Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray(1848)
Extract
Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?
Two young women leave Miss Pinkerton's academy and enter a world governed by money, marriage, and the merciless calculus of social position. One is gentle Amelia Sedley, born to comfort. The other is Becky Sharp, born to nothing, armed with wit and an absolute refusal to accept her station. William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 novel calls itself "a novel without a hero," and the subtitle is precise: no one here is innocent, no virtue goes unpunished, and the cleverest woman in the room is also the most dangerous. Serialized across nineteen months, it became the great panorama of Regency England, moving from drawing rooms to the battlefield of Waterloo. Thackeray watches his puppets with an affection that never softens into mercy.
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Eliot takes Thackeray's panoramic ambition and gives it a moral seriousness that makes Becky Sharp look like a holiday.
Flaubert strips Thackeray's social comedy to a single woman's delusions, and the satire becomes a tragedy.
Dickens surveys the same society with the same scope, but his fog is institutional where Thackeray's is moral.