Vanity Fair

[The end of the story. Distressed muffin-man indeed!]

This being notice of a re-read of an old classic, Vanity Fair of reference 1, a re-read which has taken some months, starting in July, having speeded up a good deal in September and finished early this month. A re-read which has served to remind me of the convenience of a Kindle for fat books. For a proper introduction to the book see reference 2.

I had forgotten that the author is pretty visible, with regular interjections about this or that. A lot of which serve to remind the reader of the privileged position of the author of a tale of this sort. Reminders which are much less in evidence in the famous novels – say of Hardy, Conrad and Lawrence - which followed.

One of which is to be found in Chapter 47, ‘Gaunt House’, where a lot of the gossip is said to have been provided by one Tom Eaves, who appears to be a gossip columnist. As it happened, I found this chapter a bit hard to follow, a bit hard to keep track of the various Gaunts and Steynes, but there were two new-to-me titbits. First, the wife of the odious Marquis of Steyne puts up with a great deal in expiation of her fling after marriage with a flame – a French aristocrat – from before her marriage. She also takes to her (Roman) bible. Second, their elder son being childless, their younger son goes mad in his middle years and has to be shut up in a cottage with keeper and straight-jacket – leaving Steyne the father to be haunted by the curse of madness hanging over the family. Which goes some way to accounting for his odious behaviour.

A lot of space is given to the pretensions and the often unpleasant behaviour of the aristocracy and the upper middle classes – together with the parvenus, the wannabees and the hangers on – which is fair enough given that most of his readers probably came from the lower middle and upper working classes. At least there were a lot more of them and literacy was coming on. He reminds us on lots of occasions of the extent to which blood from the west end was marrying money from the east end by the start of the nineteenth century, the pretensions of the former notwithstanding. He also has a spirited go at the custom of presenting ladies at court, a presentation which usually served to make them full members of society. The sort of person you might invite to your parties. I had not thought that an aspiring author would sail so close to the monarchical wind in the first decade of the reign of Queen Victoria – but perhaps this last did not mind the louche behaviour of her immediate predecessors being lampooned. And then, towards the end of the book, we get the pasteboard version at the Court of Pumpernickel, a place with more generals than private soldiers. Prescient chap this Thackery!

I associate to the presentation of Lillie Langtry at court, a real life version of Becky Sharp, not much more than fifty years later. For whom see reference 6.

The portrait of Becky Sharp is kinder than that in most of the screen adaptations. Good looking and gifted but of shabby origins, she makes the best of her gifts to make her way in the world. Particularly her gifts to charm men of all sorts. OK so she is cynical and very visibly on the make, but as she reminds us from time to time, it is all very well to make a parade of virtue when you have a comfortable balance in the bank, with a comfortable income in the consolidated funds. The rest of us can’t afford to be squeamish if we want to get on. She is also good natured and does not get all hot and bothered about things very often.

Ditto, Captain Osborne. A spoilt son of someone who did well in the city, a vain popinjay. But he was also good company and good at the things soldiers are supposed to be good at. He did his duty at Waterloo – having repented of the way he had treated his young wife, even if he had left contrary evidence in the hands of Becky – who eventually put it to good use in weaning the foolish Amelia off her long-dead husband.

Thackery takes some trouble to show us how it was possible, for a while at least, to make a great splash in the fashionable world, without having to spend a lot of money. But it was not done painlessly; there were casualties and innocent – if foolish – people were ruined.

Television adaptations tend to foreground the relationship between Becky Sharp and her rich and powerful admirer, the Marquis of Steyne and the smash which follows Becky’s complaisant and not very bright husband stumbling across what is going on – a husband who had been a dashing young Life Guard, a hero of Waterloo. Which is fair enough, given that a good chunk of the middle of the book does too.

But now, getting near the smash, it all seemed a bit improbable to me that Steyne would have let the whole business run on for so long, to cost him so much, without more tangible rewards along the way. OK, so he was an old rake with plenty of experience of such matters, more likely to wait than a younger man, but still and all. And then that the husband would be so blind and complaisant for so long – although this does explain his fury when he finally learned the truth. I also find it puzzling that Steyne was so angry with Becky after the event, a vindictive anger which followed her for years – this even though, as already mentioned, we are told of some skeletons in his cupboard which go some way to explaining his often vicious behaviour. So maybe what we have is a parable rather than some approximation to the real world.

With part of the story being that Becky, once engaged in the great game, did not know when to stop, when to pull out with her winnings. Perhaps, as well as enjoying the game, her problem was that she was too fond of her husband, middle aged dullard though he might have become. She did not like to cut and run. Unlike her French maid who did very well out of the smash and went off to start a shop in Paris.

A bit further on, we find that Becky has descended to the lower, unsavoury ranks of expatriate life on the continent, taken to drink, gambling and irregular life to the extent that she has spoiled her once fine singing voice. But somehow, having got her claws into the fat and rich Jos Sedley, she gets back into form. It all seems a bit improbable, but it does propel the story to a satisfying and edifying end in Bath.

Odds and ends

We are told at least twice of the younger men’s often loud and boastful doings in the regimental messes of the time. Which the older men, who had done and heard it all many times before, might find rather tiresome, but mostly put up with indulgence. Perhaps the few older men that stayed on were the ones that did not mind.

A smell of Ecclesiastes on the occasion of old Mr Sedley’s death. It does not matter who you are or what you have been, but it is all gone in a few days after your departure. The waters close over the stone thrown into the pond. I remember reading similar stuff in the roughly contemporary Balzac.

A smell of women’s lib here are there. On the waste and worse than can be caused by denying women who want it a proper education and a proper occupation – apart, that is, from the important business of keeping house and raising a family – important business which is not enough for, not suited to, some.

Few of the bad characters are wholly bad, or the good characters wholly good. So Becky, though a schemer is good natured and does not bear grudge. Her husband is both a kind father and (as a young man) a bully and card sharp. Steyne is given an alibi of sorts in the family stain.

There are something over thirty mentions of ‘vanity fair’ in the blog archive, where the unit of search is a month rather than a post. Not that vanity and fair are necessarily adjacent or related and a month can represent a lot of posts. I checked about half of them: lots of vanity publishing, vanity projects and vanity businesses, but very little vanity fair, even less relevant here. A lesson in how searches do not always do what you want. On the other hand, there were only four mentions of ‘thackery’, two of which are not very relevant and two of which are from the present re-read. There is also a confusing tendency to misspell ‘Thackery’.

Conclusions

Despite its age and length, an entertaining and instructive read. Thoroughly recommended.

References

Reference 1: Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackery – 1848. 

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_Fair_(novel).

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/09/orchard-park.html. The last notice.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/07/kindling.html. The first notice of the present read.

Reference 5:  http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2012/12/literary-matters.html. Which ends with a strange story about ‘War and Peace’ being inspired, in part at least, by ‘Vanity Fair’. Possibly from a review of the book at reference 7, with the reviewer flying his own kites rather than sticking to the chapters listed here.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-jersey-lily.html. 

Reference 7: https://academic.oup.com/cornell-scholarship-online/book/16995.