Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics) [Hardcover]

William Makepeace Thackeray (Author), Nicholas Dames (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2005

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

 

“I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year,” observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest—and most appealing—women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many fascinating figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, a wonderfully satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use all her wit, charm and considerable sex appeal to escape her drab destiny as a governess. From London’s ballrooms to the battlefields of Waterloo, the bewitching Becky works her wiles on a gallery of memorable characters, including her lecherous employer, Sir Pitt, his rich sister, Miss Crawley, and Pitt’s dashing son, Rawdon, the first of Becky’s misguided sexual entanglements.



Filled with hilarious dialogue and superb characterizations, Vanity Fair is a richly entertaining comedy that asks the reader, “Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?”

Features more than 100 illustrations drawn by Thackeray himself for the initial publication.

 

Nicholas Dames is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870, and other commentary on nineteenth-century British and French fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Nicholas Dames's Introduction to Vanity Fair

What kind of a novel is Vanity Fair? Given the bewildering variety of responses that it has elicited since its publication began in January 1847, we might assume that at no time since Thackeray's serial first gained public notice has the answer to that question been obvious. To the novel's first readers, Thackeray's aim seemed puzzling. G. H. Lewes, one of the Victorian period's most able critics, wondered whether Vanity Fair was too embittered to be truly humorous, and too uniformly skeptical to be effectively satirical; Charlotte Brontë, however, dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray, whom she had never met, and in the process compared the effect of Vanity Fair to that of a Hebrew prophet admonishing the kings of Judah and Israel. That dilemma—whether Vanity Fair is the work of a moral satirist, or a worldly cynic retailing gossip for the diversion of his audience—has haunted efforts to understand Thackeray ever since. In our own time the pendulum has swung closer to the latter sentiment, thanks in no small part to the efforts of more recent novelists and critics to discredit Thackeray's method; E. M. Forster, in his Aspects of the Novel (1927), compared Thackeray's interruptions of his narrative to that of a bar patron offering to buy you a drink in return for some attention to his not quite lucid stories. There have, however, been intriguing testimonies to the contrary. The Trinidadian historian, social critic, and activist intellectual C. L. R. James attested to reading Vanity Fair regularly starting at the age of eight, learning the workings of the British class system while feeling their persistence in his own West Indian milieu; as James later commented, it was to Thackeray, even more than to Marx, that he owed his vocation.



Worldly cynic, righteous prophet, tiresome companion, proto-Marxist social anatomist: the appellations are as contradictory as they are vivid and plausible. What unites these disparate accounts of the novel's effect, however, is their attempt to describe its voice—a narrative style that speaks in a manner utterly unlike the usual Victorian novel. Vanity Fair is Thackeray's masterpiece, his most ambitious and colorful effort, full of characters and scenes memorable in a way his later work could only occasionally recapture; but its most important element, the fact of its presentation that accounts at once for its brilliance and its undeniable difficulty, is the voice of its narrator. Amid a babble of distinctive accents—Becky Sharp's light, cutting wit, Jos Sedley's ponderous inanities, William Dobbin's plain, gentlemanly eloquence—the narrator stands out as the most continually entertaining, and continually protean, of voices. The voice of Vanity Fair's narrator is its great contribution to the history of the English novel, while being nonetheless the most difficult of the novel's aspects to describe fully or accurately. Without the pyrotechnic virtuosity of Dickens's style, or the measured gravitas of George Eliot, Thackeray's narrator speaks with a mixture of tones that might perhaps be the most distinctively modern among the styles of the Victorian novel.



Most evident of all this voice's traits is its undeniable worldliness. As the narrator frequently advertises, he (for this voice is always a male one) has seen the insides of gentlemen's clubs, society dining rooms, auction houses where the effects of bankrupts are sold, foreign courts, respectable and not-so-respectable theaters, boarding schools, tourist hotels, coaching inns, even the chambers of servants. A Londoner, evidently, this narrator can know even the secrets whispered in female drawing rooms; "every person who treads the Pall Mall pavement and frequents the clubs of this metropolis," he blandly announces, "knows, either through his own experience or through some acquaintance with whom he plays at billiards," as much as one need know about the kind of disreputable female who dresses too showily in public and who women refuse to meet. True to his worldly awareness, Thackeray's narrator refuses to spell out the full implications of his description—how might these women earn the money to afford those dresses?—preferring instead to let implication, and a knowing smile, do the work. The innocent and ignorant, "the apprentices in the Park" or "the squire's wife in Somersetshire, who reads of their doings in the Morning Post," will remain uninstructed in this curious aspect of metropolitan society. As for the narrator and his readers, surely they know enough without being explicitly instructed. "Men living about London," we are told, "are aware of these awful truths." We are in the hands, therefore, of a discreet and rather jaundiced narrative voice, acquainted with—and perhaps already tired of—all the restless machinations of urban strivers. Vanity Fair is a novel full of scandal, including fraud, petty deceit, extramarital complications, and (possibly) murder, but these putative outrages to Victorian notions of social decency are never narrated as surprises. Instead, Thackeray presents them to us with a half-amused, half-disgusted species of boredom, as if to say: Surely you weren't so naïve as to pretend this wasn't the case?

Product Details

• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics (September 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593083653
• ISBN-13: 978-1593083656
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #872,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All's fair in love and "Vanity", July 15, 2006

By 

E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Hardcover)

Greed, gold-digging and deception sit at the heart of "Vanity Fair." It's no joke that it's subtitled "a novel without a hero" -- William Makepeace Thackeray mercilessly skewered the pretentions and flaws of the upper class all throughout it. The result is a gloriously witty social satire.

It opens with two young women departing from a ladies' academy: dull, sweet Amelia (rich) and fiery sharp-witted Rebecca (poor). Becky Sharp is a relentless social climber, and her first effort to rise "above her station" is by trying to get Amelia's brother to marry her -- an effort thwarted by Amelia's fiancee. So instead she gets married to another family's second son, Rawdon Crawley.

Unfortunately, both young couples quickly get disinherited and George is killed. But Becky is determined to live the good life she has worked and married for -- she obtains jewels and money from admiring gentlemen, disrupting her marriage. But a little thing like a tarnished reputation isn't enough to keep Becky down...

"Vanity Fair" is actually a lot more complex than that, with dozens of little subplots and complicated character relationships. Reading it a few times is necessary to really absorb all of it, since it is not just a look at the two women in the middle of the book, but at the upper (and sometimes lower) social strata of the nineteenth century.

The main flaw of the book is perhaps that it sprawls too much -- there's always a lot of stuff going on, not to mention a huge cast of characters, and Thackeray sometimes drops the ball when it comes to the supporting characters and their little plots. It takes a lot of patience to absorb all of this. However... it's worth it.

Like most nineteenth-century writers, Thackeray had a very dense, formal writing style -- but once you get used to it, his writing becomes insanely funny. Witticisms and quips litter the pages, even if you don't pick them all up at once. At first Thackeray seems incredibly cynical (Becky's little schemes almost always pay off), but taken as a social satire, it's easier to understand why he was so cynical about the society of the time.

Becky Sharp is the quintessential anti-heroine -- she's very greedy and cold, yet she's also so smart and determined that it's hard not to have a grudging liking for her, no matter what she does. Certainly life hasn't been fair for her. Next to Becky, a goody-goody character like Amelia is pretty boring, and even the unsubtle George can't measure up to Becky.

To sum up "Vanity Fair": think a period soap opera with a heavy dose of social commentary. In other words, it doesn't get much better than this, Thackeray's masterpiece.

4.0 out of 5 stars Social Climbing, December 11, 2009

By 

A. Luciano (Lowell, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Hardcover)

Amelia and Becky are schoolmates together at a fancy young ladies' finishing school in England in the 1800s. When the two leave together, Amelia is sobbed over, remembered fondly, and given a gift by the headmistress. Amelia comes from a good family and is very wealthy.

Becky, on the other hand, is a poor orphan who had to earn her stay at the school by teaching French to the younger girls, and her graduation is not mourned by anyone. Once free from the stifling environment of the school, Becky is able to look around and the world and find the best way of getting ahead in it.

This book follows the paths of Amelia and Becky as they each make their way through society and, for very different reasons, marry and gain families of their own. Becky and Amelia both struggle to be liked, to be accepted, and to make their way through their socially complex England.

The story of these characters is fascinating, and it is especially compelling to watch Becky, who is always on the lookout for the most advantageous opportunities provided to her. Amelia's story is much less turbulent, as she is not at all the conniver Becky is.

The book was a bit of a slog; it took a long time for me to read and I sometimes felt like I was missing some of the jokes. The characters and the story were still very interesting, though, despite being written in the style of the time.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars nice edition, August 25, 2008

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Connie Comfort "MCC" (Connecticut) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Hardcover)

I ordered this copy to entice my grand-daughter to read Thackery. It worked. She plowed through the entire novel in two weeks. This excellent edition, in fine condition helped. Thank you.