as good a lady as ever I see. You’ve got more brains in your little vinger than any
baronet’s wife in the county. Will you come? Yes or no?’
‘Oh, Sir Pitt!’ Rebecca said, very much moved.
‘Say yes, Becky,’ Sir Pitt continued. ‘I’m an old man, but a good’n. I’m good for
twenty years. I’ll make you happy, zee if I don’t. You shall do what you like; spend what
you like; an’ ‘av it all your own way. I’ll make you a zettlement. I’ll do everything reg’lar.
Look year!’ and the old man fell down on his knees and leered at her like a satyr.
Rebecca started back a picture of consternation. In the course of this history we have
never seen her lose her presence of mind; but she did now, and wept some of the most
genuine tears that ever fell from her eyes.
‘Oh, Sir Pitt!’ she said. ‘Oh, sir – I – I’m married already.’Becky is sorry because she has misplayed her hand. She has secretly married Sir Pitt’s
spendthrift younger son Rawdon, hoping that he will inherit his rich aunt’s estate.
As Sir Pitt’s wife, she would have been rich now, and could soon hope to be his
widow. As Mrs Crawley, she drives her gambling husband higher and higher in soci-
ety on less and less money. Regency society may have been driven by money and
pleasure, but cannot have been so breathtakingly heartless as this.
Fe w nove ls move so well as Vanity Fair. We watch Becky climb ever higher with-
out visible support. The Fair’s social scenes, topical details and theatrical effects spin
round in an action similar to that of a comedy by Ben Jonson, but accompanied by
a rapid commentary and appeals to the middle classes. Thackeray has a whip-crack
style. Wives follow their men to Brussels and to the Countess of Richmond’s Ball on
the eve of Waterloo. Amelia persists in loving George, who writes proposing elope-
ment with Becky, who is bewitching a general. At last ‘no more firing was heard at
Brussels – the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city:
and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet
through his heart.’
At the climax, Rawdon discovers Becky compromisingly alone with her protector
the Marquis of Steyne. ‘He tore the diamond ornament out of her breast, and flung
it at Lord Steyne. It cut him on his bald forehead. Steyne wore the scar to his dying
day.’ Becky claims she is innocent, ‘but who could tell what was truth which came
from those lips;or ifthat corrupt heart was in this case pure?’ Further anticlimax
follows: Steyne pre-empts Rawdon’s challenge to a duel by having the bankrupt
gambler appointed Governor of Coventry Island, a fever spot. Becky pursues her
luck in Paris and then in Pumpernickel, where she shows Amelia George Osborne’s
letter proposing elopement, in order that Amelia should marry the faithful Dobbin.
Whether Bec ky was technically innocent and whether she had some feeling for
Amelia are intriguing moral questions but less clear than the brevity of life and the
rarity of goodness in Vanity Fair.In its spirited narrative, drama alternates with
irony, feeling with cynicism, hilarity with sadness. Thackeray’s dash and wit create
effects which are hard to define, but seem to be more moral and humane than he
pr etends, and curiously moving. His disillusioned exposure of conventional senti-
ment and morality implies that there are truer standards.
Mrs Lynn Lynton wrote that ‘Thackeray, who saw the faults and frailties of human
nature so clearly, was the gentlest-hearted, most generous, most loving of men.
Dicke ns,whose whole mind went to almost morbid tenderness and sympathy, was
infinitely less plastic, less self-giving, less personally sympathetic.’ Thomas
Babington Macaulay made a different comparison: ‘Touching Thackeray and
Dicke ns,my dear, / Two lines sum up critical drivel, / One lives on a countess’s298 10 · FICTION