William Makepeace Thackeray
1811–1863 · England
“I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through William Makepeace Thackeray
Drew From(2)
who shaped William Makepeace Thackeray
- The title is a quotation: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress invented Vanity Fair as the worldly snare on the pilgrim's road, and Thackeray made it his entire stage
- Where Bunyan's fair was a hazard to be escaped en route to heaven, Thackeray drops the heaven and leaves only the fair — the inversion is the point
- Reading Bunyan first shows you the moral frame Thackeray is satirizing; contemporaries already compared Becky to the pilgrim and the author to Faithful
- That intrusive, knowing narrator who keeps interrupting Vanity Fair to lecture you — Thackeray took the technique directly from Fielding's Tom Jones
- He said as much, praising Fielding in his 1853 lectures on the eighteenth-century humourists; scholarship names Tom Jones as this book's structural and stylistic model
- Read Tom Jones first and "A Novel Without a Hero" reads as the rebuttal it is — Thackeray rejecting the lovable scapegrace Fielding asked you to forgive
Famous Quotes
“Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.”
“Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?—come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.”
“The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.”
“The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.”
About William Makepeace Thackeray
English novelist and satirist, Dickens's chief rival as the leading Victorian novelist. His masterpiece Vanity Fair, subtitled 'A Novel Without a Hero,' is a panoramic satire of early nineteenth-century English society. His mordant wit and unflinching social observation offer a darker, more cynical counterpoint to Dickens's sentimentality.