page_title: Vanity Fair (novel)
section_title: Title
hierarchical_section_title: Vanity Fair (novel) / Title
caption_attribution_description: A Plan of the Road From the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, Adapted to The Pilgrim's Progress, 1821.
context_page_description: 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. It was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial from 1847 to 1848, carrying the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, reflecting both its satirisation of early 19th-century British society and the many illustrations drawn by Thackeray to accompany the text. 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 is sometimes considered the "principal founder" of the Victorian domestic novel.
  The story is framed as a puppet play, and the narrator, despite being an authorial voice, is somewhat unreliable. The serial was a popular and critical success; the novel is now considered a classic and has inspired several audio, film, and television adaptations. In 2003, Vanity Fair was listed at No. 122 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's best-loved books.
context_section_description: The book's title comes from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a Dissenter allegory first published in 1678. 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 is meant to represent man's sinful attachment to worldly things. 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 a letter to the critic Robert Bell—whose friendship later became so great that he was buried near Thackeray at Kensal Green Cemetery—Thackeray rebutted his complaint that the novel could have used "more light and air" to make it "more agreeable and healthy" with Evangelist's words as the pilgrims entered Bunyan's Vanity Fair: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?"
  From its appearance in Bunyan, "Vanity Fair" or a "vanity-fair" was also in general use for "the world" in a range of connotations from the blandly descriptive to the wearily dismissive to the condemning. By the 18th century, it was generally taken as a playground and, in the first half of the 19th century, more specifically the playground of the idle and undeserving rich. All of these senses appear in Thackeray's work. The name "Vanity Fair" has also been used for at least 5 periodicals.
caption: A 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
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