Vanity Fair is a satirical novel of manners which takes place during, and in the decade after, the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The various scenes in the novel range across Europe and England. It was first published in serial form beginning in 1847. The work is by turns witty, scintillating, brutally realistic, tragic, humorous, and always fascinating. The title of the book stems from Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”, where Vanity is a town along the pilgrim’s route, and which holds an eternal fair of the vanities. It is a place where people are ensnared by worldly things. By Thackeray’s time, Vanity Fair had come to be seen as a playground of the idle rich and their sychophants. As an example of the Victorian novel, there is none finer than this.

Although the novel is peopled by dozens of sharply outlined characters, it traces in detail the intertwined lives and careers of six: Rebecca Sharp, Amelia Sedley, George Osborne, Joseph Sedley, William Dobbin, and Rawdon Crawley. Of the six, Becky is the most famous and certainly the most interesting. Impoverished child of an artist and opera singer, Miss Sharp is determined to carve out a place for herself in Vanity Fair. Ambition is her outstanding characteristic. She personifies the merciless social climber who carelessly destroys the lives of others in pursuit of her goal. But in the final analysis, Vanity Fair is the timeless story of people futilely struggling to establish themselves in society…with all the resultant human foibles, deceptions, fears, and triumphs.