ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Vanity Fair as a thorough yet highly idiosyncratic exploration of literary geography that is hyper-conscious of the different generic dimensions of stories set in Bloomsbury and Mayfair, and which, though it encompasses both metropolitan localities, is especially invested in the former. It traces Thackeray's complex intertextual engagement with the previous generation's cultural constructions of Bloomsbury, and shows how the novel's narrative interrogation of that place as it was in the early nineteenth century moves beyond mere allusion and constitutes a kind of local historical fiction writing, like and yet unlike other metropolitan historical writing from the 1840s by Ainsworth and Dickens. It has been noted before that Vanity Fair has a complex and critical relation to the Regency culture it depicts, but this chapter elucidates how its metropolitan geography responds to a specific historical contention over Bloomsbury in which the Silver Fork genre, from the 1820s and early 1830s, had intervened.
