Contents introduction william Makepeace Thackeray, his early life and literary career Vanity Fair- a novel without a hero critical analysis of this novel conclusion glossary Bibliography introduction the aim of the work

The structure of the work: it consists of introduction, two chapters, conclusion and bibliography. The first chapter is devoted to the study of life and literary career of the author. The second chapter is devoted to observing and analyzing his novel “Vanity Fair” . Total amount of the work is -- pages.
Introduction deals with the aim , tasks, actuality, novelty and practical value of the qualification paper.
The results achieved during the investigation are summarize in conclusion.
Bibliography lists all the scientific and internet sources and references used for investigation.

1. William Makepeace Thackeray, his early life and literary career.
William Makepeace Thackeray was one of the greatest representatives of the English Victorian age .The Victorian age was characterized by sharp contradictions. In many ways it was an age of progress. The Victorian era marks the climax of England’s rise to economic and military supremacy. The nineteenth century England became the first modern, industrialized nation. It ruled the most widespread empire in world history, embracing all of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, and many smaller countries in Asia, and the Caribbean. But internally England was not stable. There was too much poverty, too much injustice and fierce exploitation of man by man.
The workers fought for their rights, their political demands were expressed in the People’s Charter in 1833.The Chartist movement was a revolutionary movement of the English workers, which lasted till 1848.The Chartists introduced their own literature. The Chartist writers tried their hand at different genres. They wrote articles, short stories, songs, epigrams, poems. Chartists (for example: Ernest Jones “The Song of the Lower Classes”, Thomas Hood “The Song of the Shirt) described the struggle of the workers for their rights, they showed the ruthless exploitation and the miserable fate of the poor.
The ideas of Chartism attracted the attention of many progressive-minded people of the time. Many prominent writers became aware of the social injustice around them and tried to picture them in their works. The greatest novelists of the age were Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot. The writers used the novel as a tool to protest against the evils in contemporary social and economic life and to picture the world in a realistic way.
They expressed deep sympathy for the working people; described the unbearable conditions of their life and work, Criticism in their works was very strong, so some scholars called them Critical Realists, and the trend to which they belonged-Critical Realism,”Hard Times” by Charles Dickens¹ and “Mary Barton” by Elizabeth Gaskell are the bright example s of that literature, in which the Chartist movement is described. The contribution of the writers belonging to the trend of realism in world literature is enormous .They created a broad picture of social life, exposed and attacked the vices of the contemporary society, sided with the common people in their passionate protest against unbearable exploitation and expressed their hopes for a better future.
As for the poetry of that time, English and American critics consider Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning to be the two great pillars on which Victorian poetry rested. Unlike the poetry of the Romantic Age, their poetry demonstrated the conservatism, optimism, and self-assurance that marked the poetry of the Victorian age.
Thanks to such amusements, his own inability to excel at mathematics, the poor preparation he had received at Charterhouse, and a penchant for gambling and trips to the Continent, Thackeray left the university without a degree after two years. The life of the undergraduate at “Oxbridge” is represented obliquely for “the life of such boys does not bear telling altogether” in Pendennis. Thackeray did, however, form friendships at Cambridge that were lasting, the most important of which was with Edward Fitzgerald. And while he failed to distinguish himself at school, he did develop the fondness for Horace and other classical authors his childhood experiences had almost robbed him of. After leaving Cambridge, Thackeray traveled on the Continent, spending a winter at Weimar, which included at introduction to the aged Goethe. Thackeray took away from Weimar a command of the language, a knowledge of German Romantic literature, and an increasing skepticism about religious doctrine.
During the Victorian era Thackeray was ranked second only to Charles Dickens, but he is now much less widely read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair, which has become a fixture in university courses, and has been repeatedly adapted for the cinema and television.
William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811.Both his parents were of Anglo-Indian descent, and his father, Richmond Thackeray was born at South Mimms and went to India in 1798 at age sixteen as a writer with the East India Company. Richmond fathered a daughter, Sarah Redfield, in 1804 with Charlotte Sophia Rudd², his possibly Eurasian mistress, and both mother and daughter were named in his will. Such liaisons were common among gentlemen of the East India Company, and it formed no bar to his later courting and marrying William’s mother. Thackeray’s mother Anne Becher was “one of the reigning beauties of the day” and a daughter of John Harmon Becher, Collector of the South 24 Parganas district, of an old Bengal civilian family” noted for the tenderness of its women”.
Anne Becher and Richmond Thackeray were married in Calcutta on 13 October 1810. Their only child was William. There is a fine miniature portrait of Anne Becher Thackeray and William Makepeace Thackeray, aged about two, done in Madras by George Chinnery 1813. Anne’s family’s deception was unexpectedly revealed in 1812, when Richmond Thackeray unwittingly invited the supposedly dead Carmichael-Smyth to dinner. Five years later, after Richmond had died of a fever on 13 September 1815, Anne married Henry Carmichael-Smyth, on 13 March 1817.The couple moved to England in 1820 and his son was sent to home to England at five years old to be educated, stopping at St. Helena on the way and having a servant point out to him the prisoner Napoleon, who “eats three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands on” The separation from his mother had a traumatic effect on the young Thackeray, which he discussed in his essay” On Letts’s Diary” in The Roundabout Papers.
In England he was educated at schools in Southampton and Chiswick. After attending several grammar schools Thackeray went in 1822 to Charterhouse, the London public school, where he led a rather lonely and miserable existence and he became a close friend of John Leech. Thackeray disliked Charterhouse, and parodied it in his fiction as “Slaughterhouse”. Nevertheless, Thackeray was honoured in the Charterhouse Chapel with a monument after his death. Illness in his last year there, during which he reportedly grew to his full height of six foot three, postponed his matriculation at Trinity College Cambridge, until February 1829. He was happier while studying at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1828-1830. In 1830 he left Cambridge without taking a degree and during 1831-33 he studied law at the Middle Temple, London. He then considered painting as a profession: his artistic gifts are seen in his letters and many of his early writings, which are amusingly and energetically illustrated. Thackeray then travelled for some time on the continent, visiting Paris and Weimar, where he met Goethe. He returned to England at the age of 21.All his efforts at this time have a dilettante air, understandable in a young man who, on coming of age in 1832, had inherited $20.000 from his father. He soon lost his fortune, however, through gambling and unlucky speculations and investments and he squandered much of it on gambling and on funding two successful newspapers, The National Standard and The Constitutional, for which he had hoped to write. He also lost a good part of his fortune in the collapse of two Indian banks. Forced to consider a profession to support himself, he turned first to art, which he studied in Paris, but did not pursue it, except in later years as the illustrator of some of his own novels and other writingsю In 1836, while studying art in Paris, he married a penniless Irish girl, on 20 August 1836, Isabella Gethin Shaw (1816–1893), second daughter of Isabella Creagh Shaw and Matthew Shaw, a colonel who had died after distinguished service, primarily in India. The Thackeray’s had three children, all girls: Anne Isabella³ (1837–1919), Jane (who died at eight months old) and Harriet Marian (1840–1875). Of Thackeray’s three daughters, one died in infancy (1839); and in 1840, after her last confinement, Mrs. Thackeray became insane. She never recovered and long survived her husband, living with friends in the country. Thackeray was, in effect, a widower, relying much on club life and gradually giving more and more attention to his daughters, for whom he established a home in London in 1846. The serial publication in 1847–48 of his novel Vanity Fair brought Thackeray both fame and prosperity, and from then on he was an established author on the English scene.

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Thackeray’s one serious romantic attachment in his later life, to Jane Brookfield, can be traced in his letters. She was the wife of a friend of his Cambridge days, and during Thackeray’s “widowerhood,” when his life lacked an emotional centre, he found one in the Brookfield home. Henry Brookfield’s insistence in 1851 that his wife’s passionate but platonic friendship with Thackeray should end was a grief greater than any the author had known since his wife’s descent into insanity. Thackeray now began "writing for his life", as he put it, turning to journalism in an effort to support his young family. He primarily worked for Fraser’s Magazine, a sharp-witted and sharp-tongued conservative publication for which he produced art criticism, short fictional sketches, and two longer fictional works, Catherine and The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Between 1837 and 1840 he also reviewed books for The Times. He was also a regular contributor to The Morning Chronicle and The Foreign Quarterly Review. Later, through his connection to the illustrator John Leech, he began writing for the newly created magazine Punch, in which he published The Snob Papers, later collected as The Book of Snobs. This work popularised the modern meaning of the word "snob". Thackeray’s literary significance lies in his contribution to the development of the novel. His reflections upon Victorian England through the use of an intrusive narrator became a new form of fiction, and his sprawling panoramas of eighteenth century England give the reader a psychological treatise of the times. The slow, satiric revelation of his characters and the realistic analysis of topics that other Victorian writers avoided, told in the form of a memoir by a witty, caustic observer, laid the groundwork for the psychological realism of Henry James; Thackeray’s experiments with the generational form presaged the works of John Galsworthy.
Thackeray’s writing can be divided into four distinct periods. The first, from 1837 to 1843, was a period in which he exercised an almost passionate vigor to point out where society had gone wrong. He places himself outside his writing through his superior attitude toward his characters, lower-class subjects whom he treats in the most disparaging manner conceivable. There is a glimmer of the Thackeray yet to come when he shifts his focus to the middle class, and when, in The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841; later published as The Great Hoggarty Diamond, 1848), he presents the likable Sam Tit marsh. Thackeray cast himself as Tit marsh, thereby indicating his concern about class. This concern was to dominate his writing.

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Thackeray was unsure about his own place in the rigid English social system. He thus adopted a jauntily unpretentious persona in his social fictions. He developed a talent for the burlesque and began to attack other writers, ridiculing military adventure novels, satirically attacking the New gate School, and portraying his fascination with the Europe of that time. The years 1843 to 1848 marked a significant change in Thackeray’s development as a writer. His personal involvement in his works became more apparent, and his association with Punch heightened his understanding of society’s injustices. During this period, Thackeray wrote a series of short stories, Men’s Wives (1843), that illustrate his misgivings about women and marriage. Along these same lines, he wrote several other pieces. One of particular note, “Bluebeard’s Ghost,” is the tale of a young widow’s devotion to her dead partner; in it, Thackeray’s love for Jane Brookfield and his jealousy of her fidelity to her husband are clear. The opulence of the eighteenth century, the lives of rogues, the education of gentlemen, and the presence of doting mothers blend in his best work of these middle years, The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Although the theme of the novel is social pretension, it is also a deliberate spoof of popular historical, crime, and romantic novels. The Snobs of England, by One of Themselves (1846-1874; later published as The Book of Snobs,1848, 1852) is Thackeray’s classic assault on pretentiousness. His message is that the remedy for social ills is social equality Thackeray was a regular contributor to Punch between 1843 and 1854.
Tragedy struck in Thackeray’s personal life as his wife, Isabella, succumbed to depression after the birth of their third child, in 1840. Finding that he could get no work done at home, he spent more and more time away until September 1840, when he realised how grave his wife’s condition was. Struck by guilt, he set out with his wife to Ireland. During the crossing she threw herself from a water-closet into the sea, but she was pulled from the waters. They fled back home after a four-week battle with her mother. From November 1840 to February 1842 Isabella was in and out of professional care, as her condition waxed and waned.
She eventually deteriorated into a permanent state of detachment from reality. Thackeray desperately sought cures for her, but nothing worked, and she ended up in two different asylums in or near Paris until 1845, after which Thackeray took her back to England, where he installed her with a Mrs Bakewell at Camberwell. Isabella outlived her husband by 30 years, in the end being cared for by a family named Thompson in Leigh-on-Sea at South end until her death in 1894 After his wife’s illness Thackeray became a de facto widower, never establishing another permanent relationship. He did pursue other women, however, in particular Mrs Jane Brookfield⁴ and Sally Baxter. In 1851 Mr Brookfield barred Thackeray from further visits to or correspondence with Jane. Baxter, an American twenty years Thackeray’s junior whom he met during a lecture tour in New York City in 1852, married another man
In the early 1840s Thackeray had some success with two travel books, The Paris Sketch Book and The Irish Sketch Book, the latter marked by hostility to Irish Catholics. However, as the book appealed to British prejudices, Thackeray was given the job of being Punch’s Irish expert, often under the pseudonym Hibernis Hibernior⁵ It was Thackeray, in other words, who was chiefly responsible for Punch‘s notoriously hostile and condescending depictions of the Irish during An Gorta Mór (1845–51)
Thackeray achieved more recognition with his Snob Papers (serialised 1846/47, published in book form in 1848), but the work that really established his fame was the novel Vanity Fair, which first appeared in serialised instalments beginning in January 1847. Even before Vanity Fair completed its serial run esses, including a near-fatal one that Thackeray had become a celebrity, sought after by the very lords and ladies whom he satirised. They hailed him as the equal of Dickens⁶.
He remained "at the top of the tree," as he put it, for the rest of his life, during which he produced several large novels, notably Pendennis, The Newcomes and The History of Henry Esmond, despite various illnesses, including a near- fatal one that struck him in 1849 in the middle of writing Pendennis. He twice visited the United States on lecture tours during this period. Thackeray also gave lectures in London on the English humorists of the eighteenth century, and on the first four Hanoverian monarchs. The latter series was published in book form as The Four Georges.
In Oxford he stood unsuccessfully as an independent for Parliament. He was narrowly beaten by Cardwell, who received 1,070 votes, as against 1,005 for Thackeray.
In 1860 Thackeray became editor of the newly established Cornhill Magazine, but he was never comfortable in the role, preferring to contribute to the magazine as the writer of a column called Roundabout Papers. Thackeray’s grave at Kensal Green Cemetery, London, photographed in 2014 Thackeray’s health worsened during the 1850s and he was plagued by a recurring stricture of the urethra that laid him up for days at a time. He also felt that he had lost much of his creative impetus. He worsened matters by excessive eating and drinking, and avoiding exercise, though he enjoyed horseback-riding (he kept a horse). He has been described as "the greatest literary glutton who ever lived". His main activity apart from writing was "guttling and gorging". He could not break his addiction to spicy peppers, further ruining his digestion. On 23 December 1863, after returning from dining out and before dressing for bed, he suffered a stroke. He was found dead in his bed the following morning. His death at the age of fifty-two was entirely unexpected, and shocked his family, his friends and the reading public. An estimated 7,000 people attended his funeral at Kensington Gardens. He was buried on 29 December at Kensal Green Cemetery, and a memorial bust sculpted by Marochetti can be found in Westminster Abbey.

2. Vanity Fair- a novel without a hero

Thackeray’s first great novel, Vanity Fair, marks the beginning of his literary acclaim. The title, taken from John Bunyan’s⁷ The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), and Thackeray’s preface reveal the moral purpose behind his satire.
Thackeray’s high reputation as a novelist continued unchallenged to the end of the 19th century but then began to decline. Vanity Fair is still his most interesting and readable work and has retained its place among the great historical novels in the English language.
With Vanity Fair (1847–48), the first work published under his own name, Thackeray adopted the system of publishing a novel serially in monthly parts that had been so successfully used by Dickens. Set in the second decade of the 19th century, the period of the Regency, the novel deals mainly with the interwoven fortunes of two contrasting women, Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp. The latter, an unprincipled adventuress, is the leading personage and is perhaps the most memorable character Thackeray created. Subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero,” the novel is deliberately antiheroic: Thackeray states that in this novel his object is to “indicate . . . that we are for the most part . . . foolish and selfish people . . . all eager after vanities.”
The wealthy, wellborn, passive Amelia Sedley and the ambitious, energetic, scheming, provocative, and essentially amoral Becky Sharp, daughter of a poor drawing master, are contrasted in their fortunes and reactions to life, but the contrast of their characters is not the simple one between moral good and evil—both are presented with dispassionate sympathy. Becky is the character around whom all the men play their parts in an upper middle-class and aristocratic background. Amelia marries George Osborne, but George, just before he is killed at the Battle of Waterloo, is ready to desert his young wife for Becky, who has fought her way up through society to marriage with Rawdon Crawley, a young officer of good family. Crawley, disillusioned, finally leaves Becky, and in the end virtue apparently triumphs, Amelia marries her lifelong admirer, Colonel Dobbin, and Becky settles down to genteel living and charitable works.
The rich movement and colour of this panorama of early 19th-century society make Vanity Fair Thackeray’s greatest achievement; the narrative skill, subtle characterization, and descriptive power make it one of the outstanding novels of its period. But Vanity Fair is more than a portrayal and imaginative analysis of a particular society. Throughout we are made subtly aware of the ambivalence of human motives, and so are prepared for Thackeray’s conclusion: “Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire, or having it, is satisfied?” It is its tragic irony that makes Vanity Fair a lasting and insightful evaluation of human ambition and experience.
Successful and famous, Thackeray went on to exploit two lines of development opened up in Vanity Fair: a gift for evoking the London scene and for writing historical novels that demonstrate the connections between past and present. Vanity Fair was a turning point in Thackeray’s life and career. A gentleman by birth and education, Thackeray was forced to earn his living by writing because most of his money had been lost in a financial crash. The articles, reviews, essays, and sketches he produced for magazines and newspapers did not provide sufficient income either to support a gentleman’s status or to provide for the futures of his two daughters. In addition, writing for a living made his status as a gentleman somewhat tenuous. The serialization of Vanity Fair, which was a financial success, quickly established Thackeray’s literary reputation. Thackeray was jubilant, "There is no use denying the matter or blinking it now. I am become a sort of great man in my way--all but at the top of the tree: indeed there if the truth were known and having a great fight up there with Dickens." Though Thackeray’s novels never sold at the rate of Dickens’s⁸ novels (in the tens of thousands), he became financially secure with Vanity Fair. Also his social status as a gentleman was assured because of his acknowledged genius; he w as no longer an amusing, talented hack writer, just one of a crowd of London journalists.
Contemporary reviewers and novelists appreciated the brilliance of the novel. John Forster wrote, "Vanity Fair is the work of a mind, at once accomplished and subtle, which has enjoyed opportunities of observing many and varied circles of society. . . his genteel characters... have a reality about them... They are drawn from actual life, not from books and fancy; and they are presented by means of brief, decisive yet always most discriminative touches" (1848). Charlotte Bronte, whose admiration for his genius was boundless, called him "the legitimate high priest of Truth":
The more I read Thackeray’s works, the more certain I am that he stands alone--alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling (his feeling, though he makes no noise about it, is about the most genuine that ever lived on a printed page), alone in his power, alone in his simplicity, alone in his self-control. Thackeray is a Titan, so strong that he can afford to perform with calm the most herculean feats; there is the charm and majesty of repose in his greatest efforts; he borrows nothing from fever, his is never the energy of delirium-his energy is sane energy, deliberate energy, thoughtful energy.
George Eliot’s praise was more restrained, "I am not conscious of being in any way a disciple of his, unless it constitute discipleship to think him, as I suppose the majority of people with any intellect do, on the whole, the most powerful of living novelists" .
Not all reviewers and readers agreed. Some were repelled by his realism and his focus on society’s moral corruption. Robert Bell complained: The people who fill up the motley scenes of Vanity Fair, with two or three exceptions, are as vicious and odious as a clever condensation of the vilest qualities can make them. The women are especially detestable. Cunning, low pride, selfishness, envy, malice, and all uncharitableness are scattered amongst them with impartial liberality. It does not enter into the design of Vanity Fair to qualify these bitter ingredients with a little sweetness now and then; to shew the close neighbourhood of the vices and the virtues as it lies on the map of the human heart, that mixture of good and evil, of weakness and strength, which in infinitely varied proportions, constitutes the compound individual.
An anonymous reviewer wondered, "is it advisable to raise so ruthlessly the veil which hides the rottenness pervading modern society?" (1848). Harriet Martineau could not finish the novel "from the moral disgust it occasions" (1848).From Thackeray’s day to the present, Vanity Fair has generally been regarded as a masterpiece and as his best novel. What has changed is the flaw Thackeray, as well as Vanity Fair, is most commonly charged with. Critical readers of his day called him cynical and even depraved; comparable readers today call him sentimental and even cloying.
Until the publication of Vanity Fair, Thackeray was known as a humorous writer; he wrote regularly for Punch. Thackeray regarded humor as doing more than making readers laugh, "the best humour is that which contains most humanity, that which is flavoured throughout with tenderness and kindness." He was compelled to write the truth about what he saw and how he understood what he saw:
To describe it otherwise than it seems to me would be falsehood in that calling in which it has pleased heaven to place me; treason to that conscience which says that men are weak; that truth must be told; that faults must be owned; that pardon must be prayed for; and that love reigns supreme over all.
There may be wishful thinking in his statement that as the writer "finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him–sometimes love him." In order to tell the truth, the novelist must "convey as strongly as possible the sentiment of reality." Language should identify exactly, not elevate or exaggerate; for instance, a poker was just that--a poker, not a great red-hot instrument and a coat was only a coat, not an embroidered tunic. He disliked Dickens’s highly emotional outbursts and vivid personification of objects; Thackeray protested that the very trees in Dickens’s⁹ novels "squint, shiver, leer, grin and smoke pipes." A realist, Thackeray consistently deflated the heroic and the sentimental both in life and in literature.
Thackeray saw the writer as serving a necessary function–to raise the consciousness of his readers. Concerned, he asked his mother in a letter, "Who is conscious?" He came to see himself as a Satirical-Moralist, with a dual responsibility--to amuse and to teach, "A few years ago I should have sneered at the idea of setting up as a teacher at all... but I have got to believe in the business, and in my other things since then. And our profession seems to me as serious as the Parson’s own." He aimed not only to expose the false values and practices of society and its institutions and to portray the selfish, callous behavior of individuals, but also to affirm the value of truth, justice, and kindness. This double aim is reflected in his description of himself as satiric and kind: "under the mask satirical there walks about a sentimental gentleman who means not unkindly to any mortal person."
Though Thackeray set his novel a generation earlier, Thackeray was really writing about his own society (he even used contemporary clothing in his illustrations for the novel). Thackeray saw how capitalism and imperialism with their emphasis on wealth, material goods, and ostentation had corrupted society and how the inherited social order and institutions, including the aristocracy, the church, the military, and the foreign service, regarded only family, rank, power, and appearance. These values morally crippled and emotionally bankrupted every social class from servants through the middle classes to the aristocracy. High and low, individuals were selfish and incapable of loving.
Well aware of himself as flawed, he identified with the self-centered and foolish characters he portrayed in Vanity Fair; his object in writing the novel was to indicate, in cheerful terms, that we are for the most part an abominably foolish and selfish people "desperately wicked" and all eager after vanities....I want to leave everybody dissatisfied and unhappy at the end of the story–we ought all to be with our own and all other stories. Good God don’t I see (in that maybe cracked and warped looking glass in which I am always looking) my own weaknesses wickednesses lusts follies shortcomings?.... We must lift up our voices about these and howl to a congregation of fools: so much as least has been my endeavour.
His identification with the fools and the sinners of Vanity Fair could not be stated more clearly. The image of the cracked-mirror provided the basis of the drawing for the frontispiece when the serialized novel came out in book form in 1848.
What were some of his flaws? By temperament, he inclined to be self-indulgent, liked to eat and drink well, and until he lost his money gambled enthusiastically; today, we might, perhaps, say he had a gambling problem. The Bohemian lifestyle and Bohemians had a strong attraction for Thackeray, as he acknowledged:
I like Becky in that book. Sometimes I think I have myself some of her tastes. I like what are called Bohemians and fellows of that sort. I have seen all sorts of society--dukes, duchesses, lords, and ladies, authors and actors and painters--and taken altogether I think I like painters the best, and Bohemians generally.
As you read the novel, think about whether Thackeray’s identification with the characters and perhaps the life of Vanity Fair affects the novel. Does he show a compassion for the follies he describes and for the characters who commit those follies? Is there a sense of connection with them, or does Thackeray adopt a superior stance and look down on them, judging them harshly? Or is Thackeray ambivalent? Is Vanity Fair, as A.E. Dyson says, "one of the world’s most devious novels, devious in its characterization, its irony, its explicit moralising, its exuberance, its tone. Few novels demand more continuing alertness from the reader, or offer more intellectual and moral stimulation in return"