Today Thackeray's best known for Vanity Fair—a rollicking, satirical novel without a hero. But in the 19th century, he was famous for a whole bookcase worth of reasons. He was a big contributor to a favorite magazine of the era, Punch. He wrote novellas (like The Luck of Barry Lyndon, which Stanley Kubrick made into a film in 1975), sketches, and travel books. And he did in fact write novels besides Vanity Fair—like Pendennis and The Newcomes—they were just a lot more popular with Victorians than they are with us today. In fact, Anthony Trollope's favorite Thackeray novel was actually Henry Esmond, not Vanity Fair.

So what was it about Thackeray's writing that made him a preeminent Victorian author? Well, he seemed to be the perfect writer for the transition from the 18th to the 19th century. His novels are full of picaresque adventure and satire—but he throws some Victorian earnestness and morality into the mix. He's also just straight-up funny: this is the guy who coined the term "snob" and then wrote a guide for identifying different types of snobs. Sounds like our cup of tea.

Vanity Fair

Thackeray's first long novel is full of flirting, warring, and gambling. Two schoolgirls take radically different paths: Amelia Sedley is kind-hearted and simple-minded, and Becky Sharp is selfish and scheming.

Somehow it seems like Becky Sharp is always clawing her way onto center stage. This is Thackeray at his most cynical—and some readers thought this novel was too full of satire. Victorians liked to imagine that the aristocracy was all about old ideals and gentlemanly codes, but Thackeray's aristocratic characters are corrupt and selfish. And whereas Victorians usually loved novels about misunderstood governesses or perfect wives, Thackeray makes his governess a social climber and his sweet wife kind of boring.

Pendennis 

Thackeray was competing directly with Dickens's David Copperfield when he wrote Pendennis: both are semi-autobiographical, both trace the bumpy road of a young man figuring out his career and his very challenged love life—and both of those young men turn out to be authors. Adding to the crazy parallels is the fact that the two novels were serialized at the same time, meaning that Dickens and Thackeray could respond to one another in real time.

Chew on This:

It can seem like everyone in Vanity Fair is plotting out ways to get ahead of everyone else. Becky Sharp is the most famous example, but can you find other characters who are as obsessed with class and status? What's the narrator's attitude toward these characters? And how do they end up?

Thackeray's Vanity Fair showcases his funny style: characters are absurd (and often absurdly named), the text is full of random digressions, and the narrator seems to be winking at every other line. Check out our analysis of his style, and find some examples of your own in the novel.