Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Vanity Fair, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Greed and Ambition
Vanity
Social Class and Character
Gender
Inheritance and Family Life
Summary
Analysis
Time has passed for Mr. Osborne, and despite his money, he’s unhappy. He proposed to Miss Swartz, but she rejected him in favor of a younger noble. He takes out some of his frustration on Jane Osborne, his unmarried daughter at home. Marrying the other daughter, Maria, was a complicated transaction that involved promising a significant portion of his inheritance.
Mr. Osborne is paying the consequences of abandoning George, making himself lonelier by cutting off Amelia and his new grandson Georgy. Mr. Osborne’s proposal to Miss Swartz (whom Mr. Osborne at one time wanted George to marry) suggests his desperation. Money, Mr. Osborne’s present state suggests, does not guarantee happiness.
Themes
The joy around Maria’s wedding is short lived for Mr. Osborne. Her new husband doesn’t want her to break off all ties with her father (who still has a decent inheritance to give), but he leads her to act more coldly toward her family as she tries to solidify her higher social status. Jane Osborne jealously reads about her sister in the newspaper. Mr. Osborne wants a woman around to keep the house and says he must approve any of Jane Osborne’s potential matches. Jane Osborne feels she’s destined to be an old maid for as long as her father is alive.
Mr. Osborne already disowned George, and now he faces his daughter Maria informally cutting herself out of the family, treating Mr. Osborne like he himself treated Mr. Sedley. Meanwhile, Jane’s status shows why marriage is so important for many of the novel’s women, who have far fewer opportunities to be independent than the male characters. While marriage came with responsibility and restrictions, particularly for women, it at least offered the freedom to move on from one’s childhood home—because Jane isn’t married, she is forced to essentially become a servant to her father.
Themes
Meanwhile, Amelia starts letting Georgy spend time with Dobbin’s sisters. In his letters, Dobbin has never mentioned anything about marrying Glorvina, so Amelia congratulates him for the upcoming marriage. When Georgy comes back, he has a gold chain and watch that he got from “an old lady, not pretty,” and Amelia figures it must be Jane Osborne. That evening at dinner, Jane Osborne tells Mr. Osborne about seeing Georgy and about how much he looked like George.
Amelia nor Dobbin aren’t ready to confess their love to each other, and yet Amelia needs to know whether or not Dobbin is actually getting married. Meanwhile, Jane Osborne certainly isn’t old compared to some of the other women in the story (like Miss Crawley), so when Georgy describes her as “an old lady, not pretty,” it shows how once women reached a certain age, they were considered spinsters, past their prime. This creates builds sympathy for Becky—while her scheming efforts to woo men and secure a husband seem cold and calculating, she’s just trying to make the most of her most precious resource as a woman—her youth—while it lasts.
Themes
