Vanity Fair

"Thackeray was born in India. His father was an East India Company official who had a concubine and an illegitimate daughter by his concubine. So William had a half sister who was a woman of colour that he never acknowledged. His fiction was never, for that reason, entirely stable on the issue of race. Vanity Fair is remarkable. The title is taken from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim ’ s Progress and Bunyan’s description of London as a place of great depravity, vanity and emptiness. This was Thackeray’s first major novel. He published it in the middle of his life, at 35, when he had seen a lot of life. It is panoramic – a wonderful conspectus of the 19th century. It starts in the Napoleonic era with Waterloo. He calls it his Waterloo novel, and it was a novel that established the British century. At the same time, it has a large cast of characters. It is a kind of Tolstoyan thing, very unlike the novels that other Victorians wrote. More like Balzac or, as I say, Tolstoy. Tolstoy was, as it happens, a great admirer of Vanity Fair and drew on it in War and Peace . Unfortunately, people vote with their wallets. This is the era of Thackeray’s bicentenary and it has passed – compared to what is going to happen to Dickens – almost without notice. I think that is rather sad. Vanity Fair was serialised, as many of the great Victorian novels were. He finished it in July 1848 and then he started another novel, but that was interrupted by his catching cholera in the great epidemic, and he never really recovered from it. He died quite early in his fifties. To some extent, it was that illness which knocked the stuffing out of him. It was very sad and, arguably, unfair. Dickens became famous very young, whereas for Thackeray it didn’t happen until a good 10 years later. Thackeray believed you had to have seen something of life. The tone of his books is very middle-aged, because in those days they died a lot younger! If you don’t like that kind of middle-aged tone then the novel isn’t for you. But I do, and as you mentioned it has this most delightful heroine, Becky Sharp, who is just about the only woman in Victorian fiction who commits adultery and murder and gets away with it. She ends up a respectable woman in Vanity Fair ."

"Vanity Fair is another historical novel and a tremendous saga. I would call it the Whig version of the Regency. It is the tale of an adventuress abroad in a land where quick fortunes and metropolitan vices are very much in evidence. It is fantastically good humoured. I suppose it is the way that a liberal Victorian would look back on that time. Yes, so it is a fond remembrance of the time. I think Vanity Fair , more than any other novel, set the tone for how we think about the Regency before Jane Austen gained hugely in popularity. She is a woman on the make in a time of change. To that extent I think she is historically accurate. She learns how to manoeuvre in a very fast-changing world and make her way with all the comic richness of that. And she understands the power of Evangelical religion and the old Whig rakish values. It is a classic and, for anyone who hasn’t read it, it’s tremendous fun."