Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

THACKERAY, William Makepeace (intro. John T. Winterich; illus. by the author). Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1979.

Large Octavo. Full black leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt decoration to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. xxii, 759 pp. Colour frontispiece. Over 200 drawings by the author from the first edition throughout. Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press 100 Greatest Books Ever Written series. Originally published in monthly parts, London: Bradbury and Evans, 1847–48; first book edition 1848.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) published Vanity Fair in monthly instalments between January 1847 and July 1848, illustrating it himself with drawings that carry their own satirical commentary on the text — one of the relatively rare instances in English literature of a major novel whose author is also its principal visual interpreter. The illustrations reproduced throughout this Easton Press edition are those Thackeray made for the original serial, and they remain essential to the work: they are not merely decorative but argumentative, the author's own gloss on the characters and situations he has created.

The novel traces the parallel careers of two young women who leave Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies in Chiswick Mall on the same day in 1813 and take entirely different paths through English society. Amelia Sedley is good, gentle, and wealthy; Becky Sharp is impoverished, brilliant, and entirely without scruple. Amelia's life is shaped by the men who love her and by her own capacity for devoted feeling; Becky's is shaped by her own exertions, and by the discovery that English society, for all its emphasis on morality, will reward a sufficiently determined climber if she performs the appropriate rituals with sufficient conviction. The title announces the novel's argument: the world of ambition, fashion, wealth, and social manoeuvre through which both women move is Vanity Fair, the fair held in the allegorical city of Vanity in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, where all that is vain and worthless is bought and sold. Thackeray's narrator observes this fair with a detachment that is by turns comic, melancholy, and savage.

The introduction by John T. Winterich (1891–1952) — American bibliophile, journalist, and long-time contributor to the Saturday Review of Literature — situates the novel in its literary and publishing context.

Near fine. Some very minor and sporadic markings to gilt edges; otherwise clean and bright throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000605