Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse taal- en letterkunde. Jaargang 2005

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How Watching Vanity Fair Grow Can Influence How We Read the Novel
Peter Shillingsburg, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

The following paper is offered as an example of literary criticism that employs textual criticism as part of its method. It reflects ideas I have put into a book titled Gutenberg to Google about how studying a text in relation to its own alter-texts is richer than studying a single version of a text. Though it can be claimed that the conclusions I draw present a reading of Vanity Fair that has been shared by some people since the novel was first published - even by readers who did not ‘watch Vanity Fair grow’ - the evidence I examine gives that view a stronger basis.¹

Before one can show how ‘watching it grow’ can influence how we read, one must assume a certain kind of reading that can then be influenced. My first task, then, is to present a prevailing view of Vanity Fair which can then be influenced by information about how it was written. Readers of Thackeray generally and Vanity Fair in particular have, historically, been divided into two roughly opposing groups: those who lament Thackeray's failure to be a better novelist; and those who praise Thackeray for succeeding in being just the right kind of novelist.

1 An earlier version of these arguments appeared in my Literary Life of William Makepeace Thackeray (Palgrave 2001).

1. Two views of Thackeray

Several years ago I wrote a couple of paragraphs on this division of opinions that I cannot improve:

From John Forster and Elizabeth Rigby, among early reviewers, to Percy Lubbock, Jack Rawlins, and Jerome Meckier more recently, readers have objected to Vanity Fair because it does not say clearly what is real and what is not, what is good and what is not, because it

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does not make the moral dilemmas clear, because its author seems to waffle in his stand, because the novel's view of humankind is simultaneously too cynical and too sentimental - in short because the reader cannot be sure what the author or the narrator really thinks and, therefore, cannot know whether to agree or disagree. Fiction should not come so close to real life, said Miss Rigby, that the moral imperatives become too complex or obscure.
From Robert Bell and Dr. John Brown, among early reviewers and admirers of the novel, to John Loofbourow, Ina Ferris, and James Phelan in more recent times, readers have delighted in the sleight of hand, the slippery viewpoint, the detached ironic suggestiveness of the novel. These find in the book a challenge to enjoy the impressionist mimicry of the narrative voice as it pretends to give and then withdraws ‘proper’ views of money, six, and politics as they are manipulated in military, social, and domestic arenas where persons of varying intellectual and moral integrity manoeuvre and jockey for position and acclaim.

There have been many attempts to explain Thackeray's decline in the public's - indeed, in the academy's - affections. A few I will mention and describe; one or two I will try to demonstrate in more detail. Against the author it is said he was wishy-washy, unimaginative, repetitious, unpleasantly satiric, cloyingly sentimental, vicious in his attacks on mothers-in-law, prejudiced and even racist, and he was excessively sensitive and arrogant in person.²

Critics less hostile and yet not charitable to Thackeray suggest that his works fail to appeal to modern readers because of the dense allusiveness and thick texture of his prose. The topicality of his vision, they say, mingled though it is with wise and clever universal portraits of humanity, makes his prose alien. Some modern readers, though attracted to Thackeray's humorous exposé of human foibles, find themselves sadly puzzled by off-hand references to long forgotten divas, tradesmen, politicians, dancers, saddlers, grocers, watchmakers, bankers, pawnbrokers, old-clothesmen, inns, coachmen, and socially homogeneous (i.e., segregated) sections of London whose character has long since changed.

2 G.U. Ellis, Thackeray. London: Duckworth, 1933; Peter K. Garrett, ‘Thackeray: Seeing Double,’ The Victorian Multiplot Novel. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980; Jack P. Rawlins, Thackeray's Novels: A Fiction That is True. Berkeley: U California P, 1974.

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In recent times some critics more friendly to Thackeray have opposed these criticisms by affecting to admire the rigor and sharpness of Thackeray's early works, written in days when his personal losses made him sufficiently lean and hungry to be unmindful of what he might lose by impolitic observations or heterodox opinions. These critics admire the young Thackeray as a picaro, who stands outside the mainstream, revealing conventional views to be sycophantic. According to this view, financial and social successes at mid-life spoiled Thackeray, and rendered the aging literary lion bland and nonthreatening.

My own view corresponds with that of readers who disagree with these ‘unjust’ views that must result from misreadings. I want to show how watching Vanity Fair grow supports the view that Thackeray was carefully striving for specific effects and that readers who credit the author with care and sophistication are highly rewarded. I want to argue that at a fundamental level, the opposing opinions of Vanity Fair grow out of very different views of what kind of a man Thackeray was and / or what kind of a narrator - what kind of a voice - is speaking the novel to us. In broad strokes, I would argue that if the reader possesses one view of Thackeray, he or she will tend to think that oddities and anomalies in the narrative are accidents and flaws whereas a different view of the author might lead the reader to credit the anomalies with special meaning.

To know a person or a writer well is to know how to take what that person says. We allow our friends and close acquaintances a far wider range of voices than we allow strangers or persons with whom our relations are strained or hostile. The conventions of polite discourse and diplomatic exchange are narrow and highly controlled in order to diminish the chances of being misconstrued, that is, misunderstood. Familiarity allows the relaxation of these narrow limits. One's reaction to a writer is conducted within the limits of sympathy and tolerance one is able to grant to the writer. Thackeray's writings address the reader in so many voices and with such confidence that, I argue, conventional politeness between writer and reader is stretched. I believe Thackeray speaks best (that is, most engagingly and successfully) to readers who have firm confidence in their own ability to sort through layers of irony and indirection and who delight in the ability of language to both hide and reveal the self-deceptions and attempted deceptions of others. Thackeray's prose demands, I would say, that readers trust the showman, the writer, as a consummate practitioner in ‘slight of tongue’, because, for his part, the author has trusted the reader implicitly to retain control over his or her own credulity and scepticism.

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The primary characteristic of Thackeray's vision is, I think, its distrust of human judgment, resulting in a profound compassion for ‘sinners’ and a deep suspicion of dogma and certainty, which prevented him from adopting for long any of the radical or righteous positions required in order to maintain satire. One result has been Thackeray's inability to maintain the admiration of dogmatic or insecure readers looking for uplifting, high-minded fiction, depicting the world as it is or as it ought to be - with evil always punished and good rewarded in the end. Likewise, indignant persons seeking an author who confirms their notion that the world is filled primarily by villains whom they love to hate will be disappointed by Thackeray's frequent discovery of human qualities in vain and hypocritical but not usually profoundly evil characters.

The premise upon which I am operating is that each reader's assessment of Thackeray's writings is dependent upon the portrait from which emerges the writer's voice in the re-creative imagination of the reader. The revisions in the manuscript give us a better idea than the published book alone does of how Thackeray was managing his narrative voice.

This general overview is supported by more detailed examples of how this idea seems to work out in Reading Vanity Fair.

2. Setting up the problem

Gordon N. Ray, the most important biographer and editor of Thackeray's letters, commenting on Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair, chides modern critics for historical naiveté, saying,

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, and the Victorian heroine (of whom Amelia had come to be regarded as the great prototype and exemplar) fell into disfavor, critics friendly to Thackeray but anxious to bring his books into harmony with the new age hit on a curious theory. Assuming that so intelligent a writer must have shared their own opinions, they interpreted his praise of Amelia as ironical.³

He then quotes from a number of critics who tried to ‘palliate [Thackeray's] offences against modern taste,’ concluding that these ‘attempts at benevolent exegesis are interesting chiefly as illustrations of the ease with which critics

3 Gordon N. Ray, The Buried Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950, p. 36.

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otherwise well-equipped may come a cropper because of their deficiency in historical sense’ (p. 36). I was taken aback and struck with the shock of unfamiliarity upon rereading these remarks after having edited Vanity Fair and having prepared historical annotations for it,⁴ and after developing a deep sense of appreciation for the distanced, bemused, ironic voice of the narrator. I thought I had worked hard to develop a historical sense and keen ear for the narrative voice of the novel, but here is the biographer, the prime historian of Thackeray, speaking of the characters and events in the novel as if Thackeray himself were the narrator and as if the narrative voice could be counted on unironically to represent Thackeray's position, in this case, regarding Amelia, and suggesting that alternative views resulted from a deficiency in historical sense.

I agree completely with Ray's emphasis on the importance of knowledge of history for a discriminating and complex reaction to Thackeray's novel. I disagree, however, both with Ray's assessment of Thackeray's attitude towards Amelia and with his way of speaking about the narrative voice in the novel. It is helpful to learn and keep in mind two ideas in reading Vanity Fair simply because so few of us know enough to catch all the jokes. One is that Thackeray's attitude toward Amelia, and indeed all of his major characters, is more complex than Ray seems to suggest. And another is that the narrative voice in Vanity Fair is very slippery, indeed.

Even in his own time we find evidence that Thackeray did not necessarily have a partiality for Amelia shared by his contemporaries. Ray himself notes that ‘from the first Thackeray's favoritism irritated readers into protest. Miss Rigby wrote contemptuously in the Quarterly Review of “the little dolt Amelia,” all of whose “philoprogenitive idolatries do not touch us like one fond instinct of “stupid Rawdon””’ (p. 36). But a rereading of Miss Rigby's review reveals the important point that it was not Thackeray's alleged partiality towards Amelia (which is not mentioned in the review) but Amelia's character itself that irritated the reviewer. In addition, although Thackeray's protean narrator, in some voices, expresses unalloyed approbation of Amelia, in other voices he berates, sneers and laughs at her. For example, he early on claims that ‘as we are to see a great deal of Amelia, there is no harm in saying at the outset of our acquaintance that she was one of the best and dearest creatures that ever lived’; but in the revised edition he tones this down to, ‘she was a dear little creature.’ And in the midst of the ensuing conventional

4 See the Norton Critical Edition of Vanity Fair (New York: WW Norton, 1994).

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description of this heroine he remarks: ‘her face blushed with rosy health, and her lips with the freshest of smiles, and she had a pair of eyes which sparkled with the brightest and honestest good humour except indeed when they filled with tears and that was a great deal too often - for the silly thing would cry over a dead canary-bird or over a mouse that the cat haply had seized upon, or over the end of a novel were it ever so stupid - and as for saying an unkind word to her - were any one hard-hearted enough to do so, - why, so much the worse for them.’ (All of which is, however, open to ironic as well as straight interpretation.) He says ‘she is not a heroine’ because ‘her nose was rather short than otherwise, and her cheeks a great deal too round and red’ but then refers to Amelia as heroine on five other occasions. Of course he also denies once more that she could be a heroine and once suggested that whether she was or not, we could still treat her as one. On four other occasions he claims Becky is the heroine. And when he wants, the narrator can be quite critical of Amelia as heroine who is referred to as ‘a chit’ by Becky and by George Osborne's sisters. He remarked at one point:

Miss Sedley was not of the sun flower sort; and I say it is out of the rules of all proportion to draw a violet of the size of a double-dahlia.
No indeed; the life of a good young girl who is in the paternal nest as yet, can't have many of those thrilling incidents, to which the heroine of romance commonly lays claim. (p. 119)

Most readers detect at least a hint of disdain in the narrator's comment that ‘She shook her head sadly, and had, as usual, recourse to the water-works.’ Readers also tend to understand why Dobbin

is fonder [of his daughter Janey] than of anything in the world - fonder even than of his ‘History of the Punjaub.’
‘Fonder than he is of me,’ Emmy thinks, with a sigh. (p. 624)

The whole issue becomes interesting and complicated when one realizes that not one of these narratorial voices is reliable; none can be taken at face value as expressing the thoughts or feelings of the author or (setting authorial intention aside) the values of the book's centre of authority.

Thackeray's narrator tends to push responsibility for value judgments on to the reader, but readers might resist accepting this responsibility because they are accustomed to authors who seriously tell readers what to think. So readers need to get to know and trust this author before they feel free to distrust his narrators.

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3. Analyzing the ‘boring bits’

An analysis of two paragraphs from Vanity Fair reveals another aspect of the problem by showing the demands that book (or rather, its author) makes on readers, and we shall see how all these issues mesh: the problems of history, of text, and of reading.

The paragraphs from Chapter VII delineate the genealogy of the Crawley family into which, in 1813, Becky Sharp has come as a governess to Sir Pitt Crawley's two daughters by his second wife. It is useful to remember as well that Thackeray was writing and his original audience were reading these pages in 1847.

In the first paragraph we are introduced to the original sixteenth-century Crawley who, as a result of entertaining Queen Elizabeth well, was granted the status of borough for his estate and village, and the right to return two representatives to Parliament. His trim beard and good leg invoke images of gentlemen dressed like Sir Walter Ralegh. The fact that the family in the present time of the novel still enjoyed its representatives in Parliament reminds us that the first great Reform Bill would not be passed for another 19 years (in 1832), but denominating the borough ‘rotten’ indicates that trouble was already brewing.⁵ That Sir Pitt did not consider it rotten because it ‘produces me a good fifteen hundred a year’ reminds us that few if any landowners in those pre-reform years cared for reform.

In the second paragraph we get what appears to be a dry and obscure genealogy:

Sir Pitt Crawley (named after the great Commoner), was the son of Walpole Crawley, first Baronet, of the Tape and Sealing-Wax Office in the reign of George II., when he was impeached for peculation, as were a great number of other honest gentlemen of those days; and Walpole Crawley was, as need scarcely be said, son of John Churchill Crawley, named after the celebrated military commander of the reign of Queen Anne.

We might analyze this information as follows: Sir Pitt must have been born in the late 1750s or early 1760s when the great Commoner, William Pitt (the

5 Rotten boroughs were political entities with depleted population that retained the right to representatives in Parliament based on populations from the pre-industrial period. They were abolished in the Reform Bill of 1832.

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elder), was at the height of his career, for that statesman lost the leadership of his party and accepted a peerage in 1766, losing thereby his appellation as the great Commoner. Sir Pitt Crawley's father, Walpole Crawley, was named for Robert Walpole, who flourished in the 1720s and 1730s and who was opposed in his later years by William Pitt. Walpole Crawley's father, John Churchill Crawley, was named for the great General Marlborough. These are not mere historical facts. A pattern is developing for the naming of Crawley babies: each is named for a leading player in the party currently in power. There is no party loyalty in this family that perpetually Crawls to the nearest source of potential favour.

In the next sentence we find that the Crawley who was son of the Crawley of James the First's time is named Charles Stuart Crawley (i.e., named after the king, Charles I). Charles Stuart Crawley very soon exchanged his name for a nickname and became known as Barebones Crawley - a change that must have taken place After Charles I lost his head (1649) and the convening of the Barebones Parliament (1653).

Focusing, however, on the living Crawleys - those who play parts in the novel, set in the Eighteen-Teens and Twenties, we read as follows:

Close by the name of Sir Pitt Crawley, Baronet (the subject of the present memoir), are written that of his brother, the Reverend Bute Crawley (the great Commoner was in disgrace when the reverend gentleman was born),...

It seems then that Pitt and Bute's parents quickly changed their support of William Pitt to John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, who replaced Pitt in the leadership of the party in the mid 1760s, just before their second son was born.

Pitt Crawley, Bute's older brother, of course inherited the title, which explains why Bute went into the Church. Sir Pitt Crawley's first marriage was to the daughter of a fictitious Lord Binkie, but she was a cousin to the real Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville, a political ally of William Pitt (the younger). Sir Pitt and his wife, Lady Pitt, née Binkie, were even more dexterous in naming their sons than Sir Pitt's father, Walpole Crawley, had been. We read that Lady Binkie

brought him two sons: Pitt, named not so much after his father as after the heaven-born minister; and Rawdon Crawley, from the Prince of Wales's friend, whom his Majesty George IV. forgot so completely.

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The heaven-born minister is William Pitt (the younger) in whose train, Lady Crawley's cousin, Henry Dundas, serves. But Rawdon Crawley is named for Francis Rawdon, later the Marquis of Hastings, who was politically opposed to Pitt and Dundas. Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal from 1812-21, is the friend of the Prince of Wales who was forgotten when the Prince became George IV. The Crawleys are bent as usual upon having it both ways.

None of that, of course, is actually IN Vanity Fair. Readers, it appears, are just supposed to know it all because it is not just decoration or filler. Although our primary interest in this novel is not all these minor characters and non-characters dragged in by the heels to swell the progress, we learn some valuable facts that help us read the parts of the story that are more obvious, as we shall see.

Our interest at this point is in Becky Sharp who is just entering the Crawley family as a governess. She is to be governess to Sir Pitt's two daughters by his second wife, the daughter of Mr. T. Dawson of Mudbury, whom we learn elsewhere is an ironmonger, Sir Pitt having had as much as he could stand of aristocratic women in his first wife, daughter of Lord and Lady Binkie.

The genealogy just rehearsed, allows us to infer, if we just know enough history, that Becky is governess to girls of very little pretension, indeed. Perhaps modern readers would find it gratifying to know that Sir Pitt's title of baronet is the lowest hereditary title in the English system and that his ancestor received the title in exchange for a donation of money - one thousand pounds, to be exact, when titles were being sold in order to raise money for the restoration of Ulster. And more important, as will appear shortly, it should be noted that being a baronet does not make one a peer in England, a designation achieved only at the next rank up, that of baron.

The narrator of Vanity Fair then comments about Becky confidentially to the reader:

It will be seen that the young lady was come into a family of very genteel connexions, and was about to move in a much more distinguished circle than that humble one which she had just quitted in Russell Square.

If nothing else, the word ‘humble’ used in reference to the excessively proud merchant families of Russell Square, the Sedleys and the Osbornes, should clue the reader in to the ironic tone of voice. But readers who skimmed or skipped the genealogy of the Crawley family, revealing a vulgar, crawling,

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ne'er-do-well family clinging parasitically to the edges of political power, might think that the narrator, and by extension Thackeray, is guiding their reactions to the story by ‘informing them’ that the Crawley family is more genteel than the Sedley family rather than pointing ironically at the family's pretensions.

Readers who recognize that the Crawley genealogy is a history of crawling as close to power as possible with next to no success since the initial coup de grace that netted the family two seats in Parliament will also recognize the sly ‘misleading’ voice of the narrator and will always be on guard against taking anything the narrator says at face value. Even the remark about Walpole Crawley, first Baronet, of the Tape and Sealing-Wax Office in the reign of George II, will be suspect: ‘he was impeached for peculation [embezzlement], as were a great number of other honest gentlemen of those days....’ Honest gentlemen, asks the suspicious reader? We now assume Walpole Crawley was guilty as sin, though we know those gentlemen, like the Keating Five, are honest gentlemen.⁶

Far from being upset at discovering that our narrator has his tongue in his cheek and can never be trusted, perceptive readers see an extraordinary thing taking place. What Thackeray appears to have done is to create a narrator that utterly trusts readers to be intelligent enough, strong enough, witty enough, and confident enough to hold their own in the novel. That narrator never ‘dumbs down’ to the reader, never assumes the reader didn't get it and has to have it all explained. He in fact is making fun of overly commented novels by offering palpably false comments which the reader can and must reject.

If one does not, however, know enough history, or if one cannot distinguish between various periods in the past, or if one does not trust his or her own judgment and ability to know when the narrator is pulling the reader's leg, one might assume as some critics have that Thackeray is an inconsistent, inept novelist who abdicated his responsibility to provide readers with unambiguous moral judgments on the characters.

Furthermore, one just might miss the meaning of Lord Steyne's remark, 340 pages later, when he hears that Sir Pitt Crawley, his town-house neighbour, has died. ‘So that old scoundrel's dead, is he? He might have been a Peer if

6 The Keating Five were accused of ‘inside trading’ on Wall Street in the 1980s. These things have a tendency to drop from view rather quickly in our own time as well.

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he had played his cards better. Mr. Pitt had very nearly made him; but he ratted always at the wrong time.’

The next rank up from baronet, remember, is baron, the lowest title of the peerage. William Pitt (the younger), for whom Sir Pitt's first born son was named, might have made, perhaps almost did make, Sir Pitt a baron. But no. The wily old baronet named his second son Rawdon, for the opposition, signalling what Lord Steyne called ratting, as usual with the Crawley family, at the wrong time.

There is, of course, another view to be taken towards all this. In giving the extended genealogy of the Crawley family, Thackeray might have been ‘filling up the number’, that is, he might have been padding his story so that it would fill the 32-page allotment required by serial publication. Or he might have been mixing history with fiction as part of a larger project to enhance the realism in the novel. Instead of trusting the reader to distrust him, he might have vacillated between commentary on his story that enhances and commentary on his story that merely muddles things.

Two kinds of evidence suggest otherwise: the narrator's own comments on other storytellers and a series of textual revisions, mostly in the manuscript. I do not really have the place to analyse the commentary on story telling, the point of which is that one cannot trust the commentary - not because it is inept but because it is deliberately ambiguous. The other kind of evidence, from textual revision, however, will also give a notion of whether and how Thackeray relied on narratorial commentary in the novel.

4. Watching the manuscript

One should of course be sceptical of the assertion that the narrator is deliberately refusing to load the dice one way or another - sceptical of the idea that the author systematically trusts the reader to distrust the narrator systematically. One instead conclude that the author was inept or just ambiguous unintentionally. But the following evidence suggests otherwise.

When Sir Pitt, in Chapter X, tells his son, Pitt, not to ‘preachify’ while Miss Crawley, the wealthy spinster aunt, is visiting, the first version in the manuscript reads:

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‘Why, hang it, Pitt,’ said the father to his remonstrance. ‘You wouldn't be such a flat⁷ as to let three thousand a year go out of the family?’
‘What is money compared to our souls, Sir?’ continued Crawley who knew he was not to inherit a shilling of his aunt's money. [italics added]

The last phrase, in the narrator's voice, ‘who knew he was not to inherit a shilling of his aunt's money’ was cancelled. The accusation instead becomes Sir Pitt's, who says: ‘You mean that the old lady won't leave the money to you.’ However, after the father's retort, the manuscript revision continued in the narrator's voice, to make a bald assertion about the characters:

‘You mean that the old lady won't leave the money to you’ - this was in fact the meaning of Mr. Crawley. No man for his own interest could accommodate himself to circumstances more. In London he would let a great man talk and laugh and be as wicked as he liked: but as he could get no good from Miss Crawley's money why compromise his conscience?. This was another reason why he should hate Rawdon Crawley. He thought his brother robbed him. Elder brothers often do think so; and curse the conspiracy of the younger children wh. unjustly deprives them of their fortune. [italics added]

This unmistakable commentary, telling the reader the exact moral standing of both father and son, is then also cancelled in favour of a musingly ambiguous question. In proof the passage appeared as follows:

‘You mean that the old lady won't leave the money to you’ - and who knows but it was Mr. Crawley's meaning?

When the last version appeared in proof, someone (probably Thackeray) drove the doubtfulness home by adding italics to was: ‘and who knows but it was Mr. Crawley's meaning?’ The effect is to cast additional doubt on the narrator's overt statement and to intensify the suspicion that both Crawleys are corrupt to the core.

Can there be any question about Thackeray's deliberate intention to push onto readers the responsibility for pointing morals and judging the characters?

7 The word ‘flat’ replaced the word ‘simpleton’ in the MS.

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Another example of the author's control over the narrative tone might cement the idea that Thackeray was trusting his readers to draw their own conclusions. The Waterloo Battle in chapter 32 of Vanity Fair comes to a close with this paragraph:

No more firing was heard at Brussels - the pursuit rolled miles away. The darkness came down on the field and city, and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

The effect on many readers has been thrilling and chilling, as they are forced through the opposing passions generated by the sorrow for sudden death and for poor Amelia who does not participate at all in the pleasure of seeing George dead. In fact, however, the passage says nothing about sorrow or pleasure; for the language is crisp, clean, efficient, and flat. There is no suggestion that Amelia is shedding tears over what Becky in chapter 67 will call with great justice a selfish humbug, a low-bred cockney-dandy, and a padded booby. The mere facts here are supposed to carry a great deal of emotional freight.

What did Thackeray, as opposed to the narrator, think about George and his death? Well, outside the novel he expressed himself at least twice. Two months before this passage was published, he responded to his mother's criticism of Amelia as being selfish with some general remarks about greed generally in Vanity Fair and the rarity of humility, and then he added: ‘Amelia's [humiliation] is to come, when her scoundrel of a husband is well dead with a ball in his odious bowels....’⁸ There is nothing flat or neutral in that version of George's death. Nine months after the passage was published, Thackeray wrote in an entirely different mood to a Miss Smith, declining a dinner invitation on the grounds that it was the ‘Hannawussary of the death of my dear friend Captain George Osborne of the --th regiment.’ The letter is decorated with a cartoon battle scene of cannon, soldiers, Napoleon escaping on a horse (‘Bony runnin away like anythink’), and, lying face down, ‘Capting Hosbin ded a bullick through his Art.’⁹

At the very least Thackeray the person had no qualms about expressing his opinion of George to his correspondents, but in the novel the narrator tends to be ambiguous or neutral just when the temptation is great to intrude and

8 Letters, II, p. 309.

9 Letters, II, p. 385.

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point the moral of the story. Recognizing this control might make the reader look for other subtleties in the text. Readers of the first edition could note, for example, that the last sentence of that paragraph closing chapter 32 begins with the phrase, ‘The darkness came down’ while readers of the revised edition would read, ‘Darkness came down.’ Both indicate the time of day and both suggest, perhaps, that a greater, symbolic, darkness descended that day. But readers who note that Thackeray took the trouble to remove the opening article, might be even more inclined to think that ‘Darkness’ with a capital D now starts that last sentence; a personified Darkness has descended on the day and on the book. And remember, this is the end of a monthly instalment; original readers had to wait thirty days for the next chapter.

4. Conclusion

Readers of Vanity Fair confront a difficult task. Unassisted, they might collapse history into two segments: Now, and long ago; for some readers the differences between now and 1986 are more palpable and real than those between 1756 and 1848. Unassisted they might also collapse the voices from the fiction into one category: The Author; for many have been ‘trained’ in school to find a bit of biographical information to give a sense of who is speaking. For some readers distinguishing between author and narrator is a new idea and distinguishing between straight and ironic narration is something they think was invented by stand-up comics on HBO. Unassisted they might, furthermore, collapse history and fiction into one segment: Fiction, not recognizing Bute and Pitt and Dundas and Hastings as historical figures or not knowing which is fiction and which fact when confronted by the Groom of the Bedchamber and the Baronet of the Tape and Sealing Wax Office.

Knowing the difference between the fictional references and the historical, knowing the difference between the various periods of history, knowing the biography and appearance of the author and the fictitious biography and appearance of the narrator, knowing the market-place for literature in which it made sense to publish a novel in 32 page pamphlets with yellow covers - knowing all these things makes it possible to make discriminations about the tone of voice we are hearing as we read and makes a great, long, boring book into an exciting, penetrating, troubling book that reveals human foibles from the days of the first Queen Elizabeth to those of the second.