The first thing that impressed me about this book was the voice. The introduction to the edition I read stated that it is "a narrative style that speaks in a manner utterly unlike the usual Victorian novel." It's true. The snarky all-knowing voice doesn't sound one bit to me like Charles Dickens, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins or Elizabeth Gaskell. It does remind me of Jane Austen though. A meaner, bitterer and much more cynical and jaundiced Jane Austen, and a more intrusive narrator--but every bit as witty, quotable, insightful, ironic. Vanity Fair is set around the time of Austen's novels too, beginning around 1813 and concluding in the 1830s before the reign of Victoria. Here's a bit toward the beginning of Vanity Fair describing one of the principle characters, Amelia Sedley:
As she is not a heroine, there is no need to describe her person; indeed I am afraid that her nose was rather short than otherwise, and her cheeks a great deal too round and red for a heroine; but her face blushed with rosy health, and her lips with the freshest of smiles, and she had a pair of eyes which sparkled with the brightest and honestest good-humour, except indeed when they filled with tears, and that was a great deal too often; for the silly thing would cry over a dead canary-bird; or over a mouse, that the cat haply had seized upon; or over the end of a novel, were it ever so stupid; and as for saying an unkind word to her, were any persons hard-hearted enough to do so—why, so much the worse for them.
Compare that to an excerpt from the opening of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.... A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features--so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy's plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush.
The difference is that while you feel Austen tells her tales with a smile and a good-natured laugh, Thackeray seemingly has a rather sardonic smirk on his face. I think it's telling the subtitle of Vanity Fair is "a novel without a hero." And heroines? Well, even Thackeray admits within his narrative that one could call Amelia Sedley "insipid." Much more interesting is her friend Becky Sharp, who together with Amelia, carries the story. If you want an Austen parallel to her, the nearest would be Lucy Steele of Sense and Sensibility, only Becky is much more cunning, cutting and clever. She's an orphan, the impoverished social-climbing daughter of an artist and a ballet dancer. I've heard her called the literary ancestor of Scarlett O'Hara of Gone With the Wind, and I can see the resemblance. Like Scarlett, Becky is flirtatious, conniving and completely lacks all maternal instinct; she even uses the word "fiddlededee!" Except Becky is a much darker, harder figure. While Scarlett is a successful, if ruthless, businesswoman who provides for her family's survival, Becky is a parasite who is the financial ruin of many. While Scarlett believes herself in love with Ashley, comes to care for Rhett, Becky cares only about Becky. Her redeeming characteristic though is her wit. She's lively and her scheming ways are fun to read about. She's a lot of the reason I kept reading for hundreds of pages, even though I don't usually care for such a jaded world view or books with such an unlikable protagonist. Austen allows witty and clever characters such as Henry Tilney and Elizabeth Bennet to also be good. In Thackeray's world, you seem to have a choice between clever and sociopathic like Becky or good and quite dim and dull like Amelia and William Dobbin.
But then it's all one piece with the title, which is alluded to throughout the novel. "Vanity Fair" is a place within John Bunyan's Christian allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress, where "are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not. And, moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be seen juggling cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind. Here are to be seen, too, and that for nothing, thefts, murders, adulteries, false swearers, and that of a blood-red colour." That's about as good a description of the human pageant Thackeray displays before us as any. It's not a pretty display, and don't expect a warm and toasty romantic happily ever after a la Austen. And it is long. But it's not just entertaining but as vivid and and memorable as any novel I've ever read.
