(click image to enlarge)
First published from 1847-1848 as a 19-volume monthly serial, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is set in England during and after the Napoleonic Wars and follows two women, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, from school days into adulthood. The ambitious Becky Sharp manipulates her way up through society, through marriage to the dim-witted Rawdon Crawley, before attaching herself to the wealthy, corrupt Lord Steyne. The contrasting character of Amelia Sedley is passive and devoted to her unworthy husband George Osborne, even after his death at Waterloo. Thackeray uses the novel to skewer the vanity, snobbery and social climbing of Regency and early Victorian England.
In the present image, rumours about the impropriety of
the relationship between Becky Sharp and Lord Steyne are spreading, fuelled by the gossiping of servants. The line ‘some people ought to have mutes for servants in Vanity Fair’ is an aside from Thackeray as the narrator to the reader, comparing the gossiping servants to dangerous informants.
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