Vanity Fair and vexation of spirit

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2002 by Mullen, Alexandra

Geographically smaller in scope was Thackeray's first big public success, The Snobs of England (now published as The Book of Snobs). If not quite as fresh as it seemed in 1847 for the new comic paper Punch, this can still be laugh-out-loud funny to read and still make some palpable hits. Thackeray's "snobbium gatherum" includes the snob royal, city snobs, military snobs, clerical snobs, university snobs, literary snobs, Irish snobs, party-- giving snobs, dining-out snobs, dinner-giving snobs, country snobs, Continental snobs, English snobs on the Continent, club snobs (in eight numbers) ... in fact there was no reason ever to stop: "When I see the great effect which these papers are producing on an intelligent public, I have a strong hope that before long we shall have a regular Snob-department in the newspapers, just as we have the Police Courts and the Court news at present." (The Pseud's Corner in Private Eye might be his pious answer.)

Thackeray invented the modern snob. The word had once meant "cobbler"; in Thackeray's youth at Cambridge, "snob" was a derisory piece of local slang for a townsman (as opposed to the more glorious gownsman). It has now become a bona fide, indispensable word for a shallow adjudicator of human worth along class lines, or, as Thackeray put it more universally, "He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob."

A Court system that sends men of genius to the second table, I hold to be a Snobbish system. A society that sets up to be polite, and ignores Arts and Letters, I hold to be a Snobbish society. You, who despise your neighbor, are a Snob; you, who forget your own friends, meanly to follow after those of a higher degree, are a Snob; you, who are ashamed of your poverty, and blush for your calling, are a Snob; as are you who boast of your pedigree, or are proud of your wealth.

A nice Thackerayan note is that the title page declares the book written by "One of Themselves."

Thackeray's masterwork is Vanity Fair, published serially from January 1847 to July 1848. It made his name-almost literally, since it was the first of his works not to be published under a pseudonym. The Victorian reading public venerated authors who thundered away at them for their flaws: Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens are obvious examples. Charlotte Bronte placed Thackeray in even more august company:

There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital-a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of "Vanity Fair" admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levinbrand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time, they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.

Thackeray thought about his success a bit differently: he crowed to Lady Blessington, "I reel from dinner party to dinner party-I wallow in turtle and swim in claret and Shampang." Bronte's gravity seems to be a mismatch with Thackeray's levity, but the clergyman's daughter was right to hear that Old Testament ring. For while Thackeray's comic novel is realistic, crammed with characters set in a recognizable time and place (1811 London, Waterloo in 1815, and so forth), it tells an almost Bunyanesque allegory of selfishness and emptiness, the buying and selling of virtue, and ends with a nod to Ecclesiastes: "Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?"