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The Discipline and Significance of Form in Vanity Fair

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edgar F. Harden
Edgar F. Harden*
Affiliation:
Simon Frasee University, Burnaby, B. C
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Extract

Almost all critics of Vanity Fair have assumed that Thackeray's novel had no very carefully worked out structure and have been content to make rather general comments on the form of the novel: it was loosely improvised along the line of a contrast between Becky and Amelia. J. Y. T. Greig, for example, believes that Thackeray not only lacked Fielding's ability to work out a highly detailed plot but also suffered from the additional handicap of being forced to compose hurriedly for monthly serialization. To Greig, “Vanity Fair is unified and shapely up to and including the episodes of Brussels and the Battle of Waterloo: for although it contains two heroines, the adventures and sufferings of the one are causally related to the adventures and sufferings of the other. It becomes unified and shapely again after Chapter xliii (Pumpernickel), and for the same reason. But in between—roughly 300 pages—the plot of the first and last sections of the book is suspended, and the unity of the novel disappears.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 7 , December 1967 , pp. 530 - 541
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 J. Y. T. Greig, Thackeray: A Reconsideration (London and New York, 1950), p. 106. See also such appraisals as Anthony Trollope, Thackeray (New York and London, 1902), p. 96; Charles Whibley, William Makepeace Thackeray (Edinburgh and London, 1903), pp. 91–92; George Saintsbury, A Consideration of Thackeray (London, 1931), p. 166; and John W. Dodds, Thackeray: A Critical Portrait (New York, 1963), p. 110.

2 All citations are taken from Vanity Fair, ed. Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson (Boston, 1963).

3 K. Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford, 1956), pp. 239–240.

4 G. Tillotson, Thackeray the Novelist (London, 1963), p. 12.

5 Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (New York, 1955), pp. 406–409, 499.

6 Myron Taube, “Contrast as a Principle of Structure in Vanity Fair,” NCF, xviii (1963), 119–135.

7 G. Tillotson, Thackeray the Novelist, p. 49.

8 For a summary of the evidence covering this two-year period, see Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, pp. 384–387, 494–495, and Vanity Fair, pp. xvii–xxi, xxvii–xxix.

9 For a discussion of the mock-heroic tone and its function in these two chapters and later, see my article, “The Fields of Mars in Vanity Fair,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, x (1965), 123–132.

10 I use the term “section” in referring to those portions of each chapter that are marked off by a break in the text. Ch. v, for example, has 4 sections: pp. 45–47, 47–49, 49–52, and 52–54. The latter is one of the relatively few sections that has no counterpart in a paired number. Though Ch. i has only 2 sections, it offers parallels to the 3 sections of Ch. v, just as the 3 chapters of No. 2 pair off with the 4 chapters of No. 1.

11 Contrast the admiring but inaccurate description by Lord David Cecil in Early Victorian Novelists (London, 1934), p. 80.

12 See K. Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, p. 29, and John Butt and K. Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London, 1963), p. 14.