Characters in Vanity Fair [Update 2]

The two women at the centre of Vanity Fair are Rebecca (Becky) Sharp and Amelia (Emmy) Sedley, who are later Mrs Rawdon Crawley and Mrs George Osborne respectively. 

The novel mostly revolves around 3 families—the Sedleys, the Crawleys, and the Osbornes—and also William Dobbin, who is friends with George Osborne and in love with Amelia.

If I have to name the most interesting characters in Vanity Fair, I would say Becky Sharp, George Osborne, Mr Osborne (his father), Joseph Sedley (Amelia’s brother), and Miss Matilda Crawley (Pitt and Rawdon’s spinster aunt).  

Becky Sharp is an obvious choice: Vanity Fair wouldn’t be Vanity Fair without her. Right from the beginning, Thackeray sets up her and Amelia to be foil for each other, but I doubt any reader would pick the soft and gentle Amelia to be a favourite, as she is insipid. On the surface, Amelia may be grouped together with good, virtuous female characters whom readers like to hate, such as Fanny Price from Mansfield Park and Esther Summerson from Bleak House, but she’s nothing like them: she doesn’t have the sharp eye, introspection, and moral strength of Fanny Price, and doesn’t have the observation and sense of humour of Esther Summerson. Amelia isn’t just insipid—she is passive, vacuous, oblivious, and self-absorbed. She notices nothing. But I think Amelia becomes less boring as a character when Thackeray shows that the gentle, good-natured woman everyone loves isn’t so good after all, and she is shallow. 

Becky is a social climber, a liar, a hypocrite, a schemer, a manipulator, a chameleon, a deceitful friend, an unfaithful wife, a distant and cold mother, and yet we can’t help being enthralled by her. She is one of the greatest creations in literature. 

For example, look at the scene when George Osborne visits the Crawleys and sees Becky again after some time. At this point, Becky Sharp is a governess at the Crawleys. 

“When the young men went upstairs, and after Osborne's introduction to Miss Crawley, he walked up to Rebecca with a patronising, easy swagger. He was going to be kind to her and protect her. He would even shake hands with her, as a friend of Amelia's; and saying, "Ah, Miss Sharp! how-dy-doo?" held out his left hand towards her, expecting that she would be quite confounded at the honour.

Miss Sharp put out her right forefinger, and gave him a little nod, so cool and killing, that Rawdon Crawley, watching the operations from the other room, could hardly restrain his laughter as he saw the Lieutenant's entire discomfiture; the start he gave, the pause, and the perfect clumsiness with which he at length condescended to take the finger which was offered for his embrace.” (Ch.14) 

Last time they met, Becky was trying to bait the rich Joseph Sedley, and George Osborne was advising him against it because of her low background. Now he alludes to her failed attempt, in front of others, but she’s utterly cool. 

“Thus was George utterly routed. Not that Rebecca was in the right; but she had managed most successfully to put him in the wrong. And he now shamefully fled, feeling, if he stayed another minute, that he would have been made to look foolish in the presence of Amelia.” (ibid.) 

Isn’t she a fabulous character? 

Now look at this: 

“My Lady Bareacres cut Mrs. Crawley on the stairs when they met by chance; and in all places where the latter's name was mentioned, spoke perseveringly ill of her neighbour. The Countess was shocked at the familiarity of General Tufto with the aide-de-camp's wife. The Lady Blanche avoided her as if she had been an infectious disease.” (Ch.32) 

From the first appearance in the novel, they’re described as snobbish: Amelia writes to her mother “how the Countess of Bareacres would not answer when spoken to; how Lady Blanche stared at her with her eye-glass” (Ch.28). But Becky isn’t Amelia, and things change when the war spreads and people want to get out of Brussels.  

“Rebecca had her revenge now upon these insolent enemies. It became known in the hotel that Captain Crawley's horses had been left behind, and when the panic began, Lady Bareacres condescended to send her maid to the Captain's wife with her Ladyship's compliments, and a desire to know the price of Mrs. Crawley's horses. Mrs. Crawley returned a note with her compliments, and an intimation that it was not her custom to transact bargains with ladies' maids.

[…] What will not necessity do? The Countess herself actually came to wait upon Mrs. Crawley on the failure of her second envoy. She entreated her to name her own price; she even offered to invite Becky to Bareacres House, if the latter would but give her the means of returning to that residence.” (Ch.32) 

She laughs in the Countess’s face. It’s hard not to love Becky in those moments. It’s delicious. 

In some ways, Becky Sharp is a cousin to Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park and Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, but she beats them both. Compared to Mary Crawford, she comes from a poorer family and has to try harder, and has grander schemes. Becky is more similar to Undine, who is also a social climber, but the central difference is that Edith Wharton doesn’t allow Undine to be charming and bewitching to the reader, as Thackeray does with Becky Sharp or Jane Austen does with Mary Crawford. Edith Wharton’s contempt for her own character comes through. 

Miss Matilda Crawley, the spinster aunt, is also a memorable character. 

“She was a bel esprit, and a dreadful Radical for those days. She had been in France (where St. Just, they say, inspired her with an unfortunate passion), and loved, ever after, French novels, French cookery, and French wines. She read Voltaire, and had Rousseau by heart; talked very lightly about divorce, and most energetically of the rights of women.” (Ch.10) 

She’s painted with a few large strokes, and she is vivid. 

“Besides being such a fine religionist, Miss Crawley was, as we have said, an Ultra-liberal in opinions, and always took occasion to express these in the most candid manner.

"What is birth, my dear!" she would say to Rebecca—"Look at my brother Pitt; look at the Huddlestons, who have been here since Henry II; look at poor Bute at the parsonage—is any one of them equal to you in intelligence or breeding? Equal to you—they are not even equal to poor dear Briggs, my companion, or Bowls, my butler. You, my love, are a little paragon—positively a little jewel—You have more brains than half the shire—if merit had its reward you ought to be a Duchess—no, there ought to be no duchesses at all—but you ought to have no superior, and I consider you, my love, as my equal in every respect; and—will you put some coals on the fire, my dear; and will you pick this dress of mine, and alter it, you who can do it so well?" So this old philanthropist used to make her equal run of her errands, execute her millinery, and read her to sleep with French novels, every night.” (Ch.11) 

And we can see how liberal she is, when the “little jewel” Becky secretly marries her favourite nephew Rawdon. 

Among the male characters, the greatest is George Osborne. William Dobbin, in comparison, is insipid—Thackery’s strength clearly isn’t in noble or good-natured characters. To use today’s slang, Dobbin is a bit of a simp. Another major character in the novel, Rawdon Crawley, doesn’t have much of a personality: he starts off as a bad boy, but submits to his devious wife and gradually loses his identity: “that was now his avocation in life. He was Colonel Crawley no more. He was Mrs. Crawley's husband.” (Ch.37) 

George Osborne is more interesting because he’s more complex and multifaceted: he’s an asshole, but has the nobility to recognise and acknowledge Dobbin; he’s a snob, but loves and chooses to marry Amelia; he’s selfish, thoughtless, and unprincipled, but does have a conscience, at least sometimes; he’s captivated by Becky and even tempted to betray his wife (the ball scene in Vanity Fair makes me think of Anna Karenina), but does love Amelia and afterwards realises what he has almost done; he’s careless with money, but in the army, is a brave and respectable soldier… Thackeray depicts George Osborne so that we think Amelia is foolish for idealising him and loving him for so long, not noticing William Dobbin’s affection, but at the same time, we can also see why she loves him, why other characters get along with him, and why the noble Dobbin is best friends with someone so self-centred and unprincipled. 

I think the way Thackeray depicts the difference and quarrel between George Osborne and his father is especially excellent: we can see why George, who is normally distracted by all sorts of diversions and thoughtless or even cold to Amelia, would openly defy his own father and risk disinheritance, by marrying the poor Amelia. 

I would even go as far as saying that the Osbornes are one of the most interesting depicts of father-son relationships in literature. 

“Turning one over after another, and musing over these memorials, the unhappy man passed many hours. His dearest vanities, ambitious hopes, had all been here. What pride he had in his boy! He was the handsomest child ever seen. […] And this, this was the end of all!—to marry a bankrupt and fly in the face of duty and fortune! What humiliation and fury: what pangs of sickening rage, balked ambition and love; what wounds of outraged vanity, tenderness even, had this old worldling now to suffer under!” (Ch.24)  

That is a great passage. Before this chapter, Thackeray lets the reader see it from George’s point of view, but now he writes about the father’s perspective. Thackeray has sympathy for everybody. 

After George’s death: 

“He remembered them once before so in a fever, when every one thought the lad was dying, and he lay on his bed speechless, and gazing with a dreadful gloom. Good God! how the father clung to the doctor then, and with what a sickening anxiety he followed him: what a weight of grief was off his mind when, after the crisis of the fever, the lad recovered, and looked at his father once more with eyes that recognised him. But now there was no help or cure, or chance of reconcilement: above all, there were no humble words to soothe vanity outraged and furious, or bring to its natural flow the poisoned, angry blood. And it is hard to say which pang it was that tore the proud father's heart most keenly—that his son should have gone out of the reach of his forgiveness, or that the apology which his own pride expected should have escaped him.” (Ch.35) 

A few deaths in Vanity Fair are not much more than plot devices—Nabokov’s remark that in Jane Austen’s novels, no character dies in the author’s arms could be true for the deaths of Lady Crawley (Sir Pitt’s wife), Miss Matilda Crawley, and Sir Pitt in Vanity Fair—but the death of George Osborne has a great impact on many characters, and it is poignant. The old man switches his seat at church so he can face the inscription about George on the wall. 

And yet, the interesting thing is that even then, old Osborne doesn’t really forgive his son, and turns his anger and regret into hatred for Amelia, rather than take care of his dead son’s widow and child. That is extreme, but it is believable. 

Compared to George Osborne, Joseph Sedley is not so multifaceted. Readers who want depth may not see much in Joseph, but the character is very vivid: he is obese but vain about his clothing, self-important but deep down insecure and gullible, foolish, cowardly, lazy, pompous… And most of all, the characterisation is very funny. 

“"The children must have someone with them," cried Mrs. Sedley.

"Let Joe go," said-his father, laughing. "He's big enough." At which speech even Mr. Sambo at the sideboard burst out laughing, and poor fat Joe felt inclined to become a parricide almost.

"Undo his stays!" continued the pitiless old gentleman. "Fling some water in his face, Miss Sharp, or carry him upstairs: the dear creature's fainting. Poor victim! carry him up; he's as light as a feather!"

"If I stand this, sir, I'm d———!" roared Joseph.” (Ch.4) 

It’s hard to explain why many characters in the novel are types, as it is a satire, and Joseph is also a type, but he’s much more vividly drawn than others. 

At some point, I should perhaps write about the “insignificant” characters in Vanity Fair. I do think it’s one of the greatest novels of the 19th century.

Addendum (21/4/2022): It is to be expected that in a novel spanning so many years, the characters would change and our view of them wouldn’t stay the same. 

A lot has happened since I wrote the blog post (which is an argument for writing blog posts after reading the book, though I doubt I’ll change). 

Old Mr Osborne is even more finely portrayed than I thought—I like that he doesn’t change upon George’s death, which would have appeared rather contrived and amateurish, but persists in his anger, resentment, and hatred, and becomes a tyrant to his spinster daughter Jane, but he gradually has a change of heart after he sees the boy. It is more believable, more subtle this way.

I was unfair to both Amelia and Joseph Sedley. Joseph, for all his foibles, is good to his own family—compare him to, say, Pitt Crawley (Rawdon’s brother). And Amelia is in some ways self-absorbed, but she does take care of her parents, and does have lots of patience for them. Her main fault is that she notices nothing, and lives with delusion for so long. And she is insipid, but if she’s meant to be, isn’t that a success for Thackeray?

The same can be said about Rawdon Crawley: he is dull and doesn’t have much of a personality, but isn’t that also the point?  

“Rawdon Crawley was scared at these triumphs. They seemed to separate his wife farther than ever from him somehow. He thought with a feeling very like pain how immeasurably she was his superior.” (Ch.51) 

Rawdon isn’t meant to be Ralph Marvell: in The Custom of the Country, Undine is a little philistine who is attractive and full of life, and Ralph is more intelligent, more refined than her, but that isn’t the case for Rawdon and Becky. Rawdon is described as dull, without an identity beyond “Mrs Crawley’s husband”, and he follows Becky around like a shadow, not noticing what she’s been doing and how she’s been ruining their reputation. Chapter 53 is excellent, and heartbreaking. 

I’m currently on chapter 62. 

Addendum (22/4/2022): Finished, after 17 days or so. I read relatively quickly, perhaps because I have been ill with Covid and unable to do anything else. Great, masterful novel, one of the best novels of 19th century British literature, why did I not read it till now?