Essay: Reader, Writer, and Character Entanglement in Vanity Fair

Chapter Six of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair opens with a direct address to the serial novel's readers. "I know that the tune I am piping is a very mild one", the narrator apologizes, "and must beg the good-natured reader to remember that we are only discoursing at present about a stockbroker's family in Russell Square" (60). In an era in which the extent of the readership determined a serial novel's continued existence, the reader-writer relationship was of paramount importance. Thackeray appeases his readers, defends his artistic choices, and refutes their implied concerns about his craft. By examining the dialogue into which Thackeray enters with his readers in the context of the novel, we can gain insight into the role of the reader in the Victorian serial, and the manner in which Thackeray harnesses the reader-writer relationship to engage the readers and enhance the effectiveness of his social critique. 

The dependence of the serial writer upon his fan base is evident in the tone of the narrator as he addresses the reader. It is quite structurally sensible for the first five chapters of a sixty-seven chapter work to contain only expository details and very little action, and yet Thackeray's narrator feels that he "must beg" the reader for patience regarding the "mild" nature of the related narrative. That readers might lose interest in a plot devoid of action during the month's interval that separates one installment from the next is a real problem of which Thackeray, as a serial writer, would be aware. In encouraging the readers' patience, a Victorian serial author is implicitly attempting to maintain his paying readership. "My readers must be content with a chapter about Vauxhall, which is so short that it scarcely deserves to be called a chapter at all… And yet it is a chapter, and a very important one too" (61).

A struggle emerges between the author's faithfulness to his craft and the need to maintain his readership. This struggle is manifested in the wording of the narrative, as Thackeray contradicts himself in two consecutive sentences. In one breath, Thackeray's narrator admits that wooing is a mundane, commonplace occurrence, but in the next, he refers to Joseph Sedley's courtship of Rebecca as a thrilling event. "I … beg the good-natured reader to remember that we are only discoursing at present about a stockbroker's family in Russell Square, who are … making love as people do in common life" (60). The next sentence reads: "Jos Sedley is in love with Rebecca. Will he marry her? That is the great subject now in hand" (my emphases). The narrator (and, possibly, Thackeray) cannot seem to decide whether to declare matrimony a dull or exciting topic and the result is narrative confusion.

Similarly, Thackeray refutes readers' or critics' potential complaints regarding the choice of middle-class characters and the focus on their social lives, as opposed to characters of high or low birth and more thrilling plot choices. "We might have treated this subject in the genteel, or in the romantic, or in a facetious manner." Alternately, "instead of the supremely genteel, suppose we had resorted to the entirely low and described what was going on in Mr. Sedley's kitchen" (60). Thackeray dismisses a focus on the genteel as "romantic" – sentimentalist – and a focus on the low as something to be "resorted to". These allusions to the genteel and the low serve to locate Thackeray as an author within the scope of literary history. He dissociates himself from the eighteenth-century novel with its focus on the low, such as Fielding's Tom Jones, which were "supposed to represent scenes of ‘life’" (61). Similarly, Thackeray refuses association with earlier heroic romances and their focus on the high life, a distaste that is later emphasized by his mocking representation of pseudo-noble characters such as Baronet Crawley. Thackeray introduces these options and dismisses them at once, implicating them as inferior to his own choices by the fact of their omission from the de facto narrative. 

However, Thackeray's attempt to distinguish himself from his literary predecessors is tempered by the awareness of his audience. His consistent use of the pronoun "we" is an indication of the care the author took to maintain reverence to his readers and make them implicit partners in his artistic choices. "We might have treated"; "Suppose we had shown". The pronoun is used in proximity to a direct address to the readers, and so its usage holds the possible meaning of inclusion of the readers in the creative process. Of course, the "we" Thackeray employs is a hoax, merely a royal "we", since only he has the final say in the writing decisions. The reality of Victorian serial writing is that the writer is dependent on his readers for his livelihood; Thackeray manages to have it both ways, making his readers feel included in the artistic process while asserting his ultimate superiority as a story-teller.

Thackeray uses this complex web of writer-reader power relations not only to charm and placate his readers, but also to increase their sympathy toward the characters and events of the fictional world he creates. "Are not there little chapters in everybody's life," he asks, "that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?" The author carefully conflates life with art, referring to "chapters" of life, and referring to life as a "history". By hinting at a union between the novel's fictional world and the readers' own, Thackeray increases the attentiveness of his readers and their attachment to the narrative and its characters.

The readers, then, become intricately entwined in the fictional life of the characters of Vanity Fair; they are made to feel important both as partners in the writing process and as characters not unlike those in the novel, ensuring their emotional and financial attachment to the Vanity Fair project. This kinship and involvement that Thackeray fosters in the readers become doubly effective as the characters' morality deteriorates. As the novel's characters founder in sin after sin, the novel's readers must take a hard look inward at themselves and examine the nature of their attachment to representatives of such moral corruption.

Literary entanglement.
Image by Erik Eastman