Please note the following essay contains some spoilers for Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. (Ed.)

This is the year I intend to read some of those classics of English Literature, which I have never read before.  Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray features large on this list.

Halfway through the novel (p. 411 of my Penguin Classic edition, edited by J. I. M. Stewart) and I find myself asking “Who will get Miss Crawley’s fortune?”  It seems like a good question when speculating about how will the novel end.  Perhaps, thankfully, I read on four pages further before embarking on an entire blog devoted to this query, because by p. 415, the question of Miss Crawley’s fortune had been entirely resolved with Thackeray adding with a harsh finality “Peace to thee, kind and selfish, vain and generous old heathen! – We shall see thee no more.”  So much for Miss Crawley.  It was not quite the enduring topic of the rest of the novel that I had imagined.

Perhaps safer just to speculate who will ultimately emerge as either a winner or a loser of Vanity Fair amongst the principal characters who have been introduced to me by the halfway point.

For what it is worth, here are my predictions:

Rebecca Sharp – Winner
Amelia Sedley – Winner
George Osborne – Loser
William Dobbin – Winner
Rawdon Crawley – Loser
Pitt Crawley – Loser
Joseph Sedley – Winner

My speculation depends as much upon my reading of Thackeray’s psychology as it does a close appreciation of the text.  George Osborne is a safe bet as a Loser, because he is already dead by the novel’s halfway point.  But what of the others?

Surely Becky Sharp’s endless Machiavellian scheming will ultimately find her some reward?  I credit Thackeray with a sufficiently mischievous sense of humour that he won’t see that resourceful adventuress’s life end in misery.  But, similarly, I believe he possesses a sufficiently sentimental heart that he will allow eternally-worthy Amelia Sedley and William Dobbin to discover happiness, and happiness together.  As for the Crawley brothers––Pitt and Rawdon––surely neither Pitt’s godly devotion nor Rawdon’s reckless gambling will be rewarded?  Both must meet an untimely comeuppance.  And Joseph Sedley?  I believe that he is the ultimate Vanity Fair manoeuvrer; wealth, cowardice, a thick skin and, above all else, vanity, seeing him through most of Life, and the novel’s, hazards.

Will I be proved right or wrong?  I have 382 pages still to read to find out.

© Fergus Longfellow

Fergus Longfellow succumbs to a little vanity himself.