us to trust the tales not the teller. Forget Thackeray the clubman and genteel litterateur whose official “conservative liberal” politics were un-insurrectionary. Remember, instead, the happy warrior whose target-rich novels nail habitués of the Great World. Those who have…
no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for anything beyond success. Such people there are living and flourishing in the world — Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless; let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main.
What follows is a slightly compacted version of the second chapter in The Exposure of Luxury, (which focuses chiefly on episodes in Vanity Fair though Hardy’s book takes in Thackeray’s other major novels. The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., The History of Pendennis and The Newcomes).
…
Art and Nature
One of the major implications of the title and main image of Vanity Fair is the corruption of nature by greed, deceit and art. Thackeray approves of honesty, sincerity and spontaneity, and criticizes posing and artifice. The critical emphasis varies, falling on heartlessness or hypocrisy or exhibitionism or artful manipulation, and sometimes on all four simultaneously. Everyone knows that the chief performance in Vanity Fair is that given by ‘the famous little Becky puppet’, as Thackeray describes her in the preliminary address, ‘Before the Curtain’. At the very beginning of her ·performance, in Chapter 1, ‘Chiswick Mall’, Thackeray does not show Becky’s accomplishments as artist, actress and performer, but rather establishes the environment in which performance becomes necessary. He begins his novel with a critique of Becky’s environment which certainly goes far to create and explain her histrionic ways: it shows a hierarchy of power, a pecking-order in which Becky is as yet only finding her way, and it very clearly reveals the incompatibility of success — defined as money and power — with nature, heart, sincerity or love. As yet, Becky is only a novice and learner, as befits a character who is on the brink of leaving school. Her performance has scarcely begun, but Thackeray’s analysis of performance is already complex.
The school itself is one of those totally assimilated social symbols which exist in full and self-contained particularity in Thackeray’s satiric world: schooling, learning, achievement, testimonials, teaching, finishing the course, are metaphors as well as realities, but Thackeray uses the ready-made social symbol very quietly. It is his great gift, here and elsewhere, to work through a plenitude of such unobtrusively significant action, and not only each detail of pedagogy, teaching and learning, but every single aspect of the scene, events and characters, in this first chapter, is morally expressive.
One key to the theme of art and nature is given in the first image, which contrasts the undignified with the dignified. It does so in a way which draws our attention to the narrow formality of the institution which Becky and Amelia are about to leave for the wide world. The fat horses and the fat coachman, the bandy-legged servant and the red nose of Miss Jemima Pinkerton represent the vivid, undignified informal world, while ‘the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies’ represents dignity and enclosure. The contrast becomes plainer in the first piece of dialogue between Miss Pinkerton and. her sister Miss Jemima, who are a contrasting pair in a novel largely organized on the principle of contrast and duality. The contrast emerges as one of style and sensibility, directing our .attention to Miss Jemima’s natural, informal, good-hearted, outer-directed attention and the formality and arrangement of Miss Pinkerton’s artifice:
‘It is Mrs Sedley’s coach, sister,’ said Miss Jemima. ‘Sambo, the black servant, has just rung the bell; and the coachman has a new red waistcoat.’
‘Have you completed all the necessary preparations incident to Miss Sedley’s departure, Miss Jemima?’ asked Miss Pinkerton herself…(Chap. 1)
Miss Jemima speaks loosely, but has her eye on the colours and particulars of the world outside. Her concreteness is indeed characteristic of Thackeray’s descriptions, and throughout the novel his eye is fixed on the solidity and detail of persons, clothing and objects; his presentation of Amelia and Becky, for instance, is marked by this precision, of action and colour. Here, the concreteness makes Miss Jemima interesting, while her sister is less attractive in her dryness and abstraction of style. The Johnsonian lady, Miss Pinkerton, speaks in the grand style; she is presented appropriately by Thackeray in polysyllabic, allusive and high-piled grandeur, as he sets. the linguistic tone for the ensuing dialogue: ‘Miss Pinkerton herself, that majestic lady; the Semiramis of Hammersmith, the friend of Dr Johnson, the correspondent of Mrs Chapone herself.’ His grand style acts as a faint burlesque, not pushing its effects, but maintaining grandeur of vocabulary and syntax. The contrast between the sisters becomes explicit when Miss Jemima uses the old word ‘bowpot’ and is told to say ‘bouquet’ as more genteel, doing her best in the compromise of ‘booky’, which is followed up by the big-hearted but undignified. simile, ‘as big almost as a haystack’. The sisters’ styles draw attention to the formality and pedantry of the one and the clumsy and casual artlessness of the other; and throughout Thackeray works in circumlocutions, like ‘autograph letter’ or ‘billet’, and in typically Johnsonian figures of sentiments and negation, parallelism and more periodic elaboration[1] all shown paradigmatically in this model letter.
MADAM, — After her six years’ residence at the Mall, I have. the honour and happiness of presenting Miss Amelia Sedley to her parents, as a young lady not unworthy to occupy a fitting position in their polished and refined circle. Those virtues which characterise the young English gentlewoman, those accomplishments which become her birth and station, will not be found wanting in the amiable Miss Sedley, whose industry and obedience have endeared her to her instructors, and whose delightful sweetness of temper has charmed her aged and her youthful companions.
In music, in dancing, in orthography, in every variety of embroidery and needle-work, she will be found to have realised her friends’ fondest wishes. In geography there is still much to be desired; and a careful and undeviating use of the backboard, for four hours daily during the next three years, is recommended as necessary to the acquirement of that dignified deportment and carriage, so requisite for every young lady of fashion. (Ibid.)
What is said is as important as how it is said, but style and value are related. Miss Pinkerton’s careful and pedantic ‘For whom is this, Miss Jemima?’ is answered by the artless and warm-hearted ‘For Becky Sharp: she’s going too’, which undermines the style and the very insistence of Miss Pinkerton’s question. Thackeray works through dialogue and through the surrounding narration and description. The humanity of Miss Jemima’s unpedantic, unpremeditated natural style matches her spontaneous show of sensibility: she trembles, blushes all over ‘her withered face and neck’, and her sensibility shows itself in her wasted imaginative identification with Becky; ‘it’s only two and ninepence and poor Becky will be miserable if she don’t get one’. Miss Jemima, like Briggs later on, is much too simple-minded to criticize the grand and acquisitive cold-heartedness around her, but her criticism is implicit in the language and feelings. Predatory Miss Pinkerton is coldly, self-interestedly and manipulatively in control, in giving, speaking, teaching and writing; Miss Jemima is vulgar, loving, giving, artlessly betrayed by feeling and undignified in action and speech, trotting off, ungrandly, ‘exceedingly flurried and nervous’. Miss Pinkerton’s condolence is a public event: ‘… Once, when poor Miss Birch died of the scarlet fever, was Miss Pinkerton known to write personally to the parents of her pupils; and it was Jemima’s opinion that if anything could console Mrs Birch for her daughter’s loss, it would be that pious and eloquent composition in which Miss Pinkerton announced the event.’
From the beginning, therefore, Thackeray establishes a contrast between formal showing-off and lack of heart, loving generosity and lack of style. He also establishes, from the beginning, a sense of social hierarchy and power-structure, not unrelated to the style and capacity for feeling. Those who are at the top, in Vanity Fair, get there by art, not heart. The linguistic and moral contrast between the ‘superior’ and the ‘inferior’ sister is followed by the contrast between two other ladies in the hierarchy; Becky and Amelia: ‘Miss Sedley’s papa was a merchant in London, and a man of some wealth; whereas Miss Sharp was an articled pupil, for whom Miss Pinkerton had done, as she thought, quite enough, without conferring upon her. at parting the high honour of the Dixonary.’ The psychological pecking-0rder can override the social[2] as Thackeray demonstrates in the little passage in which Becky makes her ‘adieux’ in fluent French, unintelligible to Miss Pinkerton, thus inflicting a stylistic victory, appropriately enough, over the Johnsonian mode. This victory is accompanied by a flouting gesture, as Becky refuses to accept one of Miss Pinkerton’s fingers: ‘In fact, it was a little battle between the young lady and the old one, and the latter was worsted.’ One could describe the whole action of the novel in such military terms, and Thackeray uses them freely; he is well aware of ironic parallels between his story and history, and also of the ‘unheroic’ appropriation of military or. heroic terms to everyday strife. In his novels, these skirmishes are fought with social weapons — with words, sentences, wit foreign languages, gestures, rituals, refusal of ritual, clothes, presents. Thackeray does more than show Becky as victorious, her strength of personality, intelligence, and learning prevailing over her low place in the social order. He creates a contrast between failure and success in artifice and ritual. Miss Pinkerton makes her ridiculous, elaborate gesture, ‘she waved one hand, both by way of adieu, and to give Miss Sharp an opportunity of shaking one of the fingers of the hand which was left out for that purpose’, and Becky nonchalantly rejects it. Becky’s very last gesture, however, is not an act of social aggression against the style of the Hammersmith Semiramis, but a rejection of poor loving styleless Jemima. The throwing of the dictionary is of course a marvelous rejection of style — Johnson, the institution, order, dignity and pretence — but it is not a simple revolutionary gesture which we can applaud. As so often, Becky is on the wrong side, attacking the Establishment only because she is jealous of its advantages. Our sympathies are carefully withdrawn from her as she throws back what is not only a symbol of ‘corrup’ style, but a loving present. Miss Jemima’s very last speech and action are typically artless, broken and stammered, and her last generous, if silly, act, is accompanied by the words, ‘God bless you!’ Becky, like Scrooge, rejects a blessing. The rejection marks her entry into the great world.
Thackeray’s last sentences emphasize the contrast between the world of school and the great world, as the gates close; he says, formally, ‘and so, farewell to Chiswick Mall’. The brilliant close-up of this first scene has established style and theme, the style and theme of nature and art.
There are certain characters in this chapter I have not mentioned, and they too are involved in style and, theme. They are the author and his readers, real and imaginary. Before the curtain rises, in ‘Before the Curtain’, Thackeray has presented himself as the Manager of the Performance; he has begun to develop the histrionic significance, as well as the vanity and commerce of Vanity Fair; he has admitted that he is in it for money, and is not without charlatanry: amongst the crowd he singles out ‘quacks (other quacks, plague take them !)’.[3] The author is, from the beginning, involved in the business of art and acting. [4] As we know, Thackeray originally intended to call the novel ‘A Novel without a Hero’ and to develop the theme of unheroic drama, rather than that of Vanity Fair. Although there are divergent emphases, the two themes very plainly overlap, and in Thackeray’s claim to the unheroic, he uses the convention of the self-conscious artist to make a certain claim for realism. A certain claim: implicit in his insistence that this is art, that these are puppets, that this is illusion and performance, that it is a book, written for money by an author, and read by various readers, is the claim that it is closer to life and nature than some forms of art. The self-conscious claim to realism is made in the description of Amelia’s undignified, unheroinelike beauty and sensibility. Another complex claim for heart as against art, it ends with disarming address to a Reader, Jones, whose taste is ‘for the great and heroic in life and novels’ and who will underline the author’s ‘foolish, twaddling, etc.’, and add ‘quite true’. But Jones is critically presented as a worldling, reading at his club, and ‘rather flushed with his joint of mutton and half pint of wine’, and it seems likely that Thackeray uses him in order to further the claim for simple, unworldly heroines and passions. He does as much as he can to claim that his novel, though a work of art, has a heart, and not simply by making jokes about the wrong kind of heartless, art-seeking (but wine flushed) reader like Jones, but by deliberately drawing attention to his own sentimentality. Amelia has a heart, cries over silly novels, and dead pets, and attracts heart: in yet another qualification of the pecking-order, even Semiramis gives orders that Amelia should be treated gently, and when Amelia goes she is surrounded by loving, giving, weeping friends. Indeed, Becky is not entirely the victim of the class hierarchy, since Amelia’s friends are seen to love her for herself (‘kindly, smiling, tender, gentle, generous heart’) and perhaps even Miss Pinkerton is not sensitive to her wholly because of her father’s income. Though Becky is made to claim, in Chapter 2, ‘In Which Mm Sharp and Miss Sedley Prepare to Open the Campaign’, that Amelia was her only friend, we shall, in retrospect, blame that on Becky’s heartlessness rather than on the social hierarchy of the school. Jones’s rejection of Amelia is made to be a rejection of sentimentality, and Thackeray lays claim to the sentimental as an index of sensibility: she cries over dead pets, lost friends, and even silly novels. Thackeray makes it awkward for us by linking the three so that we cannot be as selective in our emotional snobbishness as we should like.
Amelia is, as a character and a woman, deliberately sentimental: that is, she is meant to be the sentimental heroine of an unsentimental novel, illustrating the complexity of the heart’s excesses. We shall begin by loving her and feeling with her in her friendship, love, grief, maternal affection, but we shall eventually learn the limitations of sensibility uncontrolled by reason: she will worship her unworthy husband, alive and dead, spoil her son, and make sentimental demands on Dobbin, her patient lover. The very first chapter prepares us for this aspect of Thackeray’s criticism, his refusal to accept unqualified sensibility as a moral norm. Heart like this can be linked with silliness and excess: it is all very well to cry for dead birds but not for silly novels. But the qualification of heart is less conspicuous, at first, than the qualification of art. Only in the misplaced loving gift of Miss Jemima, the rejected dictionary, do we see our first clear instance of sentimentality; it is punished rudely by its exact opposite, hard heartedness, which also earns its first clear criticism when, biting the hand that feeds, it throws back the dictionary at the silly affectionate old woman. The reader is involved even with her rejection, because Thackeray tells us, drily, that she is not going to appear again:
Miss Jemima had already whimpered several times at the idea of Amelia’s. departure; and, but for fear of her sister, would have gone off in downright hysterics, like the heiress (who paid double) of St Kitt’s. Such luxury of grief, however, is only. allowed to parlour-boarders. Honest Jemima had all the bills, and the washing, and the mending, and the puddings, and the plate and crockery, and the servants to superintend. But why speak about her? It is probable that we shall not hear of her again from this moment to the end of time, and that when the great filigree iron gates are once closed on her, she and her awful sister will never issue therefrom into this little world of history. (Ibid.)
What does this rather odd passage mean? That there are heroines even less heroic than Amelia, who is, once this passage has urged us to reflect, more of a heroine than Miss Jemima? Thackeray seems to mean what he says in the sentence ‘Such luxury of grief, however, is only allowed to parlour boarders’. In a novel which is about the luxury of grief, Thackeray reminds us, in the dismissal of Jemima, of the circumstances that permit grief, in and out of novels. He also claims for his novel a high degree of realism; though it is interesting to distinguish his claim from George Eliot’s in the totally tolerant Adam Bede, where Lizbeth Bede is permitted her ‘luxury of grief’. At the same time, he draws our attention to the social interest of his emotional theme: if people like Amelia dwell on grief, devote themselves to worship of dead, husband and living son, it is as a luxury. Thus he makes another qualification of heart: sensitivity, as well as art, depends on position and possessions. Thackeray’s initial creation of category is uncomfortably blurred. On the one hand we have Miss Pinkerton, the Johnsonian style, the great filigree iron gates, Jones, with his contempt for sentiment, and Becky, able to put down the grand style with fluent French. On the other hand, Amelia, all tolerant and sentimental readers, and Jemima, loving, giving, artless. Between the two worlds, the rejection of the dictionary; yet, beside it, Jemima’s blessing and the two-edged admission that Jemima is not promising material for Thackeray’s novel.
The realistic effects of the self-conscious reference should be stressed here. Thackeray insists on the illusion, the art, the performance, the drama, the novel, but in such a way — dismissing a character who is not qualified to be a character — that brings the novel very close indeed to life. There are some unpromising materials, he says, that will not come in; and the very mention reminds us of the novelist’s selection from life, in a way that is moving and evaluative. At the extreme of art is Thackeray himself; at the extreme of heart is Jemima, who will be left out. The reader is made wary, and perhaps, as Thackeray wished, uncomfortable. If he is attentive, he will not reject Jones, Amelia, Miss Pinkerton or Johnson’s dictionary too precipitately. This first formal and framing scene in Chapter I of Vanity Fair makes plain the heroines’ initiation into the great world, and the reader’s initiation into the world of the novel. In Chapter 8, Thackeray draws our attention, first by direct dramatic presentation, then by complex authorial commentary, to certain crucial differences between Becky’s art and his own. In the chapters that bridge the initiation and the very explicit analysis, we have seen Becky beginning her career as an artist in life. She does, in fact, possess some positive artistic talents, chiefly displayed in her entertaining and persuasive performances of miming and singing. In Chapter 8, Thackeray adds a new artistic achievement, epistolary and literary. Becky’s letter to Amelia probably takes a glance at epistolary fiction in its feminine effusiveness and self-pity, and its very lack of resemblance to the situations of Pamela and Clarissa. But the chief purpose, as I see it, is to bridge Becky’s artistic forte, which is dramatic, and Thackeray’s, which is literary. Becky is given the whole narrative burden, for the space of her letter, of introducing the reader to a new place and several new characters. She is a quite convenient surrogate for Thackeray, being, like him, sharply attentive, witty and satirical, but she is of course not simply a surrogate, and her letter also shows the Becky Sharp traits of false sensibility and predatoriness. Her letters are usually written to get something, directly or indirectly, and this letter is clearly designed to keep a tenuous hook on the Sedleys — ‘Is your poor brother recovered of his rack-punch?’ – and even Amelia, who may be good for another India muslin or pink silk in the future. But the cast-off dresses are still fresh (see Chapter 11 for the hint about their replacements) and Thackeray is free to develop Becky’s literary gifts.
Throughout the novel, her letters are important in the furthering of the action and the development of her character. There is the unsuccessful letter dictated to Rawdon and addressed to Miss Crawley, which does not take in the old lady for a minute, since Becky has thought of using short sentences but not of misspelling. Moreover, the letter is fatally amusing, and Miss Crawley detects Becky’s fundamental style, as well as appreciating, it and asking for more. There is the more crucial letter written to Rawdon in the sponging-house, designed to put him off affectionately and humorously, but unable to hide her exhibitionism and self-interest. Its crude ingratiation does not take in Rawdon, who also detects her fundamental style, failing to be amused by Becky’s jokes, and disliking them for the first time. But the first letter, in Chapter 8, is a more disengaged venture. It introduces the reader to King’s Crawley and to some new and important characters. It is a superb stroke of art, totally and variously eloquent. The very title of the chapter, ‘Private and Confidential’, is expressive of the epistolary gossip of bosom-friends and its frank-mark, ‘Free.-Pitt Crawley’, is informative and ironic — who pays and for what, or who does not pay, is always of interest in Thackeray.
MY DEAREST, SWEETEST AMELIA,
With what mingled joy and sorrow do I take up the pen to write to my dearest friend! Oh, what a change between to-day and yesterday! Now I am friendless and alone; yesterday I was at home, in the sweet company of a sister, whom I shall ever, euer cherish!
I will not tell you in what tears and sadness I passed the fatal night in which I separated from you. You went on Tuesday to joy and happiness, with your mother and your devoted young soldier by your side; and I thought of you all night, dancing at Perkins’s, the prettiest, I am sure, of all the young ladies at the Ball. I was brought by the groom in the old carriage to Sir Pitt Crawley’s town house, where, after John the groom had behaved most rudely and insolently to me (alas! ’twas safe to insult poverty and misfortune!), I was given over to Sir P’s care, and made to pass the night in an old gloomy bed, and by the side of a horrid gloomy old charwoman, who keeps the house. I did not sleep one single wink the whole night.
Sir Pitt is not what we silly girls, when we used to read Cecilia at Chiswick, imagined a baronet must have been. Anything, indeed, less like Lord Orville cannot be imagined. Fancy an old, stumpy, short, vulgar, and very dirty man, in old clothes and shabby old gaiters, who smokes a horrid pipe, and cooks his own horrid supper in a saucepan. He speaks with a country accent, and swore a great deal at the old charwoman, at the hackney coachman who drove us to the inn where the coach went from, and on which I made the journey outside for the greater part. of the way….
‘There’s an avenue,’ said Sir Pitt, ‘a mile long. There’s six thousand pound of timber in them there trees. Do you call that nothing?’ He pronounced avenue — eueneu, and nothing — nothink, so droll…
Here, my dear, I was interrupted last night by a dreadful thumping at my door and who do you think it was? Sir Pitt Crawley in his night-cap and dressing gown, such a figure! As I shrank away from such a visitor, he came forward and seized my candle; ‘no candles after eleven o’clock, Miss Becky,’ said he. ‘Go to bed in the dark, you pretty little hussey (that is what he called me), and unless you wish me to come for the candle every night, mind and be in bed at eleven.’ And with this, he and Mr Horrocks the butler went off laughing. You may be sure I shall not encourage any more of their visits. They let loose two immense bloodhounds at night, which all last night were yelling and howling at the moon….
Half an hour after our arrival, the great dinner-bell was rung, and I came down with my two pupils (they are very thin and insignificant little chits of ten and eight years old). I came down in your dear muslin gown (about which that odious Mrs Pinner was so rude, because you gave it me); for I am to be treated as one of the family, except on company days, when the young ladies and I are to dine up-stairs.
Well, the great dinner-bell rang, and we all assembled in the little drawing-room where my Lady Crawley sits. She is the second Lady Crawley, and mother of the young ladies. She was an ironmonger’s daughter, and her marriage was thought a great match. She looks as if she had been handsome once, and her eyes are always weeping for the loss of her beauty. She is pale and meagre, and high shouldered; and has not a word to say for herself, evidently. Her step-son, Mr Crawley, was likewise in the room. He was in full dress, as pompous as an undertaker. He is pale, thin, ugly, silent; he has thin legs, no chest, hay-coloured whiskers, and straw-coloured hair. He is the very picture of his sainted mother over the mantel-piece — Griselda of the noble house of Binkie….
Lady Crawley is always knitting the worsted. Sir Pitt is always tipsy, every night; and, I believe, sits with Horrocks, the butler. Mr Crawley always reads sermons in the evening; and in the morning is locked up in his study, or else rides to Mudbury, on county business, or to Squashmore, where he preaches, on Wednesdays and Fridays, to the tenants there.
A hundred thousand grateful loves to your dear papa and mamma! Is your poor brother recovered of his rack-punch? Oh, dear! Oh, dear! How men should beware of wicked punch!
Ever and ever thine own,
REBECCA
The first thing we notice is the conventional satire on female sensibility. The strongest impression is that of exaggeration and falsity: ‘My Dearest, Sweetest Amelia’; or ‘With what mingled joy and sorrow do I take up the pen to write to my dearest friend! . . . Now I am friendless and alone . . .’ But these initial emotions of indulgence, envy and self-pity soon give way to the sheer verve of narrative and presentation of character. Thackeray does something simple but clever with Becky’s narration; he allows it to overlap slightly with his own narrative in Chapter 10, so that we see a slight discrepancy between what has happened and what Becky presents as happening. Nothing very marked; just a little evidence that Becky is a liar: the detail that she has not slept a wink (when the author has said that she does) and the omission of her attempt to pump the old charwoman with whom she shares a bed. She presents herself as the heroine of a Gothic novel[5] rather than a resilient, unfastidious and predatory opportunist. But what is most striking is the wit and humour of Becky’s narrative, achieved at the expense of the characters in her story. The girls are ‘very thin and insignificant little chits of ten and eight years old’. Lady Crawley ‘looks as if she had been handsome once, and her eyes are always weeping for the loss of her beauty’. Pitt Crawley is ‘pompous as an undertaker…pale, thin, ugly, silent; he has thin legs, no chest, hay-coloured whiskers, and straw-coloured hair’. Sir Pitt is exposed by his ‘dumpy little legs’ and rustic accent. The butler is laughed at for his ludicrous French pronunciation (Becky’s pride in her French is one of her humourless weaknesses), and Miss Horrocks, described as ‘very much over dressed’, flings Becky a look of scorn as ‘she plumped down on her knees’.
Such strokes of wit and ridicule may be enjoyed for their own sake, and our critical spirit may be held in check until Thackeray himself stands back to analyse the letter. The contrast between the maidenly gush and the hard-hitting satire is probably clear, but we do not feel strongly critical until Thackeray drily observes that we should.[6] For although he has been using Beck as a narrator, the narration is itself material for satire. It is satire proffered for the reader’s enjoyment, then analysed by the satirist.
Everything considered, I think it is quite as well for our dear Amelia Sedley, in Russell Square, that Miss Sharp and she are parted. Rebecca is a droll funny creature, to be sure; and those descriptions of the poor lady weeping for the loss of her beauty, and the gentleman ‘with hay-coloured whiskers and straw-coloured hair’, are very smart, doubtless, and show a great knowledge of the world. That she might, when on her knees, have been thinking of something better than Miss Horrocks’s ribbons, has possibly struck both of us. But 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 falsenesses and pretensions. And while the moralist, who is holding forth on the cover (an accurate portrait of your humble servant), professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation is arrayed: yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as far as one knows it, whether one mounts a cap and bells or a shovel-hat; and a deal of disagreeable matter must come out in the course of such an undertaking. (Chap. 8)
This first ironic combination of criticism and defence is Thackeray at his most subtle and disconcerting: we cannot know what he is saying in this first paragraph which neatly balances indictment with justification, and relates Becky to her author. But what does he mean by speaking the truth? Does he refer to his own exposure of Becky? Or does he also include her exposure of the vanity and foolishness of Lady Crawley, Pitt and Miss Horrocks, who are all easily and accurately describable as vain and foolish, ‘full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions’.
Another contrast and symmetrical figure follow: the story of a preacher — a Neapolitan story-teller — who worked himself up into such a ‘rage and passion’ against ‘some of the villains whose wicked deeds he was describing and inventing that the audience could not resist it’. The result of the story-teller’s fervour was a good profit: ‘the hat went round, and the bajocchi tumbled into it, in the midst of a perfect storm of sympathy’. This anecdote is balanced against that of the Parisian actors who refuse to play villains and prefer to play virtuous characters for a lower payment.[7] He observes: ‘I set these two stories one against the other, so that you may see that it is not from mere mercenary motives that the present performer is desirous to show up and trounce his villains; but because he has a sincere hatred of them, which he cannot keep down, and which must find a vent in suitable abuse and bad language.’ Not a simple antithesis, it needs careful analysis before we finally conclude that Thackeray is admitting his own lack of pure motivation. After all, he is a performer who gains from the performance, an author earning his living with this serial (later a book) which is paid for by the reader. Thackeray is distinguishing between his satiric stance and Becky’s; he is telling us clearly that though a critic, she is subjected to the author’s criticism as ‘one who has no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for anything beyond success. Such people there are living and flourishing in the world — Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless; let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main’.
This disclosure criticizes and clarifies Becky’s wit and ridicule. While admitting that Thackeray writes for gain, it claims that his satiric mode derives from Faith, Hope and Charity. It invokes lofty and noble moral purpose: he is mercenary but not ‘merely’ mercenary. If we then look at Thackeray’s irony, scorn, wit and ridicule; we see that his satire is not cynical; rather it derives from Hope and Faith in the possibilities of human nature, and has Charity. Thackeray is a master of timing and placing, and follows this criticism of Becky’s immoral and eclectic satire and wit by a conspicuously charitable and serious satiric piece in the next chapter. Another instance of symmetry and juxtaposition, it is also an instance of Thackeray’s explicitness and clarity. Uncomfortable though he may be as a satirist constantly involving the reader in the satire, he takes no chances with misunderstanding. He is writing a novel about the corruption of nature, and this corruption shows itself here, in Becky, performance, wit and satire. However, as an artist sharing the actions of performance, wit and satire, he is constrained to distinguish between right and wrong wit, right and wrong satire. The distinctions involve an art which has a heart — Hope, Faith, Charity — and an art which is heartless, ‘no reverence for anything except for prosperity’. At the same time, he is aware and forced to admit that he is involved in profiting too. The character and the author are fully compared and contrasted. This is extremely rare in English fiction, apart from the earlier and influential case of Fielding who presented, in Tom Jones, antithetical images of his own desire for lofty Fame and worldly prosperity — what
Thackeray, memorably recalling Fielding’s invocation of roast beef, calls ‘a little of the Sunday side’.
Chapter 8, then, exposes Becky as a heartless artist practising Thackeray’s arts, and implies that Thackeray is more honourable than Becky. Chapter 9 follows with a demonstration, taking a revised look at those characters analysed so heartlessly and artfully by Becky. Sir Pitt, Lady Crawley and Mr Pitt Crawley are all presented afresh, with wit and satire, and with sympathy and charity. Sir Pitt, for whom admittedly little can be said, is shown as first marrying ‘under the auspices of his parents’, then marrying to please himself. There is feeling in ‘He had his pretty Rose, and what more need a man require than to please himself?’ What follows is inside information, not mere brilliant superficial wit, and it is much more devastating than. Becky’s exposure: ‘So he used to get drunk every night: to beat his pretty Rose sometimes: to leave her in Hampshire when he went to London for the parliamentary session, without a single friend in the whole world.’ An extremely charitable account of pretty Rose herself follows, together with a glance at her limitations and losses: ‘ … she had no sort of character, nor talents, nor opinions, nor occupations, nor amusements, nor that vigour of soul and ferocity of temper which often falls to the lot of entirely foolish women….O Vanity Fair — Vanity Fair! This might have been, but for you, a cheery lass: — Peter Butt and Rose, a happy man and wife’.
There is a dignified and sympathetic account of Pitt, his respect for his mother-in-law, his kindness, and then — just in case we were beginning to identify Thackeray’s manner of satiric analysis with charity and imagination — a devastating account of his mediocrity, industry and lack of self-knowledge. Thackeray’s own wit is disarmingly produced when least expected, as we nod over his ability to see the humanity of these characters with heart and generosity; it is harder than anything achieved by Becky’s rather visual ridicule: ‘… yet he failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity which ought to have insured any man a success. He did not even get the prize poem, which all his friends said he was sure of’. Thackeray is very deliberate in his revision of Becky’s satire, even to the extent of commenting when he agrees with her: ‘Miss Sharp’s accounts of his employment at Queen’s Crawley were not caricatures. He subjected the servants there to the devotional exercises before mentioned, in which (and so much the better) he brought his father to join.’ The parentheses of course mark, once more, the comment Becky would not be capable of making.
Thackeray’s expansion and revision has one last effect. He has a capacity for moral and social diagnosis and generalization which Becky, at least at this stage in her education, utterly lacks. She sees, at school and out of it, how she is at an unfair disadvantage because of her birth and poverty; but later, when she makes the celebrated suggestion that she could be a good woman on five thousand a year, she does not see into the heartlessness of Vanity Fair, having insufficient heart and vision for the enterprise. Her social criticism, even when generalized, is shallow. Thackeray, having like Becky observed Sir Pitt’s drunkenness and illiteracy, though more seriously and less amusedly, also sees the criticism of society involved in marking the defects of this dignitary. Becky finds Sir Pitt funny; ‘Anything, indeed, less like Lord Orville cannot be imagined,’ she comments, in her literary and hypocritically fastidious way. Thackeray replaces this with a moral fervour:
Vanity Fair — Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read — who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than the most brilliant genius or spotless virtue. (Chap. 9)
At one stroke, Thackeray candidly admits his own involvement; he makes explicit and dramatic the seriousness, profundity and passion of his satire. Avoiding a simple division of intellect or feeling into art and nature, he creates an art which is as close to nature, and as inclusive and serious, as possible. He also suggests, craftily and dramatically, that social criticism is his aim.
…
Notes
1 Comparison of Thackeray’s portrait of Miss Pinkerton with the language and sentiments of Samuel Johnson suggests that Thackeray had Johnson close at hand. Amelia is not unworthy’ of assuming social position; Johnson describes Swift’s advancement similarly: ‘In the year following he wrote A Project for the Advancement of Religion, addressed to Lady Berkeley, by whose kindness it is not unlikely that he was advanced to benefices.’ (Life of Swift, para. 34)
In the second sentence of Miss Pinkerton’s letter, Thackeray parodies the parallelisms and movement from general to particular of a typical Johnsonian sentence: ‘Milton would not have excelled in dramatick writing; he knew human nature only in the gross, and had never studied the shades of character, nor the combinations of concurring or the perplexity of contending passions.’ (Life of Milton, para. 268)
And Miss Pinkerton’s pedagogical advice to Amelia regarding ‘deportment and carriage’ echoes Johnson’s account of Swift’s failure as a student very faithfully: ‘It must disappoint every reader’s expectation that, when at the usual time he claimed the Bachelorship of Arts, he was found by the examiners too conspicuously deficient for regular admission, and obtained his degree at last by special favour, a term used in that university to denote want of merit.
‘Of this disgrace it may easily be supposed that he was much ashamed, and shame had its proper effect in producing reformation. He resolved from that time to study eight-hours a day, and continued his industry for seven years, with what improvement is sufficiently known.’ (Ibid., paras 415-16)
2 For a fuller discussion of this kind of reversal, see Chap. 1. ‘Rank and Reversal.’
3 In the frontispiece, not only is ‘the moralist who is holding forth on the cover’ wearing a fool’s cap, but so is every member of his audience, even including a mother and her baby.
4 ‘Before the Curtain’ was written by Thackeray after he wrote the novel; (for its publication in book form. It appeared in the last number of the serial publication. For more on this subject and the precedents for the dramatic analogy, see Joan Stevens, ‘A Note on Thackeray’s Manager of the Performance’, NCF, 22 (March 1968), 391-7.
5 It is like a burlesque of Richardson in parts, of Mrs Radcliffe in others.
6 See Edgar F. Harden, ‘The Discipline and Significance of Form in Vanity Fair’, PMLA, 82 (December 1967), 530-42. Harden shows that Vanity Fair has a thoroughgoing pattern that specifically pairs and groups successive instalments.
7 Thackeray was very impressed by this evidence of moral action in the theatre and wrote about it first in more detail in The Paris Sketch Book.