Vanity Fear

John Sutherland: ‘I’d take Vanity Fair, which I think is the greatest novel in England.’ Sue Lawley: ‘Not Middlemarch?’ JS: ‘It’s more fun than Middlemarch. And you don’t feel lectured in the same way that you do with George Eliot.’

How many of us, on hearing that snatch of conversation on Desert Island Discs in 2006, thought, ‘Well, I’d better get round to reading Vanity Fair, then.’ I did, but it still took me another five years. I was terrified of the great fat book. And so, I think, are many people, judging by the honest responses I’ve had from highly educated friends who have admitted to steering clear of it all their lives. (How I miss Sue Lawley, by the way. Kirsty Young would never make such an incisive rejoinder as ‘Not Middlemarch?’). I finished the book last night. ‘Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.’ Reading it took over three weeks of bedtimes and early mornings. Like many slow writers I’m a slow reader, and disagree entirely with the recent item in the ‘Wit and Wisdom’ section of The Week which said, ‘He has only truly learned the art of reading who has mastered the art of skipping and skimming.’ As far as I’m concerned, he has only learned the true art of reading who reads and savours every sentence, at least once and possibly twice. We owe it to the author, surely. I embarked on Vanity Fair full of preconceptions. I thought, first of all, that it was going to be all about Becky Sharp. Famously, the book is ‘a novel without a hero’, so I thought I was going to have to follow a conniving minx on the make – a sort of Regency Gabrielle-in- Desperate-Housewives – on her 740-page journey of self-aggrandisement. Well, in fact, there are some quite long sections without Becky Sharp. You can go for a chapter or two without coming across her. And when she returns, you’re happy, actually, because she has the charisma of those rule-breaking, teacher-mimicking girls you were at school with, whom you half-wished to be liked by and half-hated. Will her come-uppance come? Will you have to wait till page 730 till it does? I also thought it was going to be a cast-of-thousands pageant of Regency life, all Vauxhall Gardens, carriages, snuff-boxes and fat silly men. Well, there is a chapter called ‘Vauxhall’ and it does contain a very fat, very silly man. I didn’t find the play London Assurance funny, in spite of Simon Russell Beale’s acting, and the Vauxhall chapter was a bit like that: you’re meant to find Joseph Sedley funny for being a rotund Regency buck recently returned from India where he was the collector for Boggley Wollah. But he didn’t make me laugh. The great discovery was, though, that Vanity Fair has, in fact, a SMALL cast of characters. If you apply what Nicholas Coleridge (when he was editor of Harpers & Queen and I was a junior sub) used to call ‘the flick test’, which means flicking slowly through the book, the reassuring thing is that you see the same names on page 650 as you do on page 350 as you do on page 35. This is not the case with Dickens. (Discuss.) If you do the flick test on Bleak House, you glimpse a whole lot of new names on page 400 which weren’t there at the beginning. As each new Bleak House character appears in the later pages, you feel increasingly weary, as you do towards the end of a drinks party when the hostess whisks you off and you have to go through the rigmarole of making yet another acquaintance. In Vanity Fair, I’m pleased to report, the main characters, Becky Sharp, Amelia Osborne (née Sedley) and William Dobbin are there with you all the way. They act as they would act. Their characters are set from the first glimpse, and they play out their roles. There is, of course, what the blurb enthusiastically calls ‘a superb cast of secondary characters’. Oh, no, I thought: will these all have annoying caricature names? I’m afraid some of them do. There’s a Sir Huddleston Fuddleston. And if you think English caricature names are predictable, how much worse are German ones? In the chapter starting on page 661 called ‘Am Rhein’, we come across Gräfin Fanny de Butterbrod, the Prince of Pumpernickel, and St Catherine of Schlippenschloppen. Spare us! But among the secondary characters there are some who are so truly superb that they will live with you forever and enrich your life. My favourite is Lady Crawley’s paid companion, Briggs. Just Briggs. How I feel for her, and thus for all paid companions! A spinster who once, long ago, had a fleeting love affair with a young writingmaster, but now lives entirely under the thumb of her flippant and spoilt employer, who subtly bullies her and reminds her how ugly and unmarried she is and will remain. ‘The greatest tyrants over women are women,’ Thackeray tells us. I knew there was a character called ‘Dobbin of Ours’ and was not looking forward to meeting him, expecting him to be some kind of backward farmer. But in fact he’s the hero. The novel does have one after all. Dobbin is adorable, quiet, lanky, a major with large feet and a lisp, but good, noble and true, and slavishly devoted to Amelia who doesn’t love him back. How the book (riddled with stories of greed and sloth) needs someone good! Amelia is angelic, too, but she cries the whole time. ‘Emmy’s head sank down, and for almost the last time in which she will be called upon to weep in this history, she commenced that work,’ Thackeray writes on page 735. She is a kind but wet (literally) heroine. Dobbin’s selfless and robust goodness runs through the book as a straight thread. But how long will we have to wait for him and Amelia to get it together? It seems like a lifetime, and indeed it almost is. Seventeen years: far longer than Persuasion, which seems like an unbearably long wait even though Anne’s first desolate seven years of her twenties are over by the time the book starts. Here, you have to wait till page 737 for the long-awaited kiss, by which time the protagonists are going grey and you have almost gone off the boil, as has poor worn-out Dobbin. A sucker for scenery in plays, I’m also a sucker for scenery in books. I like to know what people’s houses were like, what they had for lunch, whether they ever came near Fulham where I live, etc. Does Thackeray score high marks for scenery? Quite high. There’s a haunting description of a drawing-room in Russell Square in which a spinster (another one, Mr Osborne’s unmarried and exploited daughter) sits alone, looking into a mirror which reflects another mirror.

The great glass over the mantelpiece, faced by the other great console glass at the opposite end of the room, increased and multiplied between them the brown holland bag in which the chandelier hung; until you saw these brown holland bags fading away in endless perspectives, and this apartment of Miss Osborne’s seemed like the centre of a system of drawing-rooms.

Tick in the margin for good detail. Thackeray takes us to the Duke of Richmond’s ball on the eve of Waterloo; he takes us to Brighton on the Lightning coach; he takes us riding in Hyde Park; he takes us from Southampton to London up the A31, via Alton and Farnham, stopping at inns on the way; he takes us to the crumbling country house called Queen’s Crawley, and to its adjoining rectory presided over by another superb secondary character, the rector’s bossy wife Mrs Bute Crawley. But he only describes scenery if it throws light on character. He does tell us that Becky’s husband Rawdon Crawley makes chocolate for her every morning and brings it up to her in bed. (Rawdon will do anything to please his wife.) As for Fulham, it’s a joke place where Becky and Rawdon live when they’re penniless. The Sedley family, when they fall on very hard times, go and live in Brompton, where Amelia does a great deal of crying. She walks with her son Georgy in ‘the Brompton lanes’. I wish Thackeray would describe these lanes but he doesn’t. I thought the book would be adults-only: I wasn’t expecting to get to know any children. Thackeray has a definite soft spot for them. Georgy and Rawdy: two innocent boys, born into Vanity Fair, our degraded world. The death of Amelia’s husband George Osborne on the field of Waterloo comes as a powerful end-of-chapter shock, and when little Georgy is born soon afterwards, Amelia is besotted with him, in a modern-mother way. She knows all about every single one of his classmates at school – another good detail. And partly because Becky Sharp is such a horrible, cold, hands-off mother (as she would be), her husband Rawdon becomes what is perhaps the first hands-on dad in literature, taking little Rawdy out for rides in the Park with a capital ‘P’. The enchanting scene where these two young boys meet each other out on their ride will bring new associations for ever to my dog walks by Rotten Row. ‘You don’t feel lectured’, said John Sutherland, ‘in the way that you do with George Eliot.’ You jolly well do feel lectured. Thackeray holds your skull up and shakes it in front of your face. You’re all going to get old and ugly and die and be forgotten, dear readers. That’s his message and he hammers it home.

Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled. And so Sir Pitt was forgotten – like the kindest and best of us – only a few weeks later.

That’s a typical Thackeray sentence. He describes characters ruthlessly: ‘the horrid old dotard’, ‘the tipsy old wretch’, ‘her scowling old father’, ‘the whimpering old idiot’. He laughs at us all. How about this wonderful glimpse of the British abroad – a pre-figuring of Benidorm: ‘Those who know the English colonies abroad know that we carry with us our pride, pills, prejudices, Harvey-sauces, cayenne-peppers, and other Lares, making a little Britain wherever we settle down.’ We’re in the hands of a brilliant storyteller who loves and hates and laughs at his characters and at the world. I’d still take Middlemarch to the Desert Island, because Dorothea is a million times more interesting than tearful Amelia could ever be. But Thackeray is excellent company and I can well imagine Professor John Sutherland luxuriating in it before he goes in search of his lunchtime fish and coconuts.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 32 © Ysenda Maxtone Graham 2011