"Becky Sharp, here's a book for you that my sister—that is, I—Johnson's Dixonary, you know; you mustn't leave us without that. Good-by. Drive on, coachman. God bless you!"
And the kind creature retreated into the garden, overcome with emotion.
But, lo! and just as the coach drove off, Miss Sharp put her pale face out of the window and actually flung the book back into the garden.
This almost caused Jemima to faint with terror. "Well, I never"—said she—"what an audacious"—Emotion prevented her from completing either sentence. The carriage rolled away; the great gates were closed.
From ‘Vanity Fair’
So ends the first chapter of Vanity Fair. Becky Sharp has been given a leaving gift as she departs from her school to enter the big wide world. It’s a gift that she should treasure – a dictionary; it should help her with education…. But before she has even left the school grounds, in full view of the donor, she casually tosses the book out through the carriage window. Thus Becky Sharp begins, and so she continues, determined to make her own way, in her own way, ruthlessly, and without care for the approval or condemnation of other people.
As the story continues, Thackeray observed that
“Her taste for disrespectability grew more and more remarkable.”
She marries, has a child, and continues to flirt with handsome soldiers and wealthy landowners.
In the closing chapters, she is plying her trade in the gambling halls of Weimar in Germany, hiding her true identity with a fake foreign accent and a mask. There she rekindles the amorous interest of Jos, who later dies, mysteriously poisoned, but only after he has left half of his money to Becky.
It is difficult to like any of the characters in the story, but it is impossible not to admire Thackeray’s storytelling skills, his razor wit and his acerbic condemnation of hypocrisy. And, one suspects, his enjoyment of the scurrilous behaviour of his central character.
