Vanity Fair, Ambition and the English Condition

 Introduction

“I am a poor blighted, disappointed old fellow, and have made an utter failure through life” [...] and in that humble frame of mind, and holding by the hand of his daughter, life and disappointment and vanity sank away from under him.”

Had I read Vanity Fair at any other time in my life, I don’t think it would have left nearly the impression it did on me. A combination of my growing familiarity with London and the financial anxiety of one’s early twenties made it an especially poignant read. This rather long book by William Makepeace Thackeray famously calls itself a “novel without a hero” and in our narcissist’s epoch where everyone functions as their own 24/7 PR department, seeing themselves as life’s protagonist, the thoroughly flawed characters of Thackeray’s Regency drama feel like a fitting realisation of this fancy. In this essay I will explore just how prescient the novel was in its satire.

It’s not without its issues. The huge scope of the thing makes it hard at times to keep track of what’s happening, especially because it has a cast the size of the Simpsons and characters are often referred to by titles instead of their actual names, after the custom of the time. I often found myself lost at who the various Mr. and Mrs. Crawleys and Sedleys and so forth were and then when Thackeray finally did use their names I was again confused because he’d been so coy about presuming a first-name basis with his own characters.

And no, I’m not just retarded, Thackeray himself couldn’t handle his own mess and famously mixed up characters and minor plot details. I guess in a world without CTRL+F and one of those world building programs that no one uses it was bound to happen.

Thackeray’s ambition is captured in the working title “Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society”, which arguably captures the actual nature of the beast a lot better than the final title. Don’t get me wrong, Vanity Fair has the ring of a classic to it, but in my opinion it’s the title of a more focused work that isn’t quite so unwieldy. 

The title is itself a reference to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a 17th Century Puritan allegorical story in which the subtly named protagonist “Christian” makes a pilgrimage to the “celestial city”, encountering various temptations and obstacles along the way. In one chapter, he arrives at Vanity Fair. A town / fair, built by Beelzebub himself. It sells any and every luxury, delight and fancy one can imagine. Not only objects, Vanity Fair offers satisfaction of all lusts and desires, any and every want that might distract one from the path of salvation. 

This choice of title casts regency London in a very specific light. It’s well worth emphasising that the Pilgrim’s Progress was in the past, alongside the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, just about the most widely read thing in the English language; Thackeray’s reference would have been universally received. I would venture to say it’s as salient a satire as ever in our own time, indeed even more so. Bunyan’s protagonist is an everyman, an allegorical stand-in for humanity at large, while Thackeray chooses to explicitly deny the presence of any hero in his story. Vanity Fair is framed as a puppet show being performed at a fair; from the get-go, there is an ironic and satirical air to the novel’s internal world. Chief among the cast of puppets is the bonafide anti-heroine Rebecca Sharp.

Becky Sharp, Capitalism and the Picaresque

The picaresque is a form of novel originating in Spain where a roguish yet likeable protagonist of low birth makes their way up the social ladder to butt heads with aristocrats. It’s your classic rags-to-riches narrative more or less. One of Thackeray’s other novels, of which Stanley Kubrick made a brilliant film, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, is in many ways typical of this genre. Redmond Barry is of minor nobility, his family having pretensions of grandeur, but ultimately not being of high status. His exciting adventures are very much in line with the tropes of the picaresque. Redmond Barry is the masculine rogue; rakish and opportunistic, but loveable for the time spent with him by the audience in his more idealistic days.

Unlike the traditional picaresque, the puppet play of Vanity Fair is written in third person. Rather than personalising Becky Sharp, Thackeray puts us at a distance from her and the other non-heroes. As far as I’m concerned, Thackeray took the classic Picaresque hero and ripped all of the appealing traits out of him and gave us Becky Sharp. She is the image of hollow social ambition. Avaricious, vain, cold, calculating, manipulative and deceitful. Where novels of Thackeray’s day had heroes, his biting satire has a yawning gap where a hero ought to be. In the place of the regular fountain of selflessness and justice we have a gaping pit of avarice and consumptive desire. Turning the picaresque on its head, in a sense, Thackeray shows us what in fact goes into social opportunism; the dark side of ambition.

In premodern times, ambition was seen as a destructive and chaotic force that had the potential to upend the divinely ordained order of the world. Classical tragedy embodies this ambition in the hubris of the tragic hero, who challenges the gods, or indeed their authority more indirectly, through rebelling against the temporal representatives of their divine mandate. In MacBeth, we see a man consumed in the temptations of ambition and greed attempt to usurp the rightful king of Scotland. The fatal flaw that brings about his ruin, as a classical tragic hero, is precisely the desire to go beyond his station in the world. Even moreso, Lady MacBeth embodies the chaotic, dæmonic conception of ambition that was common to mediæval man. The “emotional world” of Shakespeare’s drama was mediæval, but he lived through a time of tremendous upheaval.¹ The great chain of being was seen as resting on the maintenance of divine order, embodied in the social hierarchy. The early modern era would overturn this order, spiritually, philosophically, but at a more base level, economically.

Capitalism was beginning to radically reshape England (and indeed, the world) in Thackeray’s day; the old feudal order of the landowning nobility had been swept aside in a kind of civilisation-wide instantiation of the picaresque; the new bourgeois classes its hero. This upheaval brought a wholly new set of values and priorities. No longer was ambition some great evil to be guarded against, it was virtuous and vital to the advancement of society. These “whig” values, originating in England, were embodied most pronouncedly in the country she gave birth to: America. In the coming centuries, “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” would morph into the “American Dream”; in the American ideology, the greatest single good is to go far off of the back of one’s ambition and determination. Amid this changing background, Thackeray’s novel seems to reiterate, consciously or not, that older, more cautious view of ambition. It shows us, most keenly in the character of Becky Sharp, the uglier side of striving.

Vanity Fair follows the lives of two women. As well as the o̶d̶i̶o̶u̶s̶,̶ ̶p̶a̶r̶a̶s̶i̶t̶i̶c̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶p̶y̶ strong, independent go-getter that is Rebecca Sharp there’s the straightforward and sweet Amelia Sedley, who is very much a passive Angel-in-the-House type. I’m not sure if a literary character has excited quite the same intense dislike as Becky Sharp does in me in a long time, to the credit of Thackeray’s writing. I’m very dubious of that TV Miniseries they made of it a while back precisely because the promotional material seems to cast her in a “yass queen slay” light, lionising exactly what Thackeray was out to critique. Rebecca comes from a humble - and Bohemian - background, her mother being a *gasp* Opera Singer! Now these days anyone would think that rather hoighty-toighty, but way back when actresses were seen more or less as prostitutes and anyone whose career consisted in being paid to lie was probably bad news. The reader may make up their own mind regarding this.

Being “well liked” is of utmost importance to those aiming to ascend the social pyramid, and is paramount to those who have got tired of the gross benefits of wealth, as Becky Sharp is shown to once she has gone from governess to socialite. Indeed, Sharp’s affability and ability to charm others (especially men) is the reason for her success. By charming the roguish Rawdon Crawley into marriage, she secures herself a place among the aristocracy, shunning the society of the very “vulgar city people”, into whose graces she had before tried to worm her way through the attempted ensnaring of Amelia’s oafish brother, Joseph, himself a ruthless caricature of British officials in India. Unlike just about any of Thackeray’s grotesque puppets, the picaresque hero is himself likeable, the reader roots for him precisely for this reason. What makes Sharp different is the shallow performativity of her likeable traits. 

Once again, Thackeray’s insistence that there is “no hero”, despite Sharp being the narrative’s unquestionable centrepiece, is noteworthy. In line with her thespian origins, Becky is expert in acting a particular role, to help her advancement. Crucially, this often means the hypercorrection of her social habits to ingratiate herself among the nobility. In service of vanity she constructs an image of herself, under which there is, ultimately, very little. She is that shallow “line-go-up” mentality that inhabits so many of us even (or especially) today. Indeed, the vacuity of Rawdon and Rebecca’s lavish lifestyle becomes quite literal as they maintain it all on empty credit and Rawdon’s cheating at gambling (much like the Chevalier de Balibari in Barry Lyndon). Similarly to Rebecca’s career of posturing, Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman, a captive to the American dream, feels he must be likeable and advance socially, despite his true talents being in practical skill and craftsmanship. The “ambition”, if you like, that modernity demands of him, obliterates his truer self, robbing him of what might leave him actually fulfilled. He must be a salesman, capable of “selling” a certain image to people. It may be said that modernity makes salesmen of us all, demanding that we market ourselves at all times and for all purposes; fine-tuning our LinkedIns and Resumes and Tinder bios to stand out from the rest of the conveyor belt of meat.

The salt-of-the-earth lifestyle that eluded Willy Loman (a peasant’s existence now considered an escapist pipe-dream) is not the only victim of the curse of vanity. Becky Sharp, a trained pianist and beautifully voiced singer delights crowds at fancy parties and in her cunning appears truly intelligent, widely read and sophisticated. Her act is so convincing that it becomes impossible to tell the performance from the reality. Like Arabella’s dimples, she is able to blush and cry at will; the most genuine tears she sheds are at her having to refuse the hand of the wealthy Sir Pitt Crawley, as she has already married his son. She can actually play the piano and sing and must be intelligent enough to know all she does, but the cynical motive underlying all of this consumes any beauty that such things might have. The same can be said for the fine clothes and beautifully crafted things that she purchases. Fine craftsmanship and beauty are all good things in themselves, but in their absorption into totems of bourgeois status signalling, their beauty likewise is consumed in vanity. My mother said, quite poignantly, that the book is about the “ultimate futility of living for anything other than meaningful human relationships”, and this too is lost as Rawdon leaves Becky upon discovering her with a wealthier rival. Like MacBeth (and Redmond Barry) before her, ambition leaves her with nothing, mired in scandal. 

Ultimately, Rebecca is bored by all of this luxury long before she loses it, precisely because material accumulation was never the point of such things. The beauty of fine things is in the artistry of their creation, not for the bragging rights their possession might convey. Sharp never wanted these objects for any reason that they might satisfy, leaving aside the discussion of whether material possession can ever satisfy any need. Participation in Vanity Fair is the futile pursuit of quantity, and treating quality quantitatively. For Rebecca, the value of her possessions is in the number of pounds there attached, not the unicity and subtle beauty that the price tag aims to quantify. Likewise, her attachments to people are mathematical calculations of material gain. The bottomless well of vanity, in its desire to consume more and more, swallows the goodness of the things it desires. 

It’s no accident that the 19th Century novel is so utterly concerned with class and Vanity Fair, alongside the historical processes it is concerned with, can be credited with helping to solidify this. Social mobility and equal opportunity are paramount values in modernity; nothing can get in the way of our ability to accumulate more stuff and put on more airs. In its spin on the picaresque, Vanity Fair challenges these values that were far less entrenched at its time of writing, (1840s). In the inversion of this then-familiar format, critiquing the foundations of the genre’s archetypal hero, it dares ask, “what lies at the bottom of all this striving?”

London: Modernity Patient Zero

I’ve spent a good amount of time around central London in the last year or so and it’s been a pleasure to tread the very streets and parks the novel is set in. Indeed; the flocks of effete dandies and opulent carriages of the regency seem echoed in the trim city-boy suits and sportscars of the London elite. Like any book there’s a million and one possible Marxist readings of the work and I’m sure it would make a handsome basis for someone after a slick video essay along that vein, but the book’s focus is more fundamental, I think.

Mankind is a social species, and as such we are intensely concerned with status, and where we stack up alongside the other members of our group. To me, Vanity Fair captures the modern rat race to a tee. The way that those in what we see as a “high” civilisation scramble over each other to reach that ever elusive accolade of high status.

Reading the book, I would find myself often among the same streets that the characters would frequent, seeing the same buildings and taking in the same enchanting air of London’s promise. It’s certainly an intoxicating place, like many a city, but it’s even easier to recognise the hollowness of Piccadilly Circus’s brand spewing mega-tellies than of the actually beautiful bespoke luxuries of the regency.

It’s a London one would recognise in Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Tiredness of Rosabel. The story follows an impoverished girl who works in a hat shop, as she is going through Oxford Circus on a bus, we read this:

“Rosabel looked out of the windows; the street was blurred and misty, but light striking on the panes turned their dullness to opal and silver, and the jewellers' shops seen through this were fairy palaces. Her feet were horribly wet, and she knew the bottom of her skirt and petticoat would be coated with black, greasy mud. There was a sickening smell of warm humanity – it seemed to be oozing out of everybody in the bus – and everybody had the same expression, sitting so still, staring in front of them. Rosabel stirred suddenly and unfastened the two top buttons of her coat… she felt almost stifled. Through her half-closed eyes, the whole row of people on the opposite seat seemed to resolve into one meaningless, staring face.”

That image of the shops of Mayfair as “fairy palaces”, that magical quality to the luxuries of London is what Vanity Fair pinpoints to me. The Rebeccas and Rosabels of the world, forever orbiting vanity fair, are captive to this Dick Whittington, paved-with-gold notion of high status, and so are we; the modern mass of “warm humanity”. Middle class life is an exercise in one-upping our fellows, and it can be easy to get sucked into the pursuit of that ever elusive quality of eliteness and nowhere, at least in Britain, represents this more acutely than London.

London is a crucial character in the novel. At the head of the empire that would inaugurate the modern world, the lure of this Vanity Fair is central to the book’s lasting significance. All over the world, businessmen dress in suits after the style of Beau Brummel, all over the world it is a high status activity to emulate the English upper class. Nothing quite captures the role of London in world culture than the fact that the Japanese word for “business suit” is sabiro, from “Savile Row”. Even as London has given way to New York and Los Angeles as world capital, the enduring cultural pull of Englishness, of London-ness is palpable. Why do Russian and Chinese oligarchs to this day insist on an Etonian education? Why does Oxbridge remain so prestigious? 

Ultimately the answer can be found in England’s historical class system. After the Norman conquest, the feudal took on an explicitly ethnic dimension in England. The rulers of England spoke an entirely different language to their subjects, and to this day words carry a class connotation based on their etymology as Germanic or Norman derived, a common linguistic and cultural dynamic throughout history.

What makes England’s class system matter uniquely, however, is the industrial revolution and birth of capitalism. The pioneers of this economic revolution were not “Normans”, if you like, nor were they aristocrats at all, but their direct competitors. The London of Vanity Fair is far smaller than today’s metropolis, confined mostly to the north bank of the Thames, composed of the City and the West End. The City is the financial capital of Britain, her empire and indeed the world; the centre of the power of Britain’s bourgeois, mercantile elite. The West End is the opulent, fashionable end of town. Here is the aristocrats’ haunt. At least, it would be. What the industrial revolution did was grant a tremendous amount of wealth to the new upwardly mobile “middling sort”. An inflated middle class that had simply not existed before. Their wealth began to rival that of the old landed aristocracy, who were frequently indebted to creditors from the City. 

What the aristocrats had that the new money lacked was refinement. As money ceased to be the defining characteristic of nobility, the gentry began to identify themselves in terms of custom, education and culture. I often leave foreign friends of mine confused when I talk about how class in England is not directly about “money”. A Cambridge educated man on £30k a year is much more middle class than a far wealthier owner of a plumbing firm. As new money began to ascend the social ladder, the old aristocracy needed ways to discern parvenus, but the middle classes were themselves eagerly trying to attain the airs and graces of the aristocracy. At every level, people signalled their status, and continue to today. A humorous example would be referring to what the upper classes call a “valet” as a valet (French), immediately marking oneself out as trying to sound posh and alerting the actually posh that you are an impostor. The Hyacinth Buckets of the world have their work cut out for them. Perhaps even more ironically, and in a manner somewhat analogous to what we discussed earlier whereby the lust for fine things destroys their true value, the adoption of high status fashion can itself render something low status. The classic Burberry catch-22, where the brand became seen as “chav” due to its being worn to ostentatiously signal wealth. The middle class in England are very conscious not to appear “vulgar” or “tacky”, convolutedly displaying their status through… not displaying it. Class, especially in Britain, is an endless web of traps and subtle signals that are designed to keep things exclusive.

Of course, that exclusivity is exactly what draws people to it in the first place. As England’s economic revolution permeated the globe, capitalism would instantiate this class dynamic, although in a perhaps less acute form, throughout the world in the behaviours of the newly moneyed classes. This is why Oxford and Eton and the West End have the pull they do, it’s why the world over men dress after the dandies of 19th Century London - London is the epicentre of this imitative process of class signalling. In America - the WASPs have been dethroned from the height of their power, they are no longer the wealthiest ethnic group in America, and yet they are still imitated in their dress, in their customs and in their language. This very English concern of class has taken hold throughout the world, and everyone seems to be clawing after the elusive quality of having “class”, which consciously or unconsciously means an imitation of something “English”. At the very least something Angloesque; the unspoken baggage attached to the “universal” economic system that the world took from us. A received pronunciation accent is the universal symbol, in the most universal language, of high social status. Just look at the international success of Downton Abbey, visit the Barbour shop in Regent’s Street and see how it’s always full of Italians.

The English Condition

This process, by which the English upper class and their habits have become universal symbols of high status, has had deep impacts on England itself, and our cultural climate. When I was at university I made friends with a great many Europeans and people from elsewhere, all of whom would have their own sub-community at the university. They could speak in their own language and have an exclusive relationship with one another, while also participating in the nexus of English language society. England and the Anglosphere are the forum of the world, our customs, language and culture are so known and have been so influential, through the economic system that was invented here, that we have lost our sense of ourselves as a nation like other nations. As an Englishman I don’t have an exclusive language that I can speak in private with my other English people, my language is the universal language of Earth. Famously, we have no national dress. Clothing invented in England is now the official outfit of this planet; we don’t have a sense of separation between our national life and our international life, because the international was made out of what was once national to us. 

It’s no wonder English nationalists cleave to Old English for a sense of cultural exclusivity. The Anglo Saxon period is a symbol of national distinctness, before the Norman conquest, long before we became the platform for the world. When there was no ethnic distinction between the rulers and the ruled (while Britons were ruled by Anglo Saxons, and Saxons ruled by Danes, there was definitely less of a sense of ethnic disparity between rulers and ruled prior to 1066). 

It is as though our very sense of self was sucked into the warped, bankrupt notion of social chaos and status seeking that Thackeray identifies in this novel. Even the “British values” touted by right wingers in this country amount to little more than neoliberal Loadsamoney-isms. English, or more often British Patriotism is marketed as allegiance to a set of ideas that happened to emerge in this country. Even the remnants of imperial pride that you’ll find among Churchill-adoring HOI4-playing tankboys are ultimately just pride in maximal consumption, in the nihilistic exploitation of the world for wealth by a tiny class who benefited at the expense of the lives of ordinary Englishmen and whoever sat on the resources they were after that week, though I am assuredly not in the business of “apologising” for the universally human activity of conquest - we happened to win (one can very easily picture a world in this same chapter were written about French or Dutch, had they happened to become the global lingua-franca). I would go so far as to argue that those ideas, what we English are told we ought to be “proud” of, are squarely responsible for the destruction of much of what we actually love and value in this country. The very first victims of the ravenous, usury-propelled system that still manages the world were the rural English, driven off of their ancestral lands in the enclosures movement.

By contrast to the vision of a time before we became a platform for the world, the rat-race of affectation and status signalling lacks particularity and authenticity. Like the beauty and love that men have for everyday things, the notion of Englishness itself gets swept up in the neurotic game of status-seeking. Just as the true beauty of the trappings of Becky Sharp’s wealth are all swallowed by inauthenticity becoming theme-park accessories, Englishness is robbed of its proper virtues, becoming just another vain accessory. These processes, I would argue, have left the English a hollow shell of a country, never properly understanding their place in the world, because all the while we are desperately trying to abolish ourselves and our rooted place in the world, in pursuit of a fashion that we delude ourselves is our unique contribution to the world. We were merely the first victims of modernity. 

Conclusion

“Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?”

In the majority of my essays I have drawn heavily on technocritical thought, and more broadly on critiques of modernity, and while a 19th Century Romance novel might seem a departure from this, I think it is clear that Thackeray’s insights, and what he critiques in Vanity Fair are quite at home with these ideas. The spirit of this age, be it characterised as the autonomous drive towards efficiency seen in Ellul’s technique, or an Evolian Kaliyuga is defined by a preoccupation with the material as quantity (had I read Guénon, I’d surely reference him here also). The modern disease of seeing man as “hackable animal”, an equation to be solved with the right chemical formula, is the linear descendant of the notions that produced Thackeray’s own age. The reconfiguration of material ambition as a virtue, propelled by and itself propelling the technologisation of our world, is a sociological ethic, as much as a consequence of philosophy or historical circumstance. The abolition of notions of an individual’s proper, natural placement in a social hierarchy, was not simply a benevolent act of liberation to the world’s people; hierarchy was not abolished and the presence of an elite has never been realer. Instead, what was engineered was the presence of a permanently economically and socially insecure mass of “strivers”, who would relentlessly pursue elite habits to secure their economic prospects, all the while reinforcing the power of that elite (truer now than ever with the “gig economy”). The insidious way in which elite opinion is reinforced by the midwit legions in pursuit of the ever-elusive seat of high status is the direct result of this.

Victorian morality, as we now call it, denotes the moral consensus of middle class British society in the 19th Century. The middle class, permanently adrift between two more solid social positions, took to displaying their status by means of their superior moral character to both the aristocracy and the working class. Puritanism is also a prime example of this, and it has become cliché to draw parallels between both these 17th-Century wackos; Victorian moralists and today's shitlibs. As identified by Ed Dutton, the psychological process of all these is more or less the same, whereby high status opinion is adopted to help secure one’s own economic and social prospects. Indeed - in a ruthless, capitalistic fashion, we see people falling over each other to be perceived as “woker-than-thou”; I recall one girl in a group job interview bragging about spending lockdown “educating herself” on this and that current-year moral doctrine, essentially bragging about having the most up-to-date ethical software compared to the rest of us. It’s depressing to realise, especially for autistic people like us who actually hold sincere beliefs, that for the most part normies glom onto whatever happens to be trending among elites that day. Virtue signalling leaves us disgusted. Once again, just as with the nature of Englishness and the subtle beauty of well-crafted things, the moral virtue of sincere belief is irretrievably consumed by the nihilistic pit that is vanity. A system that enshrines this ethic will see everything good and valuable that it comes into contact with destroyed. One can only hope the Puritanism of our own age will be seen with the same ire and ridicule as Victorian morality is now.

It’s often tempting to abstract things to a meta-societal level and to assess the agonies of modernity as a series of grand historical processes and self-realising forces that are beyond the control of individual people. Indeed, I maintain this myself and denounce instrumentalism, the standpoint that, as Dr. Iain McGilchrist recently, in my view erroneously, claimed that “technology is only as good or bad as the person using it”. It is nevertheless important to remember that society and all the things we discuss are enacted by people, acting and living each day in their own selves. As such, viewing things more sociologically, through the lens of a cast of individuals in a novel, helps us realise that the moral insanity and indeed the industrial devastation that is destroying our world is all composed of the actions of people, all individually striving and aiming for the insurmountable heights of status. I am sure that oil executives, or even solar-panel manufacturers do not enter into their ecologically devastating activities out of a cartoonish desire to do evil. They, like me, feel the allure of luxury and fear poverty and ostracism. Vanity Fair does not only pervert our social orientation, it conscripts us into a hollow, destructive pursuit of a lifestyle that is utterly unsustainable. Indeed; vanity is exactly the spirit of unsustainability - a narcissistic, projected image without bedrock or substance. Our collective, societal vanity; that there exists some possible future whereby we obtain a spacefaring, universally egalitarian, post-scarcity, post-identity, post any and all limitations civilisation, is the logical progression of the “dream” that destroyed Rebecca Sharp and Willy Loman. The unholy, hubristic ambition of the tragic hero, to undo the divine limits placed by the gods upon the world, is a path towards a tragic fall. Vanity Fair will not satisfy, it will only destroy those who partake in it, and, if permitted, the world they inhabit.

1. Ted Hughes, Essential Shakespeare.