A short life of the author
William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) was an English novelist who was, during his lifetime, considered the only serious rival to Charles Dickens for the title of greatest living English novelist — and who was preferred by many Victorian readers and critics as the more realistic, more psychologically acute, and more artistically disciplined of the two. His masterpiece, Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (1847–1848), is one of the great comic novels in the English language: a panoramic portrait of English and Continental society in the Napoleonic and Regency eras, centred on the magnificent, appalling, endlessly fascinating figure of Becky Sharp — a woman of no fortune, no family, and no scruples who uses her intelligence, her beauty, and her absolute freedom from moral inhibition to climb as high as early-nineteenth-century English society will allow.
Life
Thackeray was born in Calcutta, where his father was a colonial official of the East India Company. His father died when he was four, and he was sent to England for education — the painful separation from his mother and the misery of English boarding schools left permanent marks on his personality and his fiction. He attended Charterhouse School (fictionalised as “Slaughterhouse” in his novels) and Trinity College, Cambridge, which he left without a degree.
He lost his inheritance through gambling and a series of failed investments, a disaster that forced him to earn his living by writing. He worked as a journalist, illustrator, reviewer, and travel writer throughout the 1830s and early 1840s, publishing under numerous pseudonyms and producing an extraordinary volume of journalism, criticism, and illustrated sketches.
He married Isabella Shawe in 1836. She suffered a mental breakdown after the birth of their third child in 1840 and spent the rest of her life in care. Thackeray raised his two surviving daughters alone — a domestic tragedy that infuses his fiction with a tenderness for women and children that coexists uneasily with his satirical ruthlessness.
Vanity Fair (1847–1848)
Vanity Fair — published in monthly parts, as was the custom of the era — follows two contrasting heroines: Becky Sharp, the clever, unscrupulous daughter of a drawing master and a French opera dancer, who is determined to rise in the world by whatever means necessary; and Amelia Sedley, a sweet, loyal, emotionally dependent young woman from a prosperous merchant family who loves blindly and suffers for it.
The novel’s subtitle — “A Novel Without a Hero” — announces its method: Thackeray refuses to idealise any of his characters. Becky is brilliant but amoral; Amelia is loving but foolish; Rawdon Crawley, Becky’s husband, is a rogue with unexpected depths of feeling; George Osborne, Amelia’s husband, is a vain, selfish man whose posthumous transformation into a hero by his widow is one of the novel’s bitterest ironies.
The Waterloo chapters — in which the Battle of Waterloo is experienced not from the battlefield but from the terrified wives waiting in Brussels — are among the finest passages of war writing in English literature.
Becky Sharp is Thackeray’s greatest creation: a character who is simultaneously the villain and the most vital figure in the novel, a woman whose energy, wit, and resourcefulness make her infinitely more interesting than the “good” characters around her. She is the ancestral figure of every charming, amoral female protagonist in English fiction.
Other Major Novels
The History of Pendennis (1848–1850) is a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman about a young writer making his way in London — less tightly structured than Vanity Fair but rich in social observation. The History of Henry Esmond (1852) is a historical novel set in the reign of Queen Anne, written in a pastiche of eighteenth-century prose. The Newcomes (1853–1855) is a panoramic novel of Victorian family life whose final scene — Colonel Newcome’s death, answering “Adsum” (Present) at the last roll call — is one of the most famous death scenes in English fiction.
Critical Standing
Thackeray’s reputation declined dramatically after his death. Where Dickens’s popularity survived into the twentieth century and beyond, Thackeray was increasingly seen as a writer of lesser energy, lesser imagination, and lesser emotional power. The comparison with Dickens has been both the making and the unmaking of Thackeray’s reputation: in his own time, he was considered the realist against Dickens’s sentimentalist, the adult novelist against the popular entertainer. Henry James admired Thackeray; George Eliot learned from him; Charlotte Brontë dedicated Jane Eyre to him (and was mortified when he appeared at a dinner party where she was present, as she had modelled Rochester partly on him).
The modern reassessment values Thackeray’s irony, his psychological realism, and his refusal of sentimentality — qualities that were undervalued in the age of Victorian earnestness but that speak directly to modern taste. His narrator — intrusive, self-aware, constantly drawing attention to the artifice of fiction — anticipates the metafictional strategies of the twentieth century. And Becky Sharp remains one of the great literary creations: a character who has escaped her novel to become a permanent figure in the cultural imagination, the prototype for every brilliant woman who refuses to accept the limitations that society imposes on her sex and class.
Collecting Thackeray
Vanity Fair (1848, Bradbury and Evans) in the original twenty monthly parts brings $3,000–$10,000. First edition in book form brings $1,000–$4,000. Henry Esmond (1852, three volumes) brings $300–$800. Thackeray’s original drawings and watercolours are collected separately and command significant prices.