Vanity Fair

The double spine passes the subtractive test. Becky without Amelia is a picaresque; Amelia without Becky is a sentimental novel; the book needs both, and needs Waterloo exactly where it falls, killing George while his betrayal is still unread and binding Amelia for fifteen years to a fiction. The note George slips Becky at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, produced by her in the last number to free Amelia for Dobbin, shows the plot keeping its accounts across the whole length. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that a great deal is permitted rather than compelled: Miss Crawley’s illnesses and the scramble for her will, Lady Southdown’s tracts, the younger Pitt’s courtship, the Bute Crawleys’ schemes and much household business could lose a third without loss of a fact the book needs, and the narrator’s sermons repeat their point. Part of the length is the instalment’s.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The disclosure is articulated and holds: English society runs on credit, and virtue, vice and rank are functions of income. Chapter 36, “How to Live Well on Nothing a Year”, and its sequel show the Crawleys living in Curzon Street on unpaid bills, and the cost is named and placed: Raggles, the old Crawley servant who owns the house, is ruined by them. Becky’s sentence “I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year” states the finding in a line, and the narrator does not refute it. The second disclosure is less comfortable: Amelia’s goodness is a form of selfishness, a devotion that feeds on a dead man’s image and on Dobbin’s service, and Dobbin at last tells her so. The third is old Osborne’s pride, which disinherits his son and is broken by Waterloo. Held below 9.0 because the understanding is more diagnostic than inward: it shows why people act and what it costs, rarely what it is to be them.

Score: 8.8 / 10

A comic and satiric book that rises seldom, and rises high when it does. The close of chapter 32 is among the great sentences of the Victorian novel: “Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.” The battle has been kept offstage for chapters and is let in with one clause. Rawdon’s return from the sponging-house to find Becky with Lord Steyne, in chapter 53, has the force of tragedy, and the narrator’s note that Becky admired her husband at that moment, strong and brave and victorious, is the book’s point of most dreadful clarity. Old Osborne reading his dead son’s letter and old Sedley’s long decline rise in a lower key. Between these the register is the drawing room and the auction, by design. The frequency is low; the height is real.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The title and the frame are built, not hung. The fair is Bunyan’s, from The Pilgrim’s Progress, where everything is for sale; the vanity is the Preacher’s, from Ecclesiastes, and it closes the book. The puppet booth of the preface and the box shut at the last sentence make the frame govern the narrative stance from first page to last. Becky is an archetype made from particulars: the adventuress, the governess who climbs, the siren, whom the narrator draws in chapter 64 singing above the water with the monster’s tail below it, and Clytemnestra, whom she plays in the charades at Gaunt House in chapter 51 and whom the last plate names when she stands behind the curtain at Jos’s sickbed. What she has done is asked in mythic terms and left there. Held at this figure because Amelia and Dobbin are types, the clinging vine and the faithful knight, without the same depth: the gate is cleared by Becky and the frame, not by the whole cast.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The subtitle is the swerve: “A Novel without a Hero”. Thackeray refused the hero of the sentimental and the silver-fork novel, which he had parodied for years in Punch and elsewhere, and put at the centre an amoral woman who is the book’s most living figure and is never punished in proportion, beside a heroine the book quietly indicts. The stake was real: he was known as a journalist and parodist, not a novelist, and entered the market of the monthly part that Dickens held. But the inherited path is plain. The intrusive, moralising, ironic narrator is Fielding’s, whom Thackeray revered; the satiric anatomy of the town is the eighteenth century’s, Hogarth’s and Smollett’s; and the irony at the expense of sentiment is Austen’s turned to a larger stage. A turn taken with weight, not a new road: held below the gate.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The form carries knowledge in two ways. First, the double strand: Becky’s rise and fall against Amelia’s fall and rise, crossing at Brighton and Brussels and again at Pumpernickel, is an argument about two kinds of self-interest that a single plot could not make. Second, and more original, the narrator’s withholding. Was Becky guilty with Steyne? The book asks and does not answer. Did she hasten Jos’s death? The last plate answers with an image, the text with a lawyer’s reticence. The showman who claims to own the puppets and then declines to see inside them is the form of the book’s knowledge: in the Fair nobody is known from within. Held at this figure because the serial form loosened the instrument: the Pumpernickel numbers and the narrator’s late entry as a character are improvisations the form tolerates rather than requires.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The evidence of return is long and continuous: some hundred and seventy-eight years of reading, and criticism that keeps finding the book open. The narrator, moralist, showman, cynic or sentimentalist; the question of Becky’s guilt; Amelia as heroine or as indictment; the economics of the book, its credit, its inheritances and its Indian fortune; its women; its use of the Napoleonic war; and the relation of the plates to the text: each has sustained work, and each return finds more in Becky above all. Held at this figure because the well is shallower around Amelia and Dobbin, whose rereadings tend to turn on the narrator rather than on them, and because the book’s thought is less layered than that of Anna Karenina or Middlemarch.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is the English novel of the 1840s and the Victorian realist novel after it. The force is real: the book made the panoramic social novel without a moral centre, organised by money and rank rather than by a hero’s progress, and it carried Fielding’s ironic narrator into the Victorian novel as a moral instrument. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Charlotte Brontë dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre (1848) to Thackeray; Trollope wrote his life for the English Men of Letters (1879), and the social panorama of Trollope’s novels stands in his line; and Becky stands, in a comparison often made though the debt is not documented, behind Wharton’s Undine Spragg. Held below the gate because the reach is narrower than Dickens’s, and the Victorian novel’s moral inwardness ran rather through George Eliot.

Score: 8.4 / 10

A text of some hundred and seventy-eight years, whole, published in the author’s lifetime under his eye, and read without a break since. The presence is wide: continuously in print, taught as a principal Victorian novel, translated, and adapted for film and television again and again. The topical surface, Regency fashion, the court of George IV and the silver-fork world the book mocks, has been outlived: the novel is read for Becky and for money, not for its references. It sits a tenth below the top of its band and not at it because its presence, wide as it is, is narrower than that of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre or the major Dickens, which are more read.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The prose is among the most supple of its century: conversational, quick, exact in social register, able to turn in a clause from comedy to death, as at Waterloo, and to carry irony without strain for hundreds of pages. The comic scenes are fully made: Becky flinging Johnson’s Dictionary out of the coach window at Chiswick Mall in the first chapter; Jos and the rack punch at Vauxhall; Sir Pitt in his gaiters at Great Gaunt Street; the auction of the Sedleys’ goods. The dialogue is precise in class, and the author’s own plates and initials add a second voice. Charged: the sermonising repeats; the sentiment around Amelia and little Georgy is laid on in the way the book elsewhere mocks; and the serial slack shows in the middle numbers. Level with the best English novels of its decade, below the summit of the form.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law runs through: everyone in the Fair is buying or selling, and the narrator holds the goods of the drawing room and the death on the field in one ledger. Take the two most distant elements, the Vauxhall farce of Jos and the rack punch and the bullet through George’s heart. They obey the same law: George dies having just tried to buy Becky, and Amelia’s grief is spent on a man who was not worth it. That is a wide range held. The law slips in the narrator’s own physics. He is the puppet master who knows all, then a sentimentalist who weeps over Amelia without irony, then, in the late numbers, a traveller who met these people at Pumpernickel and heard the story from Tapeworm. The comedy absorbs much of this, but it is a change of rules in mid-play, and the tone toward Amelia is not settled from part to part.

Score: 8.3 / 10

A wide world held in one structure: the aristocracy, from Lord Steyne and Gaunt House to the baronetcy of Queen’s Crawley; the City, with Osborne and Sedley as merchants and the Sedley bankruptcy; the army and the war; the court, where Becky is presented to George IV; the colonies, in Jos’s Indian money and Rawdon dying governor of Coventry Island; the servants and tradesmen who carry the debts; families across three generations; the Continent; and the evangelical and clerical worlds of the Southdowns and the Bute Crawleys. Money integrates them: they are held, not listed. Held below the top because the sacred enters only as satire, labour only as the creditor’s loss, the natural order hardly at all, and no consciousness is opened from within.

Score: 8.7 / 10