Becky Sharp, poor, clever, and ruthless, schemes her way through Regency England, while her foil Amelia Sedley suffers the consequences of goodness. Thackeray subtitled it 'A Novel Without a Hero' and called himself a puppet master, constantly interrupting his narrative to address the reader. The satire on English society is savage; the sympathy for Becky's ambition complicates the satire. The novel took two years to serialize and established Thackeray as Dickens's only rival. It remains one of the great panoramic novels of the nineteenth century.