Authors: William Makepeace Thackeray
ISBN-13: 9781848376113, ISBN-10: 1848376111
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
Date Published: June 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)
About the Contributor:
Joanna Trollope is the author of THE BEST OF FRIENDS, OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN, and most recently, MARRYING THE MISTRESS, among other books. She lives in England.
William Makepeace Thackeray, whose satiric novels are often regarded as the great upper-class counterpart to Dickens's panoramic depiction of lower-class Victorian society, was born on July 18, 1811, in Calcutta, India. His father, a prosperous official of the British East India Company, died four years later, and at the age of six Thackeray was sent to England to be educated. After graduating from the Charterhouse School in London, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1829 but left the following year without taking a degree. After reading law for a short time at the Middle Temple he moved to Paris in 1832 to study art. Although he eventually abandoned the idea of painting as a career, Thackeray continued to draw throughout his life, illustrating many of his own works. When financial reversals wiped out his inheritance, he resettled in London and turned to journalism for a livelihood. By then he had married Isabella Shawe, a young Irishwoman with whom he had three daughters.
Thackeray's earliest literary success, "The Yellowplush Correspondence," a group of satiric sketches written in the guise of a cockney footman's memoirs, was serialized in Fraser's Magazine beginning in 1837. "Catherine" (serialized 1839-40; published 1869), his first novel, parodied the crime stories popular in Victorian England. Under the name Michael Angelo Titmarsh, the most famous of his many pseudonyms, Thackeray turned out "The Paris Sketch Book" (1840) and "The Irish Sketch-Book" (1843), two popular volumesof travel writing. "The Luck of Barry Lyndon" (1844), which chronicles the adventures of an Irish knave in eighteenth-century England, marked his first serious attack on social pretension. In "The Book of Snobs" (1848), a collection of satiric portraits originally published in Punch magazine (1846-47), he lampooned the avarice and snobbery occasioned by the Industrial Revolution.
"Vanity Fair," Thackeray's resplendent social satire exposing the greed and corruption raging in England during the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars, brought him immediate acclaim when it appeared in Punch beginning in 1847. "The more I read Thackeray's works," wrote Charlotte Bronte, "the more certain I am that he stands alonealone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling (his feeling, though he makes no noise about it, is about the most genuine that ever lived on a printed page), alone in his power, alone in his simplicity, alone in his self-control. Thackeray is a Titan. . . . I regard him as the first of modern masters."
Vanity Fair is a story of two heroines-one humble, the other a scheming social climber-who meet in boarding school and embark on markedly different lives. Amid the swirl of London's posh ballrooms and affairs of love and war, their fortunes rise and fall. Through it all, Thackeray lampoons the shallow values of his society, reserving the most pointed barbs for the upper crust. What results is a prescient look at the dogged pursuit of wealth and status-and the need for humility.
Before the Curtain | ix | |
I | Chiswick Mall | 11 |
II | In Which Miss Sharp and Miss Sedley Prepare to Open the Campaign | 18 |
III | Rebecca Is in Presence of the Enemy | 29 |
IV | The Green Silk Purse | 38 |
V | Dobbin of Ours | 52 |
VI | Vauxhall | 64 |
VII | Crawley of Queen's Crawley | 78 |
VIII | Private and Confidential | 87 |
IX | Family Portraits | 97 |
X | Miss Sharp Begins to Make Friends | 105 |
XI | Arcadian Simplicity | 112 |
XII | Quite a Sentimental Chapter | 128 |
XIII | Sentimental and Otherwise | 137 |
XIV | Miss Crawley at Home | 150 |
XV | In Which Rebecca's Husband Appears for a Short Time | 171 |
XVI | The Letter on the Pincushion | 181 |
XVII | How Captain Dobbin Bought a Piano | 190 |
XVIII | Who Played on the Piano Captain Dobbin Bought | 200 |
XIX | Miss Crawley at Nurse | 213 |
XX | In Which Captain Dobbin Acts as the Messenger of Hymen | 225 |
XXI | A Quarrel About an Heiress | 236 |
XXII | A Marriage and Part of a Honeymoon | 246 |
XXIII | Captain Dobbin Proceeds on His Canvass | 256 |
XXIV | In Which Mr. Osborne Takes Down the Family Bible | 263 |
XXV | In Which All the Principal Personages Think Fit to Leave Brighton | 278 |
XXVI | Between London and Chatham | 300 |
XXVII | In Which Amelia Joins Her Regiment | 309 |
XXVIII | In Which Amelia Invades the Low Countries | 316 |
XXIX | Brussels | 326 |
XXX | "The Girl I Left Behind Me" | 341 |
XXXI | In Which Jos Sedley Takes Care of His Sister | 351 |
XXXII | In Which Jos Takes Flight, and the War is Brought To a Close | 364 |
XXXIII | In Which Miss Crawley's Relations Are very Anxious About Her | 383 |
XXXIV | James Crawley's Pipe is Put Out | 395 |
XXXV | Widow and Mother | 414 |
XXXVI | How to Live Well on Nothing a Year | 426 |
XXXVII | The Subject Continued | 436 |
XXXVIII | A Family in a Very Small Way | 452 |
XXXIX | A Cynical Chapter | 468 |
XL | In Which Becky is Recognized by the Family | 479 |
XLI | In Which Becky Revisits the Halls of Her Ancestors | 489 |
XLII | Which Treats of the Osborne Family | 502 |
XLIII | In Which the Reader has to Double the Cape | 510 |
XLIV | A Roundabout Chapter between London and Hampshire | 521 |
XLV | Between Hampshire and London | 532 |
XLVI | Struggles and Trials | 542 |
XLVII | Gaunt House | 551 |
XLVIII | In Which the Reader is Introduced to the Very Best of Company | 561 |
XLIX | In Which We Enjoy Three Courses and a Dessert | 574 |
L | Contains a Vulgar Incident | 582 |
LI | In Which a Charade is Acted Which May or May Not Puzzle the Reader | 593 |
LII | In Which Lord Steyne Shows Himself in a Most Amiable Light | 613 |
LIII | A Rescue and a Catastrophe | 625 |
LIV | Sunday After the Battle | 635 |
LV | In Which the Same Subject is Pursued | 645 |
LVI | Georgy is Made a Gentleman | 663 |
LVII | Eothen | 677 |
LVIII | Our Friend the Major | 686 |
LIX | The Old Piano | 699 |
LX | Returns to the Genteel World | 711 |
LXI | In Which Two Lights are Put Out | 718 |
LXII | Am Rhein | 733 |
LXIII | In Which We Meet an Old Acquaintance | 745 |
LXIV | A Vagabond Chapter | 759 |
LXV | Full of Business and Pleasure | 777 |
LXVI | Amantium Irae | 786 |
LXVII | Which Contains Births, Marriages, and Deaths | 803 |
Afterword | 823 | |
Selected Bibligraphy | 831 | |
A Note on the Text | 832 |