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Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Vanity Fair Then and Now, and Really Now
Posted by Rohan Maitzen on 12/30/09 at 11:55 AM
The TLS reminds us that the first part of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair was published on New Year’s Day, 1847; they’ve rerun the column published in their pages on its centenary. It’s an odd sort of column; its author finds the novel much softer than I do:
We can touch hands with that Regency world and breathe in it as easily as in our own. He has shut some of its cupboards, but he leaves us chinks enough. In this he was at one with the convention of his age on which Victorianism was settling down with voluminous skirts. He had flogged hypocrisy and stupidity in his greener day. Now he had a melancholy awareness of what was due to the Amelia Sedleys; and, even in the flow of his creative fullness, of what a modern dramatist meant by “Aren’t we all?” Novels had become family reading, to be read aloud by Mamma on her sofa, with a candle throwing its discreet light on the page and her daughter doing needlework in the outer dusk. Thackeray was a gentleman – the word is not used disparagingly – and he would not have them blush in the dimness.
He has no far-reaching thought – no ideology, shall we say. Yet Charlotte Brontë saw him as “the first social regenerator of his day.”
If anyone at the TLS is reading this, I’d happily write you up something a little more current (it’s not as if nobody has read or written about Vanity Fair since 1947, after all). But any attention to such a splendid novel is good attention.
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