• Vanity Fair is a social satire that criticizes the faults of Victorian society.
• William Thackeray addressed the social problems of the British society in Victorian era.
• England where plenty of showiness existed and people attached importance to wealth and money.
• Vanity Fair earned him greatest reputation as a writer.
• What distinguished Thackeray from his contemporaries that he dealt with distruptions through satire and with setting of the work rather than realist criticism
• The characters in Vanity Fair are mostly vicious and detestable, with very few exceptions.
• The women in the novel are particularly detestable, characterized by traits such as cunning, low pride, selfishness, envy, malice, and uncharitableness.
• The novel does not aim to balance these negative traits with positive ones, instead, it highlights the close proximity of vices and virtues in the human heart.
• It acknowledges the complex mixture of good and evil, weakness and strength, that makes up each individual.
• The passage is a critique of the characters’ moral shortcomings and a commentary on the complexity of human nature.
• Thackeray made social criticism in his work while keeping his readers within critical distance from the characters.
• This is why he refrained from creating characters with whom the reader would probably sympathize
• The plot of Vanity Fair illustrates Becky’s determined social mobility;
  • Amelia and Rebecca (Becky) become good friends at the academy of Miss Pinkerton.
  • Becky meets Jos, Amelia’s brother, and plans to marry him for social mobility, but this does not happen.
  • Becky leaves the Sedley family, becomes a governess for Sir Pitt Crawley’s daughters, and secretly marries Rawdon Crawley, Pitt’s son.
  • Rawdon Crawley is disinherited by his rich aunt as a result of the marriage, causing Becky to lose her chance to rise in social status in the Crawleys’ house.
  • George and Amelia get married. George challenges his father for the marriage and gets disinherited. George later dies in the Battle of Waterloo.
  • William Dobbin supports Amelia without revealing his identity.
  • Becky and Amelia both have sons.
  • Becky and Lord Steyne, as well as Rawdon and Lady Jane (his brother’s wife), have relationships closer than friendship.
  • After learning about their affair, Rawdon leaves for Coventry Island, where he dies.
  • Rebecca travels in Europe, meets Joseph Sedley, takes money from him, and Joseph dies after some time.
  • William Dobbin, the admirer of Amelia, wins her heart and they marry.
• Preface identifies the narrator as the manager of a theatrical performance, provides a helpful context for understanding Thackeray’s difference from Victorian novelists who locate their genre within their domestic interior.
• Thackeray does not limit the genre within domestic space and develops a broader sense of criticism.
• Instead of criticizing the individual he criticizes the society.
• He gives clear and subjective details about the characters and reveals their inner feelings.
• He avoids misconceptions by revealing the characters’ intentions and creates his satire.
• He creates a panaroma to look before and after while moving forwards and backwards freely in time.
• Thackeray’s narrative in Vanity Fair is omniscient and highly subjective, guiding the reader to think in the way Thackeray intends.