Vanity Fair Study Guide

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta, British India, in 1811. His father and mother both worked for the East India Company, although his father died just a couple years after Thackeray’s birth, causing his mother to send Thackeray back to England. In England, Thackeray attended an elite boarding school called Charterhouse that he disliked so much that he would later write about a fictional school called “Slaughterhouse.” He later studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Having received a large inheritance from his father, Thackeray dabbled in painting until he lost most of his money gambling and investing in newspapers. In Paris, he met the Irish Isabella Gethin Shawe, whom he would later marry. Isabella had little money, and so Thackeray turned to writing to writing to support her and their children. He began writing criticism and eventually started serializing his first novel-length work, Catherine, with The Luck of Barry Lyndon coming soon after it. In 1840, Thackeray’s wife became depressed after the birth of their third child and was institutionalized. After a stint writing harshly anti-Irish pieces for the magazine Punch, where he argued against giving Irish Catholics aid during the Great Famine, he eventually started writing Vanity Fair, which was published in serial installments, also in Punch. Vanity Fair greatly raised Thackeray’s reputation, and while his subsequent novels were also well-received at the time, he remains best known today for Vanity Fair, as well as for The Luck of Barry Lydon, in part due to Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film adaptation of the work. Thackery’s health suffered in the 1850s, which his doctors blamed on too much alcohol and chili peppers. He died unexpectedly of a stroke in 1863 at age 52.

The most important historical context for Vanity Fair is the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. After seizing leadership of France in a coup, Napoleon eventually led France into a series of conflicts across Europe known as the Napoleonic Wars. Over the course of these wars, which lasted from 1803 to 1815, between three and six million people died. Napoleon fought various coalitions of other European countries (including England), achieving several victories and proving his skill as a tactician. After a failed attempt to invade Russia, however, Napoleon began to lose momentum, and in 1814, his enemies ultimately succeeded in forcing him to abdicate and accept an exile on the island of Elba. Napoleon escaped the island in 1815 and took control of France for another 100 days. The British and their allies ultimately defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 (and in the novel, this is the battle where George dies). In addition to Napoleon, another important historical event for Vanity Fair is the establishment of the East India Company. Before Britain had an official colonial government in India, The East India Company controlled Britain’s affairs in India, forming a trading monopoly and even deploying its own military to control Indian civilians. Britain’s involvement in India is part of the country’s larger history of colonialism, where Britain and other European took control of countries in other parts of the world, often through violence, in order to exploit them for resources. This explains why characters like Jos, Rawdon, and Dobbin all travel abroad in the novel for either military or business purposes.

Vanity Fair takes its title from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. In that popular allegory, a pilgrim stops at a place called Vanity Fair, which represents how humanity is too attached to material things, a theme that also clearly resonates in Vanity Fair. Pilgrim’s Progress played a key role in the evolution of English literature, although as a sincere religious allegory, its style is very different from the more satirical and flippant Vanity Fair. A more direct stylistic predecessor of Thackeray is Henry Fielding, whose comic novels, including Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, also satirized greed and class differences in British society. In his lifetime, Thackery was most often compared to Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities), whose serialized novels also achieved significant popularity with both critics and general readers. One of Thackeray’s contemporary admirers was Charlotte Brontë, who dedicated Jane Eyre to him. Although Thackeray considered his own work realistic, particularly compared to the more whimsical style of Charles Dickens, later writers like Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw) would partially reject the style of Thackeray and Dickens, attempting to go even further with realism. Vanity Fair has been adapted into a variety of different media, including radio, film, television, and theater.