Vanity Fair

“ The wonderful variety, elasticity, and freshness of the dialogue, the wit of the common scenes, the terrible power of the tragic scenes, the perfection of the mise-en-scène—the rattle, the fun, the glitter of the Fair, are sustained from end to end, from the first words of the ineffable Miss Pinkerton to the Vanitas Vanitatum when the showman shuts up his puppets in their box. There is not in all Vanity Fair a single dull page that we skip, not a bit of padding, no rigmarole of explanation whilst the action stands still. ”

“ The great triumph of Vanity Fair—the great triumph of modern fiction—is Becky Sharp: a character which will ever stand in the very foremost rank of English literature, if not with Falstaff and Shylock, then with Squire Western, Uncle Toby, Mr. Primrose, Jonathan Oldbuck, and Sam Weller. There is no character in the whole range of literature which has been worked out with more elaborate completeness. She is drawn from girlhood to old age, under every conceivable condition, and is brought face to face with all kinds of persons and trials. ”

“ The consent of mankind, and especially the consent of women, is too manifest. There is something ungenial, there is a bitter taste left when we have enjoyed these books, especially as we lay down Vanity Fair. It is a long comedy of roguery, meanness, selfishness, intrigue, and affectation. Rakes, ruffians, bullies, parasites, fortune-hunters, adventurers, women who sell themselves, and men who cheat and cringe, pass before us in one incessant procession, crushing the weak, and making fools of the good. Such, says our author, is the way of Vanity Fair—which we are warned to loathe and to shun. ”

“ I never realized that Vanity Fair might one day cease to exist for me, or that a period might arrive when, owing to the ever enlarging field of photography, that type of work would be no longer in such demand.
My father was himself a caricaturist of no mean order; and one of my most cherished possessions is a caricature which my father made of me as a child, drawn on the day before I returned to Eton after a holiday. ”

“ But, without preaching, the truth may surely be borne in mind, that the bustle, and triumph, and laughter, and gaiety which Vanity Fair exhibits in public, do not always pursue the performer into private life, and that the most dreary depression of spirits and dismal repentances sometimes overcome him. Recollection of the best ordained banquets will scarcely cheer sick epicures. Reminiscences of the most becoming dresses and brilliant ball triumphs will go very little way to console faded beauties. ”

“ Is it not the truest piety to conclude that those things which the ridicule of the ages cannot kill deserve their immortality—that Kings, War, and Christianity play a part in the scheme of creation, and that even snobbery and jobbery, folly and fraud, rouge and respectability, and horse-racing, bounders and politicians, the prize-ring and the marriage market, are all necessary to the fun of Vanity Fair! They are thrown up by the flux of things for Honesty to set his heel on. ”

“ They should remember, what they uniformly and universally forget, that we are not invited, upon the rising of the curtain to behold a cosmorama, or picture of the world, but a representation of that part of it called Vanity Fair. What its just limits are-how far its poisonous purlieus reach—how much of the world’s air is tainted by it, is a question which every thoughtful man will ask himself, with a shudder, and look sadly around, to answer. ”

“ Rebecca Crawley's biography with that lightness and delicacy which the world demands—the moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name. There are things we do and know perfectly well in Vanity Fair, though we never speak them: as the Ahrimanians worship the devil, but don't mention him: and a polite public will no more bear to read an authentic description of vice than a truly-refined English or American female will permit the word breeches to be pronounced in her chaste hearing. ”

“ it beareth the name of Vanity Fair, because the town where it is kept is lighter than vanity; ”

“ The Interpreter's House in the old allegory dealt only with things found in the Bible, the only channel of revelation to John Bunyan. To the modern pilgrim God reveals Himself in Nature, in art, in literature, and in history. The Interpreter's Hand had to do with all these things. Vanity Fair is not a place through which all pilgrims must pass as quickly as possible, shutting their eyes and stopping their ears so that they should neither see nor hear the wicked things that are done and said there. Vanity Fair is the world in which we all have to live and do our work well, or neglect it. ”

“ Perhaps in Vanity Fair there are no better satires than letters. Take a bundle of your dear friend's of ten years back—your dear friend whom you hate now. Look at a file of your sister's! how you clung to each other till you quarrelled about the twenty-pound legacy! Get down the round-hand scrawls of your son who has half broken your heart with selfish undutifulness since; or a parcel of your own, breathing endless ardour and love eternal, which were sent back by your mistress when she married the Nabob—your mistress for whom you now care no more than for Queen Elizabeth. ”

“ As a matter of fact, she had rattled all this off [Pg 152] so quickly that Vane had not had time to reply to her greeting. He had taken her hand and, somewhat tremblingly, returned the frank, firm pressure. While she was speaking, he looked into her face and saw that she had already assumed the invisible but impenetrable mask in which the society woman plays her part in the tragic comedy of Vanity Fair. It was the same face and yet not the same, the same voice and yet a different one, and the sight and sound acted upon him like a powerful tonic. ”

“ But my kind reader will please to remember that this history has "Vanity Fair" for a title, and that Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. ”

“ It was late in the day when the train thundered into the ancient city of Vanity, where Vanity Fair is still at the height of prosperity, and exhibits an epitome of whatever is brilliant, gay, and fascinating beneath the sun. ”

“ So there was splendour and wealth, but no great happiness perchance, behind the tall caned portals of Gaunt House with its smoky coronets and ciphers. The feasts there were of the grandest in London, but there was not overmuch content therewith, except among the guests who sat at my lord's table. Had he not been so great a Prince very few possibly would have visited him; but in Vanity Fair the sins of very great personages are looked at indulgently. ”

“ It seems to me little short of a tragedy that an artist of his ability should have spent the greater part of his time in fabricating those absurd, posturing effigies that simper and smirk so grotesquely in the enormous windows of Vanity Fair. ”

“ Some were honest, many were dishonest; some lived peaceably and uprightly, others robbed, murdered, seduced their neighbours' wives, or lied and perjured themselves. Vanity Fair was European society as it existed in the days of Charles II. Each nation was represented. ”

“ This surprising sentence means that Vanity Fair was lent to Paradise Lost, and Paradise Lost to Vanity Fair. If we further assume for politeness' sake that mutually is not mere tautology with to each other, the only thing left for it to mean is by each other. ”

“ I saw in my dream that Christian and Faithful tried to avoid seeing Vanity Fair; but this they could not do, because the way to the Celestial City lies through the town where this lusty fair is kept. About 5,000 years ago, Beelzebub, Apollyon, and the rest of the fiends saw by the path which the pilgrims made, that their way lay through the town of Vanity. So they set up a fair there, in which all sorts of vanity should be sold every day in the year. ”

“ Every actor on the crowded stage of "Vanity Fair" represents some type of that perverse mixture of humanity in which there is ever something not wholly to approve or to condemn. There is the desperate devotion of a fond heart to a false object, which we cannot respect; there is the vain, weak man, half good and half bad, who is more despicable in our eyes than the decided villain. ”

“ Nothing is more apparent than the loose texture of "Vanity Fair," where two stories centering in the antithetic women, Becky and Amelia, are held together chronicle fashion, not in the nexus of an organism of close weave. But this very looseness, where there is such superlative power of characterization with plenty of invention in incident, adds to the verisimilitude and attraction of the book. The impression of life is all the more vivid, because of the lack of proportioned progress to a climax. ”

“ We come to dress as punctiliously as our allowances make possible; to act as casual and reserved as our youthful exuberance will permit. The few hours we have for reading are wisely devoted to Vanity Fair. Our conversation is as circumspect: some subjects are not to be talked of, some adjectives not to be used if one is to escape the censure of aestheticism. And beneath these outward criteria we find the primary cause—a fundamental uniformity of thought. Left to ourselves we would certainly not think in the same channels; but thrown into a crowd we think as the crowd does. ”

“ There congregate more than elsewhere idlers, men and women of leisure who have nothing to do except to observe or to act in the spectacle of Vanity Fair. Aside from the display of luxury in the shops, in the streets, in private houses, one is impressed by the number of idle young men and women of fashion. ”

“ We have now made the serene spaces of the upper Heavens our media to transmit market reports and sporting news, second-rate music and worse oratory and in the meantime the great masters of thought, Homer and Shakespeare, Bach and Beethoven remain unbidden on our library shelves. What a sordid Vanity Fair is our modern Civilization!
This incalculable multiplication of power has intoxicated man. The lust has obsessed him, without regard to whether it be constructive or destructive. Quantity, not quality, becomes the great objective. ”

“ Grave issues are tangled in the game of fashion-making; but the world through which My Lady of the Chiffons dances lightly to gay music reeks of frivolity, and the story of the fashionable Parisienne and of the haunts in which she obtains and displays her incomparable frocks must needs be a story of folly and extravagance, best told, perhaps, by snap-shots of the inner courts of Vanity Fair. ”

“ By humbly and frankly acknowledging yourself to be in the wrong, there is no knowing, my son, what good you may do. I knew once a gentleman and very worthy practitioner in Vanity Fair, who used to do little wrongs to his neighbours on purpose, and in order to apologise for them in an open and manly way afterwards—and what ensued? My friend Crocky Doyle was liked everywhere, and deemed to be rather impetuous—but the honestest fellow. ”

“ He led its cotillions, arranged its more sober functions, and was a household word with the outsiders that reach society only through the printed page. His novels—whether they were his own or done for him hardly matters—were just dull enough to offend nobody. The most indolent dweller in Vanity Fair could affect his books without the least mental exertion. The lives of our fashionables are too full, too replete with a multitude of interests and excitements, to allow of the concentration proper for the reading of scintillating dialogue, or brilliant observations. ”

“ Himself most lamentably in a state of table-d'hotage, this young man trumpeted forth the most bitter editorials against Orson Vane and his doings. He frothed with anarchistic ravings. Finally, since the world will always listen if you only make noise loud enough and long enough, the general public began to believe that Vane was really a dreadful person. He was a leader in the smart set; he stood for the entire family. His taste for the theater would debauch all society. His egoisms would spoil what little of the natural was left in the regions of Vanity Fair. ”

“ Beatrix Esmond is almost as wonderful a creation as Becky Sharp; though, if formed on a grander mould, she has less fascination than that incorrigible minx. The Newcomes, if in some ways the most genial of the longer pieces, is plainly without the power of Vanity Fair. And if Barry Lyndon has this power, it is an awful picture of cruelty and meanness. The Book of Snobs and the Hoggarty Diamond were each a kind of prelude to Vanity Fair, and both contain some of its essential marks of pathos and of power. ”

“ O, my dear brethren and fellow-sojourners in Vanity Fair, which among you does not know and suffer under such benevolent despots? It is in vain you say to them, "Dear Madam, I took Podgers' specific at your orders last year, and believe in it. Why, why am I to recant and accept the Rodgers' articles now?" There is no help for it; the faithful proselytizer, if she cannot convince by argument, bursts into tears, and the refusant finds himself, at the end of the contest, taking down the bolus, and saying, "Well, well, Rodgers' be it." ”

“ His novels seem to many readers cynical, because he scrutinizes almost every character and every group with impartial vigor, dragging forth every fault and every weakness into the light. On the title page of 'Vanity Fair' he proclaims that it is a novel without a hero; and here, as in some of his lesser works, most of the characters are either altogether bad or worthless and the others very largely weak or absurd, so that the impression of human life which the reader apparently ought to carry away is that of a hopeless chaos of selfishness, hypocrisy, and futility. ”