Thackeray named his novel after the framing device he uses throughout—the "Vanity Fair," in which his characters are helpless puppets in a puppet show. Thackeray's fair, an allegorical carnival in which human vice and vanity are on display, is an allusion to the Vanity Fair found in the 1678 novel The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which is to Come, by the English preacher John Bunyan. Pilgrim's Progress is a work of theological fiction in the form of a Christian allegory: Bunyan's narrator follows a Christian pilgrim, fittingly named Christian, along a pilgrimage during which he encounters various characters that are either biblical figures or anthropomorphized versions of ideas and lessons from the Bible.
In the first part of the novel, Christian finds himself in Vanity Fair, the site of a never-ending fair run by Beelzebub—either a powerful demon or an incarnation of the devil himself, according to Christian theology, who is often associated with the sins of pride and gluttony. Sure enough, in this fair, every indulgence that a human could hope to consume or experience is for sale.
This is the context in which Thackeray situates his novel, and throughout the book he periodically reminds the reader that his characters are going through their respective motions within the confines of this Vanity Fair. By invoking Bunyan's allegory, Thackeray channels Bunyan's thematic exploration of greed and vanity into his own moralizing work—and emphasizes the extent to which he finds such sins on display within English society.
