How on earth? Well, the first time around, Vanity Fair was serialized in Punch – each month, a new section of the novel would come out. Actually, he got the fame and fortune way before the novel's ending was written. After 1848, he became the superstar author of the hilariously mean Vanity Fair, a long satirical novel that made fun of the aristocracy and the middle classes: their greed, corruption, and – ahem – vanity. A pleasure to read, the work of the fellow writer to Dickens and the Brontë sisters, revolving around what people do for money, is just as topical today as it was back then.Before 1847, William Makepeace Thackeray was a guy mostly known for writing short satirical articles for the funny magazine Punch. With “Vanity Fair”, William Makepeace wrote a social panorama that was to be published countless times, in the form of books, movies and theater plays. Not even as a mother capable of real warmth, her scheming ultimately chases everyone away. She, who does not even flinch from legacy hunting, can secure herself a livelihood. In the end, however, after trials and tribulations against the background of the Napoleonic wars – Thackeray’s novel takes place in the time 1815-1830 – the loser is: Machiavellian Becky. Good-natured to naive, the daughter of a bankrupt seems to be a loser. Becky’s girlfriend Amelia Sedley is a stranger to such strategic thinking. And they let the tempting young woman have her way. In order to gain a fortune, she repeatedly ensnares influential men. She knows exactly what she wants and uses all her feminine charms. Rebecca “Becky” Sharp’s approach is a very straightforward one.

Published from 1848 onwards, the serialized novel is a satirical assessment of how different people behave in the game for money and prestige. And so he was compelled to earn his living as a writer.Īt least, it enabled him to write from an insider’s perspective when he held a mirror up to the greedy Victorian England with his “Vanity Fair”. Still underage, young Thackeray was not lucky with gambling, neither at the table nor the stock exchange. But just as quickly as he had come to money, however, he lost it again. Born in 1811 to a colonial offer in Calcutta, Thackeray enjoyed financial security thanks to a significant inheritance early in his life. Hardly any author is so qualified to write about the seductive power of money as William Makepeace Thackeray. Published by Manesse, Bibliothek der Weltliteratur, 1959

Vanity fair by william