Vanity Fair

William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) is the great satirical novel of English society — a panoramic, ironic, unsentimental anatomy of a world in which money and rank are the only true currencies. Subtitled A Novel without a Hero, it follows two young women out of school and into the world: the sweet, conventional, devoted Amelia Sedley, and the penniless, clever, utterly amoral Becky Sharp, who has nothing but her wits and a clear-eyed determination to rise.

Across some twenty years the novel braids their fortunes — Amelia's helpless love for the worthless George Osborne and the patient devotion of honest Dobbin who waits for her; Becky's dazzling campaign upward through drawing-rooms and gambling-tables, marrying, charming, scheming her way to a presentation at court and a spectacular fall. Around them turns a whole society of the vain and the grasping, and across the middle of the book falls the shadow of Waterloo, where private vanities collide with public catastrophe.

Its boldest stroke is its narrator — the self-styled Manager of the Performance, who stages the whole story as a puppet-show, steps between the reader and the action to moralise and mock, and folds his creatures back into their box at the last: "our play is played out." Refusing to supply a hero or to settle whether Becky Sharp is a monster or the only honest player at a crooked table, Thackeray leaves us alone with the fair itself — and the suspicion that we recognise its inhabitants.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1848 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.