![]() ![]() Thackeray’s comic masterpiece shows us our imperfections while quietly encouraging us to strive for something higher. ![]() Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, was published in installments in 1847-8: the same year that saw the publication of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, and the year before David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. All three authors were keenly aware of each other. Dickens was the undisputed master of English novelists for a decade his novels had appeared in quick succession and had been wildly popular. your prompts are in there somewhere i promise. i bring you: two middle-aged people on an angsty road trip. you asked for: twiyor snuggles and first christmas together-type shenanigans. Bronte idolized Thackeray, to whom she dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre. dear sara, merry christmas i bet this is a complete surprise for you and you totally didn’t see this coming. Thackeray, trained as a critic and essayist, wrote in the serial form popularized by Dickens but in a very different style. Where Dickens was sentimental and even pedantic, Thackeray maintained a cool, ironic stance that both infuriated and delighted readers. Vanity Fair represented a new kind of novel in English. It was a book that portrayed human nature with all its weaknesses, yet did so against the backdrop of a high moral idealism. Maybe there isn't a vein of stars calling out my name No glow from above our heads Nothing there to see you down on your knees, umm hmm Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven (twenty years in the future) Off in the future maybe there ain't no heaven It's just you and me and maybe it's just as well And if there ain't no heaven maybe there ain't. ![]() Subtitled, “A Novel Without a Hero,” Vanity Fair shows us our imperfections while quietly encouraging us to strive for something higher.īecky Sharp, the aptly named “heroine” of Vanity Fair, is a surprising, entertaining, and rather unsettling character. back from the future maybe there aint no heaven theres just you and me maybe thats all whose left & if there aint no heaven maybe there aint no hell who knows maybe there isnt a vein of stars callin out my name who knows maybe there isnt a vein of stars callin out my name who knows who knows who knows who knows callin out my name who. Of lowly birth, she is brought up at Miss Pinkerton’s fashionable boarding school where her father was once the drawing master. She hates the place, and particularly the snobbish Miss Pinkerton, and the narrative opens with her gleeful, bitter escape. (We could write an essay about the moment that Becky flings Johnson’s dictionary out the window as she goes an ingenious symbol of her rejection of civilized society and its restrictions.) Vanity Fair may be a novel without a hero, but it has two heroines, for Becky has one friend at Pinkerton’s, her alter ego, Amelia Sedley. Sweet, timid, and demure, she is Becky’s polar opposite. It is the genius of Thackeray to bring these two characters into all sorts of trying situations where the reader may see their true characters revealed, and never truly to take the side of either. ![]()
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