Vanity Fair

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-1863), was born in Calcutta, the son of a Collector in the East India Company´s service. His father died when he was three and he was sent to England to live with his mother, who had married again. Thackeray was educated at Charterhouse and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He left Cambridge in 1830 without taking a degree, having lost part of his inheritance through gambling. Thackeray began to make his name as a writer during the 1840s. “Vanity Fair” was published in 1847. The story is set at the time of the Napoleonic wars, and gives a satirical picture of a worldly society. It follows the lives of two contrasted characters, Rebecca Sharp, the penniless orphaned daughter of an artist and a French opera dancer, and Amelia Sedley, the sheltered child of a rich City merchant. The novel is a satire of society as a whole, characterized by hypocrisy and opportunism, but there is no suggestion that social or political changes could improve the nature of society. It paints a fairly bleak view of the human condition. This portrait is continued with Thackeray's own role as an omniscient narrator, one of the writers best known for using the technique. As Lord David Cecil remarked, "Thackeray liked people, and for the most part he thought them well-intentioned. But he also saw very clearly that they were all in some degree weak and vain, self-absorbed and self-deceived."