In January 1847, the young English writer William Thackeray, mostly known until then for his satirical writings in the magazine Punch, published the first of what would ultimately become twenty monthly installments of a novel, Vanity Fair. By the time the final installment was published, Thackeray had become a household name and the closest rival to the undisputed king of the writers of his day, Charles Dickens. I read about this in the introduction prior to reading the novel itself, and it did not strike me as particularly remarkable; but having now read the book and thinking back on it, it is in fact rather striking, and a warning to everyone who is sure he can predict what "the public" wants to read - then or now.

The premise of the story seems ordinary enough: two young English women leaving their boarding school together, a few years before Waterloo, and trying to build up their life - for which, in that time and place, the primary requirement was of course finding the right husband. Amelia Sedley is a sweet, naive, virtuous girl, while Rebecca Sharp is a dissembling, manipulating, highly intelligent and capable young woman, with rather more life experience. An intentional contrast between the good girl and the bad girl, to be sure; but Thackeray is far more subtle than that premise suggests.

With Thackeray's background, it's not a surprise that the novel contains large amounts of satire and veiled or less veiled mockeries of persons or groups of persons in the London of the 1840s, and on occasion outside it. Much of it holds little interest to a modern reader, of course; a joke isn't funny when you have to explain it, and even good footnotes can only go so far. Still, some of the satire and humour remains funny - such as the list of French gentlemen with the cheese-inspired names, or the description of the German town of "Pumpernickel" (inspired by Thackeray's stay at Weimar in the 1830s). My copy of the book added an extra dimension to this by including Thackeray's original illustrations and caricatures.

This is a typical enough Victorian novel in some ways, at least in my limited experience of what is "typical". It largely focuses on the middle class and their daily lives, it drags a bit in the third quarter, and its resolution is conventional enough, in the end. But the author also includes large doses of cynicism, and does not seem to think very highly of any of his characters, all of whom are flawed in one way or another - not generally the stuff of which bestsellers are made, and certainly not what the cliché says Victorian readers wanted to read, even if the ending makes some significant concessions in this regard.

Of course, it's easy to be cynical, and to look down one's nose at one's flawed characters, the puppets which one uses to put up a show at the "Vanity Fair". Far less easy is what Thackeray pulls off, finding the delicate balance between cynicism and sentimentalism, and making the reader care about what happens to the characters, as flawed and weak as they may be. At the end of the day, after all Thackeray's witty, insightful or bitter comments on the folly and vanity of humans in general and his characters in particular, he still sympathizes with them, and makes his readers do the same. If Vanity Fair somehow became a bestseller at the time of its publication, and since then has somehow stood the test of time despite its flaws and despite the fact most of its satire is wasted on a modern audience, that must surely be the reason why.

I highly recommend this book, perhaps not to all readers but to all those who can do the little extra effort it takes to read novels from a different era, with different norms and standards. I must confess I've yet to read Dickens' best books, like A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, but I think I may safely say that Vanity Fair at least ranks among the best novels of its time, and is well-deserving of its place in the lists of "classics".

Edit: And one final comment to everyone who might be interested in reading this: do make sure you get a copy with the original illustrations. Good footnotes would also be useful, of course, but if you have to choose, go for the illustrations.