The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Thackeray was a broken-nosed giant of a man, standing six feet four, yet without giving the impression of strength. Unlike Dickens [77], he was educated as a gentleman. His novйis have a sophistication Dickens's lack, though they are greatly inferior in vitality.

In 1833 Thackeray lost virtually his entire inheritance of twenty thousand pounds. Despite his natural bent for writing, were it not for this misfortune he might never have been forced into the business of grinding out novйis and essays to support his family. In 1840 his wife, following the birth of their child, lost her reason, and never regained it, though she sur- vived her husband by thirty-one years. This tragedy con- tributed to the melancholy suffusing Thackeray's work, and also to his idealization of women, perhaps a mechanism by which he bought off the guilt feelings his wife's insanity would naturally arouse in him.

Thackeray might have been happier among the elegant rakes of the preceding century. But he did not have the tem- perament to flout his time as Emily Brontк [79B] did. She could do so because she lived outside the great world. Thackeray was very much in it, and so are his novйis.

He seems to have given the Victorians just what they wanted, a mixture that both soothed and stimulated. His best book, Vanity Fair (the phrase is from Bunyan [48]), is really concerned with the rise, fali, and partial rise again of a woman out for the main chance. At no point, however, does Thackeray make her character explicit; he is a master at saving appear- ances. Furthermore he is careful to present in his dimwitted Amйlia an exaggerated picture of the ideal Victorian female, and to pay his respects at regular intervals to those domestic virtues Queen Victoria had substituted for sterner ones.

But Vanity Fair rides two horses at the same time. Even while preserving an atmosphere of respectability and senti- mentalism, it is delicately exposing human nature in ali its weakness, egotism, capacity for self-delusion, and mean genius for compromise. In their secret hearts his readers knew that their England, like that of the Napoleonic period Thackeray was depicting, was a Vanity Fair, with much about it that was ignoble and canting. Thackeray appealed to their criticai intel- ligence and yet at the same time managed to support their conventional prejudices.

In Vanity Fair the contradiction is covered over by his art, which is a kind of sleight of hand. How well, how gracefully he tells his story and manipulates what he calls his puppets! How pleasantly conversational is his tone! How easy to take is his irony, that of the tolerant, worldly-wise clubman—and how flattering to our own picture of ourselves as similarly charming

and superior raconteurs! And so, though our conventional prej- udices are quite different from those of the Victorians, though our novйis are frank about sex while Thackeray is disingenu- ous, nevertheless we can still enjoy Vanity Fair.

We can enjoy the panoramic picture of high life in England and on the Continent around the time of Waterloo. We can enjoy the well-controlled plot. But mainly we can still enjoy the perfect symbol of Vanity Fair—Becky Sharp. Becky is of course the ancestress of ali the beautiful, immoral female adventuresses (Scarlett 0'Hara, for instance) who have since enraptured readers. Because of Becky Sharp, Thackerays mas- terpiece will never completely fade. She resolves one of the simpler contradictions in our human nature. For men will always (if possible) marry good women and secretly admire bad ones. And women, knowing that one of their jobs is to keep the race going, will always come out strongly for morality, and tend to have a furtive feeling that somehow immorality seems darned attractive. Thackeray, who had little depth but much worldly wisdom, understood this division in our nature and through Becky Sharp exploited it perfectly.

C.F.

77

CHARLES DICKENS

1812-1870

Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit

The commentaries you have so far been reading average per­haps eight hundred words. In writing about Dickens the most economical way to use about fifty or so of those words might be as follows: The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Dick Swiveller, Flora Finching, Sairey Gamp, Mr. Micawber, Sam Weller, Uriah Heep, Mr. Dick, Bella Wilfer, Joe Gargery, Miss Havisham,

Pumblechook, Wemmick, Bumble, Pecksniff, Mrs. Nickleby, The Crummleses, Quilp, Podsnap, Toots, Rosa Dartle, Chadband, Miss Flite, Inspector Bucket, the Tite Barnacles, Mme. Defarge, the Veneerings. As soon as a Dickens reader recalls any of these names a mental curtain goes up and he sees and hears living, talking human beings.