Vanity Fair

Becky Sharp leaves school by throwing the dictionary out of the carriage window and climbs, by charm and calculation, through a society that deserves her. Amelia Sedley is loyal past all sense. Thackeray called it a novel without a hero and meant it: the gaze is colder than Dickens's and considerably more adult. The Gilded Library volume carries full-page plates — ballrooms, the Waterloo encampment, society drawing rooms — and takes its decoration from the domino mask, the fan, the playing cards and the puppet booth of Thackeray's own frontispiece.