Close Readings: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 579 Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

Thackeray's comic masterpiece, 'Vanity Fair', is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex story of fractured families, bad marriages and the tyranny of debt. In this episode, taken from our Close Readings podcast series 'Novel Approaches', Colin Burrow and Rosemary Hill join Tom to discuss Thackeray’s use of clothes, curry and the rapidly changing topography of London to construct a turbulent society full of peril and opportunity for his heroine, Becky Sharp, and consider why the Battle of Waterloo was such a recurrent preoccupation in literature of the period. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Sponsored Links: 'Wahnfried' at Longborough Festival Opera: https://lfo.org.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of the LRB podcast is supported by Longborough Festival Opera.
0:05.7	Van Fried, the birth of the Wagner cult, is a new opera by Avna Dorman, which has its UK premiere at Longborough Festival Opera on the 27th of May and runs until the 14th of June.
0:18.2	Van Fried tells the story of the Wagner family following the composer's death,
0:23.0	their brutal infighting and disturbing political affiliations. Longborough Festival Opera is a summer
0:29.3	season of world-class opera in the Cotswolds. The 2025 season runs from the 27th of May to
0:35.8	the 2nd of August and features Debussy's Pelleas
0:39.2	a Melisande, Rossini's Barbieri di Gilles de Janeiro as well as Dormans Vanfitte.
0:46.8	There are direct trains from London to Morton-in-March and a shuttle bus from the railway station
0:51.6	to the Opera House. Book tickets now at lFO.org.uk. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. This week, I'm
1:18.8	talking to Rosemary Hill and Colin Burrow about Zachary's novel, Vanity Fair. It's a half-hour
1:25.1	sample of the latest episode from one of our new Close Reading series,
1:28.9	Novel Approaches. Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription from the LRB exploring
1:34.5	different periods of literature through a selection of key works. And in novel approaches,
1:39.9	new for 2025, Claire Bucknell and I and guests are discussing a selection of 19th century British
1:46.3	novels. Reviewing Zadie Smith's last novel, The Fraud in the LRB, Colin, you made brief reference
1:54.2	to a cameo appearance by an oafish Thackeray. So begini, perhaps you could expand on that portrait a little and
2:01.9	fill us in a bit on Thackeray's life and career and where Vanity Fair fits into that.
2:07.1	Okay, I could do that. I think it's an unfair view of Thackeray to seem as straightforwardly O'Fish,
2:12.2	but he was very large. He was six foot three and his physical presence, I think, was, you know,
2:16.9	as we say, a presence.
2:20.4	The key things I suppose to know about Thackeray from the point of view of understanding what's going on in Vanity Fair.
2:26.9	Well, the first thing is that Vanity Fair is a novel, effectively a historical novel that's looking back from the mid-Victorian period,
	...

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