NovelVictorian · 1848Study guide · no full textSteady

Vanity Fair

Thackeray's narrator keeps reminding you that this is a puppet show — a device that makes the social climbing both funnier and colder. Becky Sharp is the century's most enjoyable operator.

Ambition Class Identity War

Study guide

This work is still in copyright, so there is no full text on the page. What you get instead: the context, the cast, the ideas and the themes — enough to read it well, and to know exactly what to watch for in the first thirty pages.

“Vanity Fair! Vanity Fair! Here are all sorts of people, and all sorts of things.”

The cast, in the Character Atlas →Literary devices →Where it sits in time →

Go deeper

Ambition — how other works handle it →Identity — how other works handle it →Class — how other works handle it →

Now read the first page with all of this in mind.

The notes here are the map; the book is the journey.

Choose another work→