ABSTRACT
Vanity Fair was Thackeray's second novel (although the first published). It was followed by several novels that were well received in their own time, but by large margins it stands out as the one work for which Thackeray is now chiefly remembered. At the time of writing Vanity Fair, Thackeray was a regular contributor to Punch and was well established as a journalist and sketch artist in the vein of humorous social satire. The first novel he wrote, The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1853), revealed a capacity for sustained satire of an unusually harsh, astringent character. In Vanity Fair, he-constructs a complex, unified action that extends over a period of several years and involves dozens of characters in multiple settings. These standard features of the big Victorian novel continue to appear in such later works as Pendennis (1850), The Newcomes (1855), and The Virginians (1859), but never again did Thackeray achieve the classic symmetry and power of Vanity Fair.
