The film without the cuts. And the book itself.
A Novel without a Hero
Becky Sharp
A pale, brilliant orphan who turns society into a game of survival.
Vanity Fair
Everyone is eating, flirting, cheating, and showing off, and everyone is watching everyone else.
Behind the fair's laughter, the narrator sees weariness, fraud, and joy turned hollow.
Read →The Melancholy of Vanity Fair
As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing and fiddling; there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen on the look-out, quacks (OTHER quacks, plague take them!) bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind. Yes, this is VANITY FAIR; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy. Look at the faces of the actors and buffoons when they come off from their business; and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits down to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas. The curtain will be up presently, and he will be turning over head and heels, and crying, "How are you?"
Thackeray steps out as a showman running a fairground booth, and he wants us unsettled before the story even starts. Surveying the crowd, he does not sort the good from the bad but strings them together, love and jilting, laughing and its opposite, so that pickpockets and policemen belong to one continuous scene. His sharpest move is the aside about the "OTHER quacks", quietly admitting that he too is working a booth for our money. And by watching Tom Fool scrub off his paint to eat dinner, then bounce back out crying "How are you?", he tells us the cheerfulness ahead is a performance put on by tired people.
Two Girls Leave School
The scheming Becky Sharp and the gentle Amelia Sedley leave school together into a world Thackeray runs like a puppet-show.
Johnson’s Dictionary
A parting school gift, hurled from the carriage, and a lifelong war begins.
Amelia Sedley
A tender young woman whose goodness becomes powerful, painful, and blind.
Vanity Fair
The cast, locations, objects of note, core concepts, and selected passages in the Author’s Pen - at your own pace.
The Vanity Fair World, as it plays on your phone
- Meet the people. 31 characters, each with a portrait, who they are and what they want.
- Walk the places. 14 places, each pictured, and what happens there.
- Follow the plot. The turns of the story, in order, so you always know where you are.
- Taste the original. 54 key passages in William Makepeace Thackeray’s own words, each with a short reading of what it is doing.
- The complete book. Every word, in a reader made for your phone. From any passage, one tap opens the book at that very page.
Step inside Vanity Fair
Free, in your inbox in about a minute: the World and the complete book, on your phone.