William Makepeace Thackeray
Life and career
William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811 and educated in England. After leaving Cambridge without a degree, he travelled and eventually worked as a freelance journalist, contributing to Punch and other publications. His writing included travel books, poetry and novels issued in instalments. Vanity Fair appeared in 1847 and 1848. He died in London in 1863. The novel’s shifting sympathies invite scrutiny of both social ambition and the voice that exposes it.
Satire and the narrator's performance
Thackeray's experience with periodical writing belongs alongside the conspicuous narrative voice of Vanity Fair. The novel repeatedly makes storytelling itself part of the entertainment: the narrator displays people, comments on their conduct and draws the reader into judgment. That invitation is not entirely comfortable. A sharp observation about someone else's vanity can also expose the pleasure taken in watching it. Social criticism and the performance of superior knowledge are therefore closely entangled.
Vanity Fair
Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley enter adult life with different resources, attachments and strategies. Their intersecting stories move through family negotiations, financial reversals, war and social display. Money changes the apparent meaning of character: a quality admired in security may be judged differently after a loss of position. The novel's broad social range does not reduce to choosing one heroine as entirely right. Its interest lies in the relations among affection, dependence, calculation and the stories people tell about their own motives.
Include the storyteller in your judgment
When the narrator offers a confident interpretation, compare it with what the scene actually permits you to know. Watch how sympathy moves between characters whose choices may both be limited. A conversation about affection can also be a negotiation about property, security or status. Reading those layers together makes the satire more precise. It also prevents Becky and Amelia from becoming simple labels for ambition and innocence, categories the novel repeatedly puts under pressure.