The most important European world power to maintain the Liberal system in the Restoration age was England, but at the end of the Napoleonic wars it had a regressive phase. The re-opening of the markets, after the Napoleon’s “Continental Blockade”, coincided with a dramatic fall in agricultural prices and, consequently, in the economic power for some small rural owners. No more prosperous was, at first, the industrial situation, in which the traditional textile leading sector was subjected to increasing competition of the French and Belgian industry. The British Conservative government, after 1815, faced the crisis encouraging the landed property with high protective tariffs on imports of wheat. The manoeuvre of the Government, however, had the effects of national food prices increases.
Until 1820, the Government reacted to the economic and social crisis with harsh repression, defeating the Luddite movement (which destroyed the machines, believing they were responsible for low wages and unemployment) with tough laws that allowed courts to inflict mass convictions, or sending army troops, with the danger of serious accidents, such as in Manchester, where in August 1819, a great battle between troops and demonstrators caused eleven deaths and hundreds injured. The fact upset the public opinion, and the name of the place, St. Peter's Field, went down in history as “the Peterloo massacre.” The Authoritarianism then got on the wane around 1830, when the economic crisis of the first post-Napoleonic depression was exceeded. In fact, in 1837 Queen Victoria ascended the throne of England with a long period of prosperity. A satirical picture of English society of the early nineteenth century had been presented in 1848 by William Thackeray in his famous novel “Vanity Fair.” William Thackeray (1811-1863) was born in Calcutta, where his father held office in the Civil Service of the East India Company. Orphaned at the age of five, he was sent to London and then to Cambridge. William left the University without a degree, and went to Weimar and Paris to study art. He never became a great artist, but his studies in Germany and France prepared him for his future literary life. In 1832 he inherited a fortune which might have enabled him to live on his income; but in a year or two it was all gone. When it became necessary for him to work for a living, and subsequently he turned to literature. His first novel, “Vanity Fair”, was published in 1847-1848.
The history goes into this novel through three ways. The first one is a “direct” intrusion of the military-historical events in Amelia’s life: right after her marriage with Osborne, he must leave to the war. Napoleon was spreading in Europe and England, struck in its vital economic interests, entered into a bloody and long conflict with France. In the historical part of the novel, the plot is played around the date of the battle of Waterloo, and the author describes the effects on the civilian population of the nearby Brussels, and in particular on the moods of the protagonists, who live this historical moment with an extreme distress. “[…] The chapters in which the drama of Waterloo is presented are dominated by great events, but (…) Thackeray (…) has no desire to show how they affect history; that is the foolish method of the historical novelists; he prefers to show how history affects them […].” The second way through which the history enters the novel is “indirect”, namely the economic difficulties faced by England in the post-war time, when Becky, who meanwhile had a son by Rawdon, by whom she was abandoned, shall bear the economic difficulties, demonstrating a strong-willed personality, which certainly was going to clash with some stereotypes of women circulating in Victorian England.
And this is the “third way” through which the social history of England enters in the rightly famous Thackeray’s novel . Through Becky, Thackeray tells us the story of a woman who loves luxury and worldly formalities, the “appearances” that were so well cultivated by the Victorian society. In addition, Thackeray stresses in Becky a vivacity and an “activism”, which, as we said, contrasted fiercely with the notion that women's the Victorian society had. These thus are the critical points of a novel that still today is felt as extremely modern. Thackeray has a very large “liking” for Becky, and, over all, he seems “fascinated” by her, who is always “ the central figure of the book”, and “ […] drawn with a firmed hand and brighter colours (…) When she is off the stage the action languishes; the squalor of Queen’s Crawley, the grimness of Gaunt House, hold our attention merely as they affect the true heroine of the book. When first she appears, flinging the ‘dixonary’ out of the window, the true note of her character is struck, and never once does it ring false. ‘She was small and slight in person,’ thus she is described; ‘pale, dandy-haired, and with eyes habitually cast down: when they looked up, they were very large, odd, and attractive’ […].”
The novel
The novel is set between 1814 and 1840 and in it two stories intertwine, one of Amelia Sedley and that of Rebecca Sharp. The two girls were educated in the same college, but they are very different from one another. Amelia is the daughter of a rich merchant and was fiancée to George Osborne, Captain of the His Majesty's XXX army regiment.. She is of a peaceful character and the perfect Victorian woman, who occupies her days embroidering and playing the piano. Becky, on the contrary, is a poor woman, but a very social climber, and wants to achieve an adequate social position. Becky Sharp (Rebecca) is hired as governess in the noble family of a rich old man, and she succeeds, with various deceptions, gets married to one of his sons, a career officer, named Rawdon. Despite all her efforts, Becky fails to make the rich Miss Crawley, the aunt of her husband, leaves her fortune to Rawdon. However, despite the ongoing financial hardship, the intelligence and beauty of Rebecca manage to make the family continues to live in luxury and high society, until one day Rebecca is surprised by the husband with Lord Steyne and therefore abandoned.
Meanwhile, Amelia succeeds, despite the financial ruin of the father and the opposition of the future father-in-law, to marry George Osborne, who is unfaithful to his wife, until he dies in a battle during the Napoleonic wars. Amelia remains faithful to the memory of her husband, consoled, somehow, by the birth of the son George. Her husband’s best friend, William Dobbin, loved her, but accepted the psychological situation of Amelia and respected her will to stay on her own. Meanwhile, Becky convinces Amelia that her husband does not deserves her continuing regret. Becky shows a ticket of Osborne, in which he asked her to escape with him. Amelia finally married William, and Thackeray, at the end of the novel, describes her as happy with her husband.
“Vanity Fair” is an extraordinary and satirical framework of Victorian England, and the novel represents the faults of a society that rewards only the hypocrisy. Thackeray is certainly a writer who flogs inexorably the behaviours of his contemporary society, the hypocrisies and cowardice of the aristocracy, but he chastens the high society with a very mild tone. He gives his readers the impression that the vices of his society are only “abnormality” and “deviations”, and he indicates, albeit implicitly, as the society “should be”. In this sense, into Thackeray, there’s never a “treacherous” moral satisfaction for the moral distortions of his times, showing the possibility of a future moral improvement of it. From this point of view, we can speak about Thackeray as a “kind” writer; and a very gentleman.
E.S.
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