Vanity Fair

byWilliam Makepeace Thackeray

A Novel Without a Hero

Format:

Hardback

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Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer.

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There are no wholly admirable characters, but you can't help feeling a sort of twisted respect for the gloriously awful social climber Becky Sharp, and a bit of sympathy for the lumpen, love-struck Dobbin. In fact all the characters are alive in their awfulness, and it's no small measure of skill that Thackery can make the reader care so much about such ghastly people. I suppose part of the appeal is that their weaknesses and pretensions are still recognisable today.
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About William Makepeace Thackeray

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