The Story

Vanity Fair was first published in monthly serials in 1847. It is Thackeray's most famous novel, brimming with cutting social comment and sparkling satire. It centres on the lives of two women, ruthless, low-born, Becky Sharp and sweet, sentimental Amelia Sedley, a stock-broker's daughter, from their teenage years to middle age. When the two girls leave the cocooned gentileness of Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies in suburban London, they are instantly thrust into the fray of Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair is the metaphor that Thackeray employs for tawdry and glamorous Regency society (from Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress), a world where the only standard is material advancement.

As soon as quick-witted Becky is acquainted with the Sedleys in their Russell Square mansion, she sets her sights on Amelia's portly, egocentric, pleasure-loving, elder brother Jos, newly returned from India. An excursion to the pleasure-gardens at Vauxhall, however, sees Jos get faboulously drunk on rack punch, and ruins Becky's ambitions when he flees to Scotland to bury his head in the sand. She quickly regains her composure and finds a range of alternatives when she is engaged as a governess to a wealthy Hampshire MP's daughters.

Meanwhile, Amelia longs only for her caddish and fickle soldier lover George Osborne, from across the Square, to whom she has been "engaged since childhood." The marriage looks reasonably likely, until Mr. Sedley's fortune on the stock exchange collapses with Napoleon Bonaparte's escape from Elba. The two elope surreptitiously, and are on honeymoon in Brighton with Capt. William Dobbin, steadfast friend of both Amelia and George, and Jos Sedley (returned from Scotland) when war breaks out in Belgium. The Battle of Waterloo is a major turning-point in the story, deciding as it does the fates of both Amelia and Becky, as well as their husbands. It is also in Brussels that Becky's true nature is exposed.