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
The narrator describes Sir Pitt and his family history. His first wife was highborn and complained so much that Sir Pitt promised himself he’d never find another wife like her. His second wife, Lady Crawley, is the daughter of an ironmonger. She has no particular talents other than her fair skin and pink cheeks, although the “rose” has begun to fade from these cheeks. Caught between the lower and upper class, the second Lady Crawley has few friends after marrying Sir Pitt.
Although Sir Pitt initially marries a high-born woman, he seems more comfortable with his second wife, who comes from a more modest background. While parts of this passage are sympathetic to Sir Pitt, the story continues to portray him as unworthy of his title. All of this suggests that while Thackeray satirizes the upper class (as well as those who pretend to be part of it), he is not necessarily satirizing the core values of a gentleman like honor or manners—he is more interested in satirizing how so many people with titles fail to live up to their professed values.
Themes
One of Lady Crawley’s few allies is one of Sir Pitt’s sons from his first marriage, Pitt Crawley. Children at Eton, a famous boarding school for rich people, pick on Pitt Crawley, calling him “Miss Crawley” due to how extremely polite he is. Even his brother, Rawdon, sometimes beats him up. At college, Pitt Crawley studies famous orators, saying a lot and quoting Latin but rarely expressing an original idea. After college, he gets involved in “the Negro Emancipation question.”
Pitt Crawley and Rawdon are classic opposites, with Pitt valuing book learning and Rawdon valuing brute force. Notably, this passage portrays Pitt Crawley as only getting involved in “the Negro Emancipation question” because it was popular at the time. (Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 but did not begin to officially abolish slavery until the 1830s, after the events of the novel.) While Thackeray is not necessarily expressing support of slavery, he does seem to show disdain for the Emancipation movement (by dismissing it as a trend that attracts the pretentious Pitt Crawley).
Themes
Going back to Sir Pitt, all his stinginess never quite makes him rich, particularly because he allows his land to be managed by several advisors who all either do a poor job or cheat him. He can be a boorish man who drinks too much, but he is polite to ladies, including Becky when she eventually arrives as his governess. Sir Pitt can’t spell and doesn’t even want to bother learning to read, and yet he continues to occupy a high position due to his hereditary title.
This passage reveals that Sir Pitt is penny-wise but pound foolish, caring so much about small expenses that he fails to see the big picture. Still, in spite of his obvious failings, Sir Pitt still has some sympathetic qualities, and while it’s possible to read his friendliness toward women as lecherous, it’s also true that he is one of the few characters in the story to accept and welcome Becky just as she is.
Themes
Among his many debts, Sir Pitt owes his first son Pitt Crawley a lot of money that his mother left him, but Sir Pitt seems to enjoy how being in Parliament allows him the privilege of putting off repaying his debts. He also has an unmarried half-sister (Miss Crawley) who inherited a large fortune and has promised to split it between Rawdon and Bute. Her fortune makes many people in Queen’s Crawley treat her with respect.
One of the recurring themes in this book is that many people who are supposedly wealthy are in fact more in debt than anyone else, in part because they have so much pressure to keep up appearances and maintain an expensive lifestyle. Sir Pitt is more shameless in avoiding his debts than most, but other characters with upper class pretensions without the money to back them up are constantly searching for tactful ways to avoid paying off money that they owe.
Themes
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