ABSTRACT
There can be no doubt that, before they made their first at tempts at charting the metropolis in their novels, both Thack eray and Dickens were familiar with the expressive techniques that had developed in the city sketch.2 But what Thackeray took from the city sketch was not so much its capacity to express ur ban contradictions as its ability to manage them. A rather ex treme illustration is the transformation that the figure of the flaneur undergoes as he moves from Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836-37) to Vanity Fair. The narrator of Vanity Fair seems to follow the flaneurs agenda when he proposes “to walk with [the reader] through the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there,”3 but it becomes immediately evident that, unlike Boz, Thackeray’s narrator is no “perambulator of the streets.” Rather, as someone who projects himself as both priest and clown, the narrator of Vanity Fair seems to have abstracted himself from the urban context itself. He has subsumed, within a more ab stract set of contrasts, the social contradictions that the city sketch sought both to express and to manage, so that these con trasts can be played out within the stable and relatively mono chromatic social world of the middle and upper classes:
More than Vanity Fair, however, it is Pendennis that addresses itself, in a self-conscious manner, to the whole problem of the relationship between the urban middle-class novel and the dis concerting contradictions of the city. Built within the structure of Pendennis, in fact, is a double articulation o f this problem. On the one hand, as a bildungsroman the novel’s function is to sever, or at least to restrict within manageable limits, Pen’s relationship with the netherworld of actresses and their disreputable man agers. In this sense, the novel seeks to reaffirm the appropri ateness of the gentlemanly milieu as the context for the hero’s growth. On the other hand, it is also a literary autobiography: a warm but condescending recounting of Thackeray’s days in the lower rungs of London’s journalistic milieu and of his encoun ters with coalheavers and boxers, among other London speci mens. These factors serve to throw into relief, for the predomi nantly middle-class readers of Pendennis, Thackeray’s ascent into the properly literary vocation o f novel writing. Thus the trajectory o f Thackeray’s bildungsroman turns out to be para digmatic of his relationship with certain urban forms of writing that germinated in the lower realms of print culture described in his novel, forms that sought to achieve their effects by dra matizing the social contradictions o f the big city. Thackeray often used a polemical mode when he sought to demarcate his kind o f novel writing from the other products of the print mar ket in which his own past was implicated, and this mode resur faces in the “Preface” to Pendennis. “Ladies and gentleman,” Thackeray writes, with reference to “the ‘exciting’ plan” that his integrity as writer forced him to lay aside, “you were to have been treated, and the writer’s and the publishers’ pocket benefitted, by the recital of the most active horrors. What more excit ing than a ruffian (with many admirable virtues) in St. Giles’s, visited constantly by a young lady from Belgravia? What more stirring than the contrasts of society? the mixture of slang and fashionable language?”4
