The curtain will be up presently, and he will be turning over head and heels, and crying, How are you?Ī man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an exhibition of this sort, will not be oppressed, I take it, by his own or other people's hilarity. Look at the faces of the actors and buffoons when they come off from their business and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits down to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas.

Yes, this is VANITY FAIR not a moral place certainly nor a merry one, though very noisy. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing and fiddling there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen on the look-out, quacks (OTHER quacks, plague take them!) bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind. In creating a cognitive ethics, Thackeray teaches his readers to compare, erase, and rethink the horrors and pleasures of Vanity Fair.William Makepeace Thackeray Before the CurtainĪs the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place.

This relationship, however, is equally important across illustrations. Thackeray’s four distinct kinds of illustrations act reciprocally with the verbal text and with each other to engage the attentive reader. He works to block stereotyping or judgments based on a moral absolutism.

This chapter argues that through image and text Thackeray structures the process of reading he values by emphasising different cognitive processes, those registering visual and verbal information, collecting details, remembering, and rethinking. Thackeray’s ironising of both narrator and characters extends to his readers when he demands that they do more than sit back, after dinner, to underline a few words and feel self-satisfied. This chapter interprets Vanity Fair, serialised in 1847-1848 with illustrations by the author, in terms of cognitive processes.

Vanity fair by william