Thackeray’s Satire
Vanity Fair adapted by David Nobbs
West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1997 (JGH)
William Makepeace Thackeray
The title Vanity Fair occurred to Thackeray in the autumn of 1846. He had called an early draft of the novel Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, pointing up the importance of his own illustrations and indicating that his first idea was for a series of linked pieces along the lines of The Snobs of England. But while this phrase was retained as a subtitle for the later serialisation, the famous title from Bunyan is generally regarded as a stroke of genius. In Pilgrim’s Progress the town of Vanity holds a perpetual fair which harbours all the vices in the world. No traveller can avoid it: “he that will go to the [Celestial] City, and yet not go through the Town, must needs go out of the World.” Since this is impossible, Vanity Fair is therefore a microcosm of the world, and in a spirit of mockery and resignation Thackeray describes a closely linked group of characters attempting to get on in it by whatever means they can. (Vanity here is both the vanity of self-regard and acquisitiveness as well as the more melancholy aspect of spiritual weariness in the sense of ‘all is in vain’. The image of the mirror, evoking both meanings, pervades the book and is itself a reflection of Swift’s definition of satire: “a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own”.
Early reviewers were quick to notice the originality of Thackeray’s conception and spoke of the novel’s “unsettling” qualities. Certainly it marks a departure from contemporary practice in that there seems to be no definitive authorial voice pointing up the moral; instead, Thackeray as narrator adopts many voices, keeping the unwary reader continually on the hop. Sometimes he is omniscient, sometimes playful, sometimes he refuses point blank to fill in the gaps in the narrative. This impression of multiple viewpoint is further complicated by the preface Thackeray added to the first published edition of the full text, Before the Curtain, where he presents himself as a world-weary showman disinterestedly showing off his wares. Here is “the famous little Becky Puppet”, there “the Amelia Doll”, elsewhere “the Dobbin Figure”. He is preparing us to see the action not as a fictional representation of reality but rather as a performance played out in comically exaggerated terms, so that laughter will ease digestion of the bitter pill he has to administer. It was a technique pioneered by Voltaire in the previous century with his short, sharp contes philosophiques, of which Candide is perhaps the most celebrated example.
In fact, Vanity Fair is as much a satire on conventional contemporary fiction as it is on the character-types with which it deals, and its particular aim is to debunk the popular notion of fictional heroism. The subtitle of the book, A Novel Without a Hero, makes the point unequivocally, and one authorial voice frequently intrudes to apologise for the seemingly humdrum nature of his fiction in contrast to the more full-blooded creations of other authors: “I know that the tune I am piping is a very mild one.” The fashionable novels of the early Victorian era made much of the concepts of honour, duty and the glamour of military engagement all packaged up in highly romanticised terms. In the real world, Thackeray suggests, such ideals are much harder to come by.
Certainly they were in the 1840s, for whose mores he reserves his sharpest satirical barbs. Although Vanity Fair is set conventionally enough some decades before the actual time of writing, its targets – selfishness, thoughtless cruelty, greed and the manipulation of others for personal gain – are timeless and universal. Indeed, such impulses had never been more in evidence in a society where the new money of the industrial age was dissolving the class divisions which had fossilised it for centuries, allowing for the rise of hard-eyed young opportunists like Becky Sharp. The peace and prosperity England was currently enjoying had been hard-won at Waterloo, and Thackeray saw the battle as a turning point. Like the characters in the book the majority at home had not been directly involved in the conflict, yet still felt its effects keenly. Waterloo marked the final swan song of the military aristocratic culture based on duty, honour and gallantry, but as war gave way to commerce, the peace was to prove no less bitter a struggle for survival than the battle itself had been.
In this far-from-brave new world, wealth and position are all and goodness and decency bring nothing but their own reward. Again and again in Vanity Fair characters are described in a series of disparaging adjectives: Sir Pitt is “cunning, mean, selfish, foolish, disreputable”; Miss Crawley is “worldly, selfish, graceless, thankless, religionless”. In contrast, the ‘good’ characters like Dobbin and Major O’Dowd are defined simply by their own natural attributes of straight-forwardness and fair-dealing. But Thackeray is careful to show that the bad don’t all end badly and the good don’t all end well. Life isn’t like that, any more than his deceptively realistic fiction is.
To emphasise the point, Thackeray uses contrast and parallel. Amelia is ‘nicer’ than Becky, but her sweetness and lack of imagination quickly begin to cloy, while her innocence in the end proves anything but a virtue. Becky is much more vivacious and exhibits the traditionally noble ‘male’ qualities of courage, resilience and intelligence, but she is selfish to a fault and, when her husband Rawdon strikes Lord Steyne on discovering him in flagrante with her, she instantly falls prey to this sign of hackneyed romantic idealism in him. There are no absolute truths in the novel, and even the author’s voice – or voices – are ultimately unreliable as a guide to how we should view the characters.
In this sense Thackeray is a subtler chronicler than Dickens or George Eliot. Dickens’ Dombey and Son had begun serialisation three months before Vanity Fair, and Thackeray admired it while fearing for the fate of his own work, knowing it to be a far more unconventional and difficult proposition. Even after the Waterloo episodes in chapters 30–32 had secured him the success he craved some critics still declared themselves unhappy with the author’s apparent cynicism and misanthropy. They felt uncomfortable, simply because he had not presented them with a fait accompli, and many wondered precisely what point he was trying to make.
The clue is in the final chapters, where the ‘quiet’ characters Amelia and Dobbin come to the fore. They at least seem to have learnt from their experiences, while in the case of the die-hards like old Osborne, still trying to turn his grandson into the same spoilt dandy George had been, the passing of time has done nothing to educate them. They remain lost to conscience and self-analysis. It is perhaps significant that in Thackeray’s penultimate illustration for the book, the only puppets left standing in the children’s playbox are Amelia, Dobbin and Georgy, though typically the traditional sentimental ending is guyed by the fact that Dobbin is aware that “the prize I had set my life on was not worth the winning”. In other words, life is not like a Victorian novel, and we should not expect everyone to get their just desserts according to how they have lived their lives. Time and circumstance, chance and character play their own part in deciding how things turn out, and it is not the satirist’s job to offer false comfort by suggesting otherwise.
Ultimately, Thackeray was a sceptic, his ever-shifting narrator’s voice undermining even the decency he applauded, while constantly satirising the worldliness and cynicism he abhorred. He admired Becky’s energy and appetite for life, but rejected her heartlessness and materialism. He promoted Dobbin as the one true gentleman in the story, but could not resist harping on his lisp and calling him “spoony” at the moment of describing his great selflessness. Far from lacking a consistent moral viewpoint, Thackeray was too astute and empathetic of mind to confine himself to a single one. Unlike the bulk of his characters, he touched life at many points and learned from each contact.
David Nobbs
PS
Never read the book, never sat through any of the umpteen TV adaptations of the work, have no recollection of writing a single word of this piece. Yet my experience as a seasoned university pantser shines through here. (A ‘pantser’ in the publishing biz is the kind of novelist who starts writing without an overall detailed plan but plunges ahead nonetheless to see where they end up. The term is derived from the phrase ‘flying by the seat of the pants’, and therefore stands in marked opposition to the ‘plotter’ [or plodder?] who tends to take the more cautious approach of laying everything out first so they know where the bloody hell they’re supposed to be going.
(‘Plotter’, it now occurs to me, also has the rather pleasing echo of those trusty technicians back at base in the Second World War, steadfastly prodding their little counters around the map table and helping the heroic pantsers overhead to zero in on the invading Messerschmitts. I have nothing but bottomless admiration for them all, but it takes all sorts and I know which one I would have been. Dickens with his weekly or monthly serialisations was obviously a pantser, but I don’t think I’d have had the balls.)
Not that I’ve always had the luxury of choosing. This piece actually took me back to my final year at Oxford, where I had become so involved in writing and acting and performing in folk clubs that I had little time left over for academic work, so it all became a bit of a game trying to fit all the reading in. Ultimately, the only way I could be sure of getting the weekly essay done on time was by deliberately leaving it to the night before it was due to be handed in, so I would have no choice but to sit down around midnight and get cracking. No time to think or plan or structure or balance – there were six to eight pages to fill and double-spacing the title could only get you so far.
Of course, it also reveals the hollowness of cramming just enough stuff to see you through an essay. You may think you’re fooling your tutor (actually, you can never fool your tutor), but the down side is that afterwards everything fades swiftly from the memory, leaving not a rack behind. Certainly nothing ever lasted long enough to see me through Finals. (Third, actually, why did you feel the need to ask?)
I suppose everything in this article is all roughly accurate – I would only have consulted reliable texts, and no Thackeray expert ever got in touch to complain – but there can obviously be no personal viewpoint on show as I had no opinion worth consulting. Writing can sometimes be a terribly meretricious business.
These days I wouldn’t even think of picking up my pen (or turning on the laptop) without first making sure I’ve got a good title and a great last line. The former reminds me what I’m meant to be writing about, the latter gives me some idea of where I’m meant to be heading. It’s by far the most sensible way to conduct business, I find. On the other hand, it can’t be denied there was a certain frisson to those hectic caffeine-soused nights toiling away till dawn. I miss those Balzacian bouts of effort, surviving on coffee and work, unshaven, light-headed with fatigue, but believing somehow I was on the right track… (I was wrong, as it turned out, but that was another life and happily I’m living a better one now.)