Thackeray’s most famous novel is a meandering tale which traverses the ballrooms of the aristocracy of London, the dinner clubs of the merchants in the City, the sahibs of India, and the battlefields of Belgium. His narrator, on occasion, breaks the fourth wall. “If, a few pages back, the present writer claimed the privilege of peeping into Miss Amelia Sedley’s bedroom, and understanding with the omniscience of the novelist all the gentle pains and passions which were tossing upon that innocent pillow, why should he not declare himself to be Rebecca’s confidante too, master of her secrets, and seal-keeper of that young woman’s conscience?”
In many ways, this is a novel about gender relations, place, and norms in Victorian society, especially within the dynamics of marriage. “The best women (I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites. We don’t know how much they hide from us: how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidential: how often those frank smiles, which they wear so easily, are traps to cajole or elude or disarm—I don’t mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models, and paragons of female virtue. Who has not seen a woman hide the dulness of a stupid husband, or coax the fury of a savage one? We accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it; we call this pretty treachery truth.”
The novel’s plot centers around Captain Rawdon Crawley, disowned by his rich and eccentric aunt when he marries Rebecca Sharp, his brother’s governess, and, therefore, beneath the family station. Much of the novel centers on the couple’s aims to get back into the benefactress’ good graces. “In all his life he had never been so happy, as, during the past few months, his wife had made him. All former delights of turf, mess, hunting-field, and gambling-table; all previous loves and courtships of milliners, opera-dancers, and the like easy triumphs of the clumsy military Adonis, were quite insipid when compared with the lawful matrimonial pleasures which of late he had enjoyed.”
Some might claim, being disowned was not an easy life; whereas others might claim it was. “The novelist, it has been said before, knows everything, and as I am in a situation to be able to tell the public how Crawley and his wife lived without any income, may I entreat the public newspapers which are in the habit of extracting portions of the various periodical works now published, not to reprint the following exact narrative and calculations—of which I ought, as the discoverer (and at some expense, too), to have the benefit? My son, I would say, were I blessed with a child—you may by deep inquiry and constant intercourse with him, learn how a man lives comfortably on nothing a year. But it is best not to be intimate with gentlemen of this profession, and to take the calculations at second-hand, as you do logarithms, for to work them yourself, depend upon it, will cost you something considerable.” At least, one might be so generous as to say, Captain Crawley was a man of his age and station. “Rawdon Crawley, though the only book which he studied was the Racing Calendar, and though his chief recollections of polite learning were connected with the floggings which he received at Eton in his early youth, had that decent and honest reverence for classical learning which all English gentlemen feel.”
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