Robert Bell-whose friendship later became so great that he was buried near Thackeray at Kensal Green Cemetery -complained that the novel could have used 'more light and air' to make it 'more agreeable and healthy'. Thackeray does not mention Bunyan in the novel or in his surviving letters about it, where he describes himself dealing with 'living without God in the world', but he did expect the reference to be understood by his audience, as shown in an 1851 Times article likely written by Thackeray himself. In that work, 'Vanity Fair' refers to a stop along the pilgrim's route: a never-ending fair held in a town called Vanity, which represents man's sinful attachment to worldly things.

The book's title comes from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a Dissenter allegory first published in 1678.

Title Ī reprint of John Bunyan's Plan of the Road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, including Vanity Fair as the major city along the path 122 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's best-loved books. It also inspired the title of the British lifestyle magazine first published in 1868, which became known for its caricatures of famous people of Victorian and Edwardian society. The serial was a popular and critical success the novel is now considered a classic and has inspired several audio, film, and television adaptations. The story is framed as a puppet play, and the narrator, despite being an authorial voice, is somewhat unreliable. It is sometimes considered the 'principal founder' of the Victorian domestic novel. It was published as a single volume in 1848 with the subtitle A Novel without a Hero, reflecting Thackeray's interest in deconstructing his era's conventions regarding literary heroism. It was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial (the last containing Parts 19 and 20) from 1847 to 1848, carrying the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, which reflects both its satirisation of early 19th-century British society and the many illustrations drawn by Thackeray to accompany the text. 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.

William thackeray novels