I don’t have a problem with readers who can overlook and contextualize the racism at the heart of this novel, who can appreciate Vanity Fair’s many admirable qualities. Ultimately, I could not. The further I got into the story, and the more I learned from external sources what a racist asshole Thackeray himself was, the sicker I felt. I bailed at the halfway point, and all I’ll remember in the future about this novel is the bigotry.

(And no, I don’t want to argue with anyone about this.)

Vanity Fair, had been lurking around on my to read list for a while. Then I noticed that there was going to be a TV adaptation of it, so that kind of gave me a little nudge to pick it up. There is no real hero in this book, and the author admits that. Rebecca Sharp is by far the most interesting and rather layered character, as really, the rest of the characters, did not stir much emotion in me. I found them to be rather weak, and this probably lead me into having no empathy for them.
This novel is pretty large, and I'm sure that you could easily knock 200 pages off this, and could still be readable. I'll admit, it dragged in parts.
However, there were many times that I felt caught up in the story, and I noticed there was some light humour thrown in there too, which was a welcome addition. Unfortunately though, I just don't think it is the best of victorian literature, and although it was enjoyable, I won't be reading it again, further down the line.

n  The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.n

There seems to be little to say about Vanity Fair that is worth the time in saying it. This is an open book; its appeal is direct, its themes obvious, its interpretation unambiguous. It is an extended satire of Victorian England—what more is there to add?
tt
I was prepared for the nineteenth-century prose; indeed, Thackeray’s unadorned style has aged uncommonly well. I had readied myself for its protracted length and copious cast of characters. I was even prepared for the strong authorial voice and frequent asides; in this, Thackeray follows Henry Fielding quite closely. But I was not quite ready for such a depressing novel. For the secret of Vanity Fair’s lasting success is not, I think, due merely to Thackeray’s execution—brilliant as it is—but owes itself far more to the novel’s triumphant immoralism.
tt
Like many great novelists, Thackeray opens the book by introducing to us a pair of characters, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, who are to be foils for each other. Amelia is simple and good, while Becky is calculating and wicked. Following the standard conventions, we should expect Amelia to emerge triumphant and Becky to be foiled. And yet Thackeray consistently and persistently flaunts this expectation. Instead, he throws his characters into a world full of cowards, egoists, hypocrites, dullards, drunkards, gluttons, dandies, and every other species of vice—in short, Vanity Fair—and shows us that, in such a world, virtue is a luxury few can afford.
tt
Indeed, the frightening thing about this novel is that Thackeray gradually pulls us into sympathy with Becky Sharp. The daughter of a painter and a dancing master, she hoists herself up from the lowest to the highest ranks of society using only her wit. In the process, it becomes clear that she is a sociopath in the proper sense of the word—seeing others as mere instruments, unable to care for anyone but herself. And yet we feel—we are made to feel—that she is not morally lower than those around her (who also only care for money and status), only cleverer and more determined.
tt
In a word, Thackeray’s thesis is that, in our depraved world—where people care only for vanities, and where unjust accidents such as birth determine the distribution of these goods—the only logical course of action is to be ruthless. Thackeray completes this impression by showing how commonly virtue leads to misery. Amelia’s virtue, though genuine, is consistently made to look foolish. Her dedication to her husband is rendered ridiculous by her husband’s unfaithfulness, her dedication to her son rendered absurd by her son’s unconcern with leaving the house, and so on. For my part I found it very difficult to like her, and more often found myself rooting for Becky.
tt
William Dobbin is the only character who is allowed to appear really admirable. Yet his virtue, too, is for most of the story ignored and unrewarded. And when he finally obtains his goal—by which time he has grown bitter with waiting—this is arguably caused, not by his action, but by Becky Sharp, the only effectively active character in the book.
tt
The final result of this has been to leave me with a feeling of emptiness. Thackeray’s portrayal of Vanity Fair is convincing enough to leave the reader with a numbing sense of cynicism, scarcely pierced by the novel’s few tender moments. Despite this, I must recommend the book highly. Thackeray has, in many ways, aged better than his chief rival, Dickens. His prose is leaner and sharper, his characters more realistic, and his ethos free of Dickens’ dripping sentimentality. This is satire raised to a sweeping view of human life—which does not make it any funnier.

Yes! I finished with this book! And I'm so happy... not to have read it, but to have finished it! :D

From the first lines, I liked Thackeray’s writing and wit. He can be compared to some French writers that I love from the first half of the 19th century: a free spirit, a charming irony, a biting lucidity but not nasty, a pleasant sense of humour and an agreeable self-derision.
I didn’t know anything about this story except that I heard that Rebecca Sharp was a naughty girl. Well, in the beginning, I liked her as soon as I met her! In fact, as soon as the scene of the dictionary on chapter I. We see in this short scene all the talent of Thackeray: by this single gesture, he describes to us all the character of Rebecca:
By throwing the dictionary, Rebecca means:
As a young girl, I reject your old vision of an old world, a world that is not even mine. I reject your definitions, I will create mine. You want to give me this book, you, Miss Jemima, submissive person: I don’t accept it because I’m not one of yours, I’m an unsubmissive person. You, Miss Jemima, you’re even more cowardly than your sister Miss Pinkerton, who hasn’t been able to impose her authority on me; by giving me this dictionary without your sister knowing it, you show your cowardice to the world. To accept this dictionary would be like saying: never mind, it doesn’t matter to be cowardly, everyone is, I absolve you. Well, no, I'm not cowardly, I'm not afraid, and I dare to say it aloud, I don’t hide, I don’t want to hide what I am, that’s my proudness, that’s my sincerity. I don’t accept half measures, maybe because I'm young and whole and don’t know the nuances of things yet, or maybe because I'm hard, that's what we'll discover in the rest of the story.

Here’s an example, on chapter IV, of the cutting remarks I like :
“There is no need of giving a special report of the conversation which now took place between Mr. Sedley and the young lady; for the conversation, as may be judged from the foregoing specimen, was not especially witty or eloquent; it seldom is in private societies, or anywhere except in very high-flown and ingenious novels.”
This kind of 19th century delicate and biting wit delights me!

On chapter V, I agree with Thackeray’s passage about the children’s education. I don’t know about Thackeray’s life, but one can imagine, that he talks about his own experience. And he finishes this passage with William Dobbin reading,
“Well, William Dobbin had for once forgotten the world, and was away with Sindbad the Sailor in the Valley of Diamonds, or with Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peribanou in that delightful cavern where the Prince found her, and whither we should all like to make a tour.”
Here, Thackeray the writer becomes a reader and how pleasant it is to feel is reader’s happiness in his last sentence!

But this was only the beginning … then followed thousand pages of vanity until I felt nauseous about this subject! Maybe was this Thackeray’s goal?

Although Thackeray present us one of his character as selfish, another one as weak, another one as wrong or whatever, he seems to present unfairly women all in one basket:

Chapter IV:
“It is what sentimentalists, who deal in very big words, call a yearning after the Ideal, and simply means that women are commonly not satisfied until they have husbands and children on whom they may centre affections, which are spent elsewhere, as it were, in small change.”
Chapter IX:
“As the only endowments with which Nature had gifted Lady Crawley were those of pink cheeks and a white skin, and as she had no sort of character, nor talents, nor opinions, nor occupations, nor amusements, nor that vigour of soul and ferocity of temper which often falls to the lot of entirely foolish women, her hold upon Sir Pitt's affections was not very great.”
Chapter X:
“She was the most hospitable and jovial of old vestals, and had been a beauty in her day, she said. (All old women were beauties once, we very well know.)”
Chapter XI:
"She drank seven glasses of champagne," said the reverend gentleman, in a low voice; "and filthy champagne it is, too, that my brother poisons us with—but you women never know what's what."
Or:
“Mrs. Firkin had that natural jealousy which is one of the main principles of every honest woman.”
Or:
“The Captain had written her notes (the best that the great blundering dragoon could devise and spell; but dulness gets on as well as any other quality with women). ”
Chapter XIV:
“And regarding this delightful secret, not one syllable more was said by either of the young women. But it was destined to come out before long. ”

At the end of chapter XII, I'm going to make myself a tea, and I wonder: did Thackeray, at least once, make a compliment or say something kind about one of his characters?
I don’t think so.
I don’t know Thackeray, not that I'm not so old! but I have not read anything about this author yet. Was he a man of such cynicism to be able to write such a loooong book about so horrible characters each in their genre? And it seems it’s not only his characters whom he pitied, he despised, but still, he seems to despise the reader. Or rather, the female reader, because he suspects that his readership is rather feminine.

This said, I found two quotes which I liked:

« But oh, mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably! »
Is this sentence not scornful of women, or have I misunderstood it? Doesn’t he say: don’t worry about writing verses or prose, ladies, your natural charms are enough!
The greatest vain of this fair wouldn’t it be Thackeray himself?

And this one:
“Picture to yourself, oh fair young reader, a worldly, selfish, graceless, thankless, religionless old woman, writhing in pain and fear, and without her wig. Picture her to yourself, and ere you be old, learn to love and pray!”
This last sentence is interesting and deep.
To love is not so easy as one believes. To love needs to have an open-mindedness, to accept the other, to reconcile with their faults, with what we think are faults.
To pray is to put oneself back in its place as a human being. It is admitting: ok, we’re maybe the most intelligent being on this planet, but let’s get down of our pedestal and admit the existence of a higher power beyond our understanding.
With some empathy and humility, maybe we can hope to become acceptable old persons.
Yes, this very small sentence by Thackeray, among all those we have already read and they are already many! this little sentence of nine words pleases me a lot.

On chapter XXI, I was already bored by this Vanity Fair. It's so easy to mock people's faults, but what’s the point? Perhaps, this can make me think, when I look at myself in the mirror: well, am I not a bit selfish or niggard or hypocritical? Ok, then this book reminds me to try to be better, it's a good thing, but... 1000 pages, isn't it a bit too long for only one purpose? And being better than the worst doesn’t mean being good.
Also, I find it more interesting to read a story about characters who have a beautiful soul, a beautiful spirit ... I prefer to look upwards to try to elevate myself than to look down to be able to say: ok, I'm not so bad! I feel it's like voyeurism (English?).
As for me, I’m not interested in reading about others faults, and as whoever loves himself will be loved only by himself, I didn’t like any of this Vanity Fair characters. And, God! what a book is long when there’s not even one character who can move you, even partly!

And let’s remember that whenever vanity made someone happy on earth, surely that happy man was just a fool!

According to the description on the back of my copy, this book is "deliciously satirical." If that means the book is supposed to be taken as a joke, then I definitely read it the wrong way. Maybe I should try rereading it while repeating under my breath, "It's Oscar Wilde, it's Oscar Wilde, it's Oscar Wilde" until I see that it's funny, but frankly I'd rather not.
Here, presented in simple list form, are the reasons I disliked this book:
-William Makepeace Thackeray is a condescending ass. Maybe this was all part of the satire, but a danger of writing a satirical book is that people might accidentally take it seriously. I am one of those idiots, and because of this I just rolled my eyes at the book while reading quotes like this: "What do men know about women's martyrdoms? We should go mad had we to endure the hundreth part of those daily pains which are meekly born by many women. Ceaseless slavery meeting with no reward; constant gentleness and kindness met by cruelty as constant; love, labour, patience, watchfullness, without even so much as the acknowledgement of a good word; all this, how many of them have to bear in quiet, and appear abroad with cheerful faces as if they felt nothing. Tender slaves that they are, they must needs be hypocrites and weak."
Hear that? It's the sound of me bringing my Angry Feminist Hat out of storage.
Also, if I had a nickel for every time Thackeray refers to either Becky or Amelia as "the little woman" I would have at least three dollars. I'm not even exagerrating.
-The whole book is at least 200 pages too long, bogged down with pointless anecdotes and background information that has no effect on the plot. Several times I found myself reading a long description of the random Army captain's wife's sister's marriage arrangements, and would mutter at the pages, "Why does this matter?" Seriously, Thackeray needs a good editor more than anything else.
-Almost all the characters irritated me beyond measure. Rawdon was an idiot, George was an asshole, Dobbin had "Hello, I'm a Tool" written on his forehead, and Amelia made Jane Eyre look like Gloria Steinem. Becky was the only exception to this - she was evil, conniving, smart, charming, and totally awesome. But she was only present for about a third of the book. Which leads me to my next point...
-Why is Becky only present for one third of the story? I had to sit through pages and pages of pointless chatter about minor characters and The Trials of Amelia the Adorable Martyr, and all I wanted to know was what Becky was up to. Towards the end of the book, once I had stopped even remotely caring about the latest evidence for Amelia's sainthood, Becky finally makes a reappearance. This is several years after her husband discovered that she had been hoarding money and may have been cheating on him, and left her to go be a mayor in Wherever-The-Hell Island. What, the readers wonder, could Becky have gotten up to in that time? Whatever it is, it's probably a lot more interesting than anything Amelia the Spineless Wonder has been doing.
Here's what Thackeray has to say about Becky while she wasn't in the story: "...when Becky is out of the way, be sure that she is not particularly well-employed, and that the less that is said about her doings is in fact the better."
Yeah. God forbid you should write about your most interesting character. Let's find out how Amelia is doing instead. I'm sure it's something sweet and selfless.
The worst part is that right after Thackeray tells us that he's not going to write about what Becky did after her husband left her, he spends the next eighteen pages telling us what Becky did after her husband left her. What. The hell. Remember what I said about this book needing an editor? Exactly.

Make sure that you read William Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair in public, not in the hope that someone may spot you reading a classic, but so that you may see the characters of this wonderfully perceptive (and prophetic) novel wandering about in the flesh. Vanity Fair is populated not by characters but by real people and thus, will never date.

Thackeray is masterful, he allows his characters the freedom to do as they please; they are autonomous and must make decisions on their own, as must we all. Some choose poorly, and yet succeed. Some choose well and yet are rewarded by misfortune. Some grab and grumble, some laugh and give, some believe they are masters of their own destinies while some are cut down in their prime.

In Vanity Fair Thackeray has captured humanity in the raw - just after getting out of bed and before our first cup of coffee. You will delight in discovering people you know in its pages. You may smile when they reveal themselves as cads, you may cry when those who deserve better are treated cruelly and you may laugh when the frauds get their comeuppance.

But be warned, read Vanity Fair and enjoy the show, but know that somewhere within is pages lurks a soul much like your own, and when you least expect it, maybe when you’re laughing hardest at the foibles of another, you will recognise yourself and be silenced.

For whether you know it or not, we all live in the pages of Vanity Fair.

This is one of the Victorian classics I read as a kid, probably at the age of 13 or 14 (certainly no older); the 1999 date refers to a second reading, when I was home schooling my daughters in British Literature, and felt that I needed a refresher on this one. Though this is Thackeray's best-known novel, it's not his only one; but it's the only one I've read (although I have read his excellent short story "Dennis Haggerty's Wife," which is included in the anthology Great English Short Stories).

At 784 pages, this is a sprawling novel, beginning around 1811 or so, when Thackeray was born, and continuing until around the time the book was first published in 1848. The real protagonist is self-serving, social-climbing Becky Sharp, whom we first meet as a teen girl, when she's an "articled pupil" (that is, a student who has to work for her tuition) at a boarding school catering to middle and upper-class girls. But there are a host of other, also well-drawn, characters (including Becky's school friend Amelia Sedley and her family, the Crawley family for whom Becky becomes a governess, and the army officers William Dobbin and George Osborne). Few of these people are very likeable, and they're not intended to be. Thackeray's main purpose here is holding the class-conscious, money-obsessed well-to-do society of his day --with its snobbery, its shallowness, and its indifference to genuine character or ethics, while paying them hypocritical lip service-- up to well-deserved ridicule. (And there's not a great deal of difference between that level of high society in 2017 and in 1848.) He takes his title from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a work almost as familiar to his original readers as the Bible; and what he essentially demonstrates in the novel is that the upper-crust England of his day is the moral image of Bunyan's Vanity Fair.

Stylistically, Thackeray, though he wrote in an era when the Romantic school was dominant in literature, was himself a proto-Realist. His observation of society, character and daily life is eminently realistic, and he appeals to the intellect, not primarily the emotions. Satirical humor is one of his chief weapons (perception of humor, of course, is an intellectual function), as it was for classical satirists like Juvenal and for many of the writers of the 1688-1789 Neoclassical period. (It's not coincidental that he felt a profound affinity for the 18th century.) Even as a kid, I could detect a significant difference in the way Thackeray writes compared to the novels I'd read by his more Romantic contemporary, Dickens. (However, the two men were longstanding friends --they quarreled in 1858, but reconciled shortly before Thackeray died, a fact that Dickens was thankful for afterwards.) He's also wildly fond of the technique of authorial intrusion and direct address to the reader; this wasn't uncommon in 19th-century fiction (though deprecated by modern critics), and I usually don't mind it in reasonable doses, but Thackeray, IMO, tends to carry it too far. (Though the first edition of this novel, which was the one I read the first time, has more of these; the second edition deletes some of the most egregious ones. The older Thackeray deemed that an improvement, and I agree.)

It could fairly be said that Thackeray, at least here, demonstrates a deeply pessimistic, and even cynical and jaundiced, perception of human life and human personality. (This is particularly noticeable at the end, although I won't discuss that in more detail, to avoid spoilers.) The effect of this can be depressing, though not so much so as in some of the novels of Thomas Hardy, in the next generation. And despite the Bunyan allusion of the title, there's not a lot of spiritual content and perception here. (A slight exception to all this is one of the minor characters, Lady Jane, who's apparently an evangelical, and who's actually treated much more positively, sympathetically and respectfully than the author treats most of his characters; we get the impression that she's the kind of genuinely good person that the rest of us ought to be. But as I said, she's a minor character.)

I've never regretted reading this novel; I found it substantial and rewarding enough to earn four stars. But the unappealing personalities of many of the characters and the generally downbeat perspective kept me from giving it the fifth star, and Thackeray never became an author I wanted to read more of, unlike some of his fellow Victorian writers.

Ok, ok...I'm reading this as a break between books for classes in Grad School. Is that the dorkiest thing you could ever imagine? Yes. It is. It just is.

But the first two pages, the author's introduction....greatest two pages of introductory prose I've ever seen. Better than Kafka, better than Nabokov, better than whatever. Fucking brilliant- vivid, funny, rambunctious, wise, sarcastic, immortally satirical. I was hooked each time I picked up the book and read through it. Sometimes there's that first blush kind of thing going on, when a book seems amazing in the first few minutes of poking around in it in a bookstore and then it loses its shine when you take it home and read it.

Not so w. Vanity Fair...

I'm maybe a hundred pages in and I'm savoring it. It's deliciously wise and cyncial and knowing and filled with its own combustion engine, perpetual storytelling (ie serialization, 'let's throw in a subplot so we can go out to eat for the next week') is a lost art. this is prose I already know I'm going to re-read after I'm finished.

One thing, an objection anticipated-

Story being overtold? Concision? Legitimate grounds...in context. How much story does one really need? What is a story without the very thing which comprises it? The protein in the beef, the fiber in the bread....LANGUAGE.

For me as a reader, it's all about language- the way things are said, not (as much) what's said. How many buildungsroman 'idealistic young man from the sticks hits the big city and gets more than he bargained for" stories does one need to read (The Red And the Black, On The Road, Huck Finn, Great Gatsby, Portrait, whatever....all these can arguably be included in the genre but they're not the same novel at all, because they're not written by the same author) and that individual stamp can indeed be read in any amount of ways but it best manifests itself in language.

There are different ways of reading a novel. Reading a novel is a creative act in itself. Firstly there's the perspective from which we choose to read. The step on the stairs of our mind we choose to sit on from which to view the work of imagination. How high we crank up the volume of our critical faculties. How much historical context we give to what we're reading. How much of our own reading experience we bring to bear, to what extent all the other novels we've read shape and inform our appraisal. For example, I realised that Virginia Woolf stole many aspects of Thackeray's comic voice for Orlando. And because Orlando was a book she didn't take very seriously she's both mocking and paying tribute to Thackeray.

We're never as modern as we think. Novels from the distant past often point this out to us. Becky is a me, myself and I girl. She is self-indulgence personified. Morality for her is of little more importance than a daily newspaper. It's in the bin by the end of every day. But Vanity Fair is peppered with characters whose favourite emotion is moral disapproval, whose default setting is duty. They are dreary unhappy people, only half alive. (Thackeray himself is overly fond of doctrines.) Becky is by far the most alive and celebratory character in the novel. Everything she does is as if accompanied by uplifting dance music. She is contrasted in the novel by the dutiful Amelia. So respectful of duty is Amelia that she becomes estranged from her true feelings. Becky is never in doubt about her feelings; she owns them wholeheartedly. It's important that Becky is fatherless. This is a militantly patriarchal world. And the father was its figurehead. Supposedly a figure of trust and security, but more often as brutally self-serving as a fascist dictator. All the fathers in Vanity Fair are vain, egotistical self-righteous men. And it's Becky's determination to be seen and admired and have her share of the pie that brings into relief the hypocrisy and morally corrupt nature of the world she is compelled to live in. It's often morally flawed individuals who shine the brightest light on what is demoralisingly off kilter in the world we live in. There were times when I believed I could imagine the secret glee taken in Becky's behaviour by a 19th century female reader saddled with a despotic father and husband, compelled to live in a world where a woman's role was to be seen and not heard. Vanity Fair is a better feminist novel than most books written by overtly feminist authors.

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A GIRL WHO WAS ALIVE AT THE WRONG TIME.

I loved this book! All the characters were fascinating portraits complete with beauties and blemishes … and the narration through this world of vanity was witty and inspired … kind of reminded me of Lady Whistledown from Bridgerton …

This story follows three families, the Osbornes and the Crawleys and the Sedleys … Amelia Sedley brings home a friend, Rebecca Sharp, after graduating from finishing school, and chaos ensues as Rebecca manipulates the men from all three families at different times throughout the novel … there’s also Major William Dobbin, best friend of George Osborne, who pines for the love of Amelia, who marries George … will Amelia ever fall in love with William?

I love a book with a cast of fabulous supporting characters - there’s Joseph Sedley, the gluttonous brother of Amelia (will he fall for Rebecca’s charm?) … there’s Rawdon Crowley, who clandestinely marries Rebecca (will Rebecca destroy his life as well?) … and then there’s Lady Crawley, Rawdon’s aunt (will she be able to detect Rebecca’s greedy motives?) … all these story lines are so brilliantly intertwined, and the characters so masterfully flawed, that putting this book down for even a minute will drive one mad about what happens next, and you end up curled under the blankets in bed and snuggled in your pajamas until 2:00 pm to finish the book in a frenzy …

So yeah, read this book if 680 pages do not intimidate you … it’s worth every single page …

Maybe I've matured as a reader now but I think I haven't enjoyed any classic as much as I did this one. It was thicker and longer than many a novel, but I enjoyed it the better for it. By the end, I understood why it was so long, the ending justified it. I was so daunted by its iconic title to read it before, but it was easier to read than most classics. The experience was complete, there wasn't anything missing, it had everything and so so much more.

Published in 1847-1848, Vanity Fair is a Victorian satire and covers the English era during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The novel is about two women, totally opposite to each other, who after completing their education set out into the world. One an orphan, alone and friendless in the world except for her companion who is charming, witty, satirical, poised, manipulative, and striving to make her way into the world while the other, good-natured but passive and naïve, engaged from early childhood and belonging to a prosperous family. Thus the adventure begins, of love and loss, death and tragedy, trickery and deceit, innocence and naiveté, war and conflict.

Thackeray talks about British Raj of those times and the Battle of Waterloo which changes the course of the lives of the protagonists. The writing is rich with historical, Biblical, and literary allusions and references. The omniscient narration is most endearing.

The title of the novel, Vanity Fair, has been iconic to this day. Turns out it comes from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a Christian allegory published in 1678. The author explains his title again and again in the novel bringing its significance to light.

The author declares the heroine of the novel in the very beginning but subtitled his novel "A novel without a hero" which I don't agree with, by the way. I recognized a hero in William Dobbin by the latter part of the novel.

Thackeray's writing portrayed a realism unfound among the writers of his time. Thackeray discusses the human nature, explores the hypocrisy of society, and takes the curtain off the mysteries of life for a moment and lets us take a peek in.

The novel is about sticking to the idols we make, ourselves, of people we think we love but which are nothing like the reality, our need to believe in our ideals no matter how false they may be, the egotism and of course the vanity of the innocent and the cunning, the rich and the poor alike, the human infidelity, the brutal reality of being poor, human greed, of closing our eyes to what is right in front of us, the truth, the frailty of relations, of friendship and opportunism.

Thackeray shows us and believes that love triumphs in the end, but so does villainy, it doesn't get retribution enough, but I had the underlying sense that depravity is a punishment in itself.

"All is vanity". Ecclesiastes 1.2.

(Originally published on: https://safafatima.wordpress.com/2017...)