History in the Novel Vanity Fair
There is a strong sense of history which pervades Thackeray's Vanity Fair. The novel opens with; "while the present century was still in it's teens" and this not only places the story firmly in the history and society of the early 19th century, but also introduces the idea of 'looking back', both on behalf of the reader and the narrator. The peculiar use of the word "teens" immediately creates connotations of youth, and thus the beginnings of a story rather than the end. It is a colloquial way of describing that period, suggesting the narrator's familiarity with that time, and this is borne out again and again by references to historical events; "while the army is marching from Flanders, and, after its heroic actions there, is advancing to take the fortifications on the frontiers of France, previous to an occupation of that country-" What makes Vanity Fair so tangibly 'historical' is the juxtaposition of people and events; their involvement in them, most obvious in the experiences of Rawdon, Dobbin, and George, but also their opinions of them; "Bonaparty was to be crushed almost without a struggle." This places both the characters and the story in an historical context which enriches the story- history is
" The seemingly overt attention given to somewhat mundane historical detail is deeply significant in that it establishes the idea of prosperity. This is a fundamental sort of distinction, and it seems to set the novel apart from most of the traditional kinds- comedy, tragedy, heroic poetry and pastoral, which each deal with a specific area of human experience. In the novel the characters are subject to these necessities. Not only is the novel bound by the laws of everyday probability as no other form is, but it typically proceeds to bind itself further, to a particular time and place. Though of course, novels are not judged on the amount of social and historical reality that they incorporate. But the novel includes more of the merely contingent, the accidental, than any other literary kind. Though the interweaving of the story with actual historical events (most noticeably the tail-end of the Napoleonic Wars) is particularly striking in Vanity Fair, there are grounds for considering the novel a special case. These settings are not merely incidental, because a novel has to be set somewhere; they are a vital part of the substance of the work. "Because of the novel's unique relation to reality, and the characters and events of the novel are submerged in 'history', all novels are in part historical novels, and part of the characteristic method of the novel is historical. This is evident even in the very first lines of Vanity Fair, when the reader observes "a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. g the invincible refinement of Oliver Twist in spite of the surroundings in which he has been brought up). We can view these historical ties of the novel in two ways: that they reveals the movement of history in vividly realized concrete examples, or that the story is shackled by a multiplicity of accidental details. The novel is obliged to represent life on the terms on which it is actually lived; its only parallel in this respect being realistic drama, which occupies a relatively small part in the total history of drama, and is largely an offshoot of the novel. The repetition of "fat" also alludes to greed, and these are some of the main themes of the novel. No other literary kind has them in such numbers.
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Oliver Twist,
Jane Austen,
Dobbin George,
Lady Crawley,
Novel Hero,
History Novel,
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Napoleonic Wars,
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Acceptance Essays
