Jackson's Ephemera

Victorian novels are never as easy to get through as you think, for this reader anyway. There’s a ton of names to keep track of without visual aid, and the serial nature of their publication means there’s plenty of dithering subplots and characters that don’t really go anywhere. In the case of Vanity Fair, it does feel at times as if they serve only to complicate what is otherwise a panoramic and witty rendering of 19th century British society’s upper echelons.

It’s books like Vanity Fair that really dismay me when, a few years down the line, I come to realise that I remember almost nothing from a reading experience that invariably lasts several months. So without having anything super-insightful to say about such a well-studied work, I think I owe it at least a hack summary; both as a memento of the reading journey, and as a means of committing to memory the broad shape and concerns of this Victorian doorstop.

In hack summary…

Becky Sharp is a poor orphan of absolutely zero society, about to graduate from a finishing school for young ladies where she has never belonged or cared to belong. The headmistress deems her a lost cause, despite the fact that Becky is the smartest girl in the place; sharp in wit as well as name, and perfectly fluent in French to boot.

Her counterpart is Amelia Sedley, a young lady of promising birth who has condescended to befriend Becky even while no one else would approach her with a ten foot pole. Amelia is a thoroughly boring do-gooder whose character will remain pretty pathetic throughout the rest of the novel’s 650pp – but her father is rich, so all is well.

Freshly graduated, Amelia and Becky ship out into the real world. Amelia charitably introduces Becky to her skeptical family, and Becky promptly falls in love with Amelia’s brother Jos, a certified idiot. Unfortunately, Jos is chronically incapable of getting his shit together, so that falls through – but it does open Becky’s eyes to the prospect of riding into high society on the coat-tails of some rich, dim-witted bloke or other.

As her free ride with the Sedleys comes to an end, Becky is contracted to work as a governess in the house of Sir Pitt Crawley; a crusty old baron noble only in title but otherwise given to gambling, claret, and carousing, as is the case with many of the male personages in Vanity Fair. The Crawley clan is determined to keep her at arm’s length due to her underwhelming lineage, but the men can’t help but be taken in by Becky’s delightful wit and intelligence. Not least Sir Pitt Crawley’s son, Captain Rawdon Crawley; another simple, girthy gambler who thinks Becky is just swell.

But the real talk of the Crawley family is Sir Pitt Crawley’s sister, helpfully referred to only as Miss Crawley, a feisty old widow who is sitting on a veritable fortune that is probably destined for her favourite nephew Rawdon. That is until Rawdon starts flirting with the lowly Becky, who Miss Crawley hates. At this point, Mr and Mrs Bute Crawley – other elders of the family – start to play matchmaker between the two in the hope that they’ll further sabotage Rawdon’s inheritance. Honestly, their meddling is just as annoying for the reader as it is for the other characters so I can’t say I follow with much interest.

Anyway, long story short, Becky and Rawdon get married. Rawdon is booted out of the will as a result, with the family fortune instead going to his brother Pitt Crawley; a pious wet towel who delights in seeing Rawdon and Becky turfed out onto struggle street.

Amelia has meanwhile become enamoured with George Osbourne, a pompous twat who walks all over her, which she obviously doesn’t protest because she’s just as much a doormat as she was at the start of Vanity Fair. But there’s family disapproval on this side too. Amelia’s father abruptly goes broke and Osbourne senior won’t have his son marry a pauper. George goes ahead anyway, and is duly cut off with the utmost prejudice.

One might read this as proof of George’s self-sacrificing love for Amelia, but the guy also shamelessly flirts with Becky and tries his best to kindle an affair – much to Amelia’s consternation (not that she says anything).

George, Rawdon, and the rest of the lads then head off to the continent to battle Napoleon with the wives in tow. It’s essentially the 19th century equivalent of a Real Housewives vacation with the couples living it up in Belgium – until the French actually turn up and the Battle of Waterloo ensues. Unfortunately, George gets himself killed, leaving Amelia with nothing except a son she can scarcely provide for sans inheritance back in England.

For their part, Becky and Rawdon elect to hang back in Europe after the war, and it’s here that Becky really starts to excel at conning and conniving. With no money of their own, they stop paying their small entourage of servants, cheat at cards, and wheedle money out of others by whatever means possible. They also have a son – but Becky really can’t be bothered with the whole motherhood thing when she’s got scams to pull and rich people to schmooze.

Thus begins the moral decline of Becky, which is the novel’s principal arc from hereon. Rawdon is complicit in his own hapless way, but it’s Becky who happily leaves her servants to starve and walks out on almost every bill without a shred of guilt. Most tellingly, she starts meeting with the wealthy and thoroughly odious Lord Steyne on a regular basis, who gives her a steady supply of cheques in exchange for her… company.

Meanwhile, Amelia continues to struggle along in impoverished condition. Having vowed never to support this bankrupt daughter in law, her dead husband’s father shows no sign of relenting. He’d rather see her starve than clean up another man’s financial mess. But he does agree to take in his grandson so that little Georgy Jr can at least be afforded a decent upbringing.

Amelia does have one supporter in the form of her deceased husband’s old pal, Dobbin. He’s occupied a decent share of narrative real estate up until now, but mainly as the boringly loyal, virtuous foil to Rawdon and George. Indeed, he might be Vanity Fair’s only likeable male character – but he’s also a simpering nice guy who traipses around after the stricken Amelia, cleaning up her husband’s legacy of financial and emotional trauma in the hope that one day she’ll return his love. (She doesn’t, but she appreciates the money).

None of this hardship and emotional turmoil have any bearing on Becky and Rawdon, whose ruthless social climbing is now bordering on psychopathic – at least where Becky is concerned. Things reach their crescendo when Rawdon is arrested for an unpaid debt and locked up awaiting bail. Becky, despite having coaxed another large sum out of her totally platonic ‘friend’ Lord Steyne, opts not to pay the bail and instead keeps the money for herself.

When Rawdon gets out of the slammer he arrives home to find Becky entertaining Lord Steyne (singing to him, to be specific, although this may as well be a stand in for anything else you can imagine). He promptly hits the roof, and Lord Steyne. The marriage is over.

After 500pp of subversively toying with the idea that Becky might come out on top over the highborn Amelia, Vanity Fair now begins to inch back towards the status-quo. Amelia’s dying father in law has a change of heart toward his son’s destitute widow and leaves her a decent annuity in his will. Becky on the other hand becomes the consummate fallen woman. She wanders Europe; a polyglot card sharp who shacks up with students in cheap hotels, moving on after exhausting the purses and goodwill of her patrons.

Dobbin, Amelia, and Jos run into Becky in Germany, a few years deep into this bohemian and discredited lifestyle but charming and manipulative as ever. Jos falls in love with her all over again, and Amelia is in support of welcoming her back into the fold. Dobbin feebly tries to remind everyone of Becky’s true colours, but Amelia is adamant that she’s just misunderstood.

To say this triggers Dobbin is an understatement. In classic, frustrated nice guy fashion, he unleashes a rant many years in the making. He condemns Becky as a shameless grifter and a loose woman who thought nothing of seducing Amelia’s husband. And while we’re at it, Dobbin adds, let’s not forget that George – RIP – was hardly a model husband either. Only I, Amelia, have ever loved you in the way you deserve – so for the love of god won’t you please reciprocate already?! (Hell hath no fury like a nice guy scorned).

This long awaited boiling over sends Becky packing once more, but not before she has something like a stab at redemption. Own feelings aside, she tells Amelia that Dobbin is actually a pretty stand-up guy and she’d do well to settle down with him. Amelia takes the advice and the two presumably live happily ever after. Jos, however, can’t get Becky out of his head and opts to live in obscurity with her in Europe. He later dies in suspicious circumstances that involve a sizeable life insurance policy, and Becky Sharp. No one ever speaks to Becky again.

The casualties of this summary are many. I’ve scarcely touched on the other members of the Crawley clan or the many major/lady so-and-so’s that I don’t remember. In part this is due to my own ignorance but, as with any serialised Victorian novel, there are good chunks of Vanity Fair where one can feel Thackeray padding out the episode with new characters and narrative turns that swiftly evaporate in the next chapter. All in all though, this outline of events provides more than enough food for thought.

What Vanity Fair is about

Were I to teach this novel in the classroom, I’d start by pitching the question: “is Becky Sharp a villain or just misunderstood?”

On the face of it, Thackeray invites us to consider the latter. Although she takes social climbing to its pathological extreme, Becky is no worse than the morally repugnant aristocrats that surround her. The Osbourne family cut all ties with Amelia because her father has the audacity to fall on hard times. The Crawleys ruthlessly undercut each other to get their hands on the matriarchal inheritance. Lord Steyne, who sits somewhere near the top of the novel’s social hierarchy, is essentially Harvey Weinstein in breeches.

The only character who offers some foil to all this upper class degeneracy is Amelia, but even she isn’t spared Thackeray’s scathing social critique. Innocent to a fault she may be, but she’s also a fairly pathetic specimen who takes a good trampling from every other character – not least Becky. If her spineless characterisation draws an eye-roll from the reader, it also further validates Becky’s ruthlessness by comparison. Cheating, lying, and stealing somehow don’t seem so bad when the only alternative is to do an Amelia and be proverbially shat upon by all and sundry. Truly it is a dog eat dog world in 18th century Russell Square.

What’s more, Amelia’s hands aren’t entirely clean either. She gladly accepts cash and emotional support from the lovestruck Dobbin for years, stringing him along just gently enough to ensure the cheques keep coming. At least, that’s how Thackeray wants us to read it. The notion that Dobbin is somehow… entitled to Amelia after covering her rent is a tad problematic for a modern reader but regardless, it’s clear Amelia can switch into a slightly more manipulative mode when it benefits her. And if I’d read Vanity Fair more carefully, I might even be able to support the argument that there’s something transactional about Amelia’s introducing Becky to her family in the first place. Is there not some advantage to be found in attaching herself to a woman with a voice, when she herself lacks one of her own? Does she not serve Becky up as a bargain marriage prospect for her useless and unfulfilling brother, who could never hope to find a woman of his own station?

For this reader, however, the real pleasures of Vanity Fair stem from the hilarious voice that narrates this whole circus. Not ten pages in and the narrator himself interjects on the subject of some peripheral character to say:

But why speak about her? It is probable that we shall not hear of her again from this moment to the end of time, and that when the great filigree iron gates are once closed on her, she and her awful sister will never issue therefrom into this little world of history. (6)

These witty asides dot the novel, with the narrator often interrupting tedious dramatic developments to remind us that better stuff is coming in future chapters, or to cheerfully write-off a character right at the moment they’re immersed in some grave personal crisis. It’s a glorious glimmer of unreliability that’s well ahead of its time and frequently draws a genuine LOL.

So while it’s true that chunks of Vanity Fair drag, even those chunks aren’t without charm. It’s superficial, it’s dialogue-heavy, and entirely lacking in likeable characters – but you just have to laugh. Thackeray certainly does.