Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray - With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer. Although subtitled 'A Novel without a Hero', Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives: through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely exploitative male world.Vanity Fair is an English novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars.A brilliant satire on the nineteenth-century English society, William Makepeace Thackerays Vanity Fair was listed on the BBCs the Big Read poll of UKs best-loved books. A timeless classic, it has been an inspiration for numerous adaptations across various art forms.

Thackeray, an only child, was born in Calcutta, India, where his father, Richmond Thackeray (1 September 1781 13 September 1815), held the high rank of secretary to the board of revenue in the British East India Company. His mother, Anne Becher (17921864) was the second daughter of Harriet and John Harman Becher and was also a secretary (writer) for the East India Company.William had been sent to England earlier, at the age of five, with a short stopover at St. Helena where the imprisoned Napoleon was pointed out to him. He was educated at schools in Southampton and Chiswick and then at Charterhouse School.