Unlike Bunyan, Thackeray was hardly a die-hard Christian, but rather a man who relished a life of pleasure and luxury, and who, on the evidence of his letters, found much of the Bible either ludicrous or distasteful. “Vanity Fair”, a title that came in a eureka moment to the author in bed one night, actually derives from Pilgrim’s Progress and refers to the fair set up by the devils Beelzebub and Apollyon in the town of Vanity. Thackeray, on top form, cheerfully exploited an ebullient tradition, transcending all his previous efforts as a writer …Early drafts of the book, which had the working title “a novel without a hero” lacked the all-important figure of William Dobbin, a thoroughly good and likable character who owes much to Thackeray himself. One hundred years after the publication of Clarissa…Vanity Fair was published in serial form (including some memorable cliff-hangers, for instance Becky Sharp’s revelation of her marriage to Rawdon Crawley) from January 1847 to June 1848. Indeed, so commanding was Thackeray at the height of his powers that Charlotte Brontë even dedicated Jane Eyre to the author of Vanity Fair. A tension between the continual or particular experience of an individual novel and the felt historical pressure of novels en masse registers in the text itself as a formal and narrative problem, one that leads us suggestively toward recent methodological debates about intimate and distant reading.“…a great Victorian novel, written and published deep in the middle of a great age of English fiction. As characters encounter problems in replacing old relations (former lovers, deceased spouses, estranged relatives) with new ones, the novel raises analogous questions about the replaceability of characters as textual constructs or fictional persons, and of the novel itself as one experience among multitudes on offer in the nineteenth-century market. Drawing on recent sociological and network readings of Victorian narrative, I argue that Thackeray's plot about relationships in the marriage market is reflected (on the level of form) by the structural relation between characters and text, and (on the level of the reading experience) by the affective engagement of the reader to the novel. Through a sustained close reading of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1855 novel The Newcomes, this essay examines three analogous types of particularity in the novel: the particularity of loved ones in the social network, of fictional persons in the literary work, and of the individual text.

William thackeray novels