SOURCE: Coates, Christopher. “Thackeray's Editors and the Dual Text of Vanity Fair.” Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 9, no. 1 (1993): 39-50.

[In the following essay, Coates examines how the editorial decisions regarding the illustration of Vanity Fair affected the reader's interpretation of the novel.]

One clause of the agreement between William Makepeace Thackeray and his publishers, William Bradbury and Frederick Mullett Evans, for the serial production of Vanity Fair stipulates that:

The said William Makepeace Thackerary undertakes to furnish by the 15th of every month sufficient matter for at least Two printed Sheets with two Etchings on Steel, and as many drawings on Wood as may be thought necessary—.¹

The last five words of that clause, arranged as they are in contractual passive voice, are vague indeed. On the one hand, for Bradbury and Evans, any drawings above and beyond the requisite two engravings did not concern them and thus did not merit definition in the contract. On the other hand, the phrase is a statement of confidence and trust, a surrendering of authority, to a man they, as publishers of Punch, knew both socially and professionally. For Bradbury and Evans, their ‘surrendering’ may have amounted to nothing more than a ‘gentleman's agreement’—and a safe one at that, since Thackeray had been meeting Punch deadlines for five years. For Thackeray, however, having just completed his third and most popular series of stories and pictures for Punch, ‘The Snobs of England,’ this contract and this phrase represented a chance to import from Punch his peculiar brand of discourse, this strange combination of words and pictures, to what he perceived to be the more profitable territory of the novel.

Relatively little had been made of Vanity Fair's dual text and even less of Thackeray's years with Punch.² Ignoring these aspects, however, may result in a reading that is narrow and ahistorical. Because his tenure with Punch encompasses his writing of the novel, Thackeray's Vanity Fair needs to be situated historically within the politics, format and style of 1840s Punch.³ These contexts make it nearly impossible to ‘unify’—as 140 years of editors have tried to do—Vanity Fair's dual text.

Furthermore, qualities such as unity and coherence stand in marked contrast to the textual inclinations of both Punch and Thackeray. Indeed, the pages of the early Punch and the serial edition of Vanity Fair are conspicuously un-unified. In a typical 1840s page of Punch, the pictorial text is at least as prominent as the written one. When they are not interrupting the written text, as in Thackeray's ‘The Snobs of England’ series, Punch's illustrations frequently occupy full pages and, in some cases, two consecutive pages. What ‘fills the spaces’ between these striking illustrations is a written text that is spatially and topically fragmented: snatches of gossip, coded parodies, or cleverly aphoristic jabs at the privileged class: ‘Why is Lord George Bentinck like the Wellington Statue on the Burton arch? Because he wants taking down a peg.’⁴ The amalgam of all these textual and pictorial fragments is the early Punch—a decidedly unconventional narrative that purports to represent 1840s England. This kind of ‘anti-narrative’, so crucial in Thackeray's conception of a modern Vanity Fair, has also apparently influenced virtually all subsequent editors of Vanity Fair, most of whom, as we shall see, have attempted to edit, or simply excise, the elements that construct this anti-narrative.

For the sake of argument, let us begin by thinking of Thackeray not as writer but as an illustrator, a caricaturist, whose dresser drawers were ‘crammed with scraps of paper … covered with pen and ink caricatures’⁵—someone said to have ‘derived more enjoyment … from his pencil than from his pen,’ so much so that he thought ‘of the pencil as a resource before the pen.’⁶ Indeed, his abilities as a caricaturist were so acute that a

… member of ‘the Garrick’, who was specially unpopular with the majority of the members, was literally drawn out of the Club by Thackeray. His figure, being very peculiar was sketched in pen and ink by his implacable persecutor.⁷

And let us further propose a Thackeray who comes to writing only after his inability to succeed as a professional artist, a man who once said that, had Charles Dickens accepted his proposal to illustrate The Pickwick Papers, he might have remained an illustrator his entire life.⁸

I propose this notion of Thackeray as illustrator not to emphasize one of Vanity Fair's texts over the other, but to propose that Thackerary was not merely a casual illustrator, but one who sought to establish, and in some measure succeeded in establishing, himself as a professional artist. On the basis of ‘technique’, however, his drawings were criticized, even considered an embarrassment.⁹ This ‘embarrassment’ may account, in part, for their rapid disappearance from most editions of Vanity Fair after the first. Since the argument for restoring all the original illustrations has already been made, there is no need to rehearse it here.¹⁰ But a brief history of the illustrations is necessary to establish just how prominent Thackeray's pictorial text was as it appeared in 1846-48 and how the absence of the full complement of Thackeray's original illustrations affects our reading of Vanity Fair.

The first edition of Vanity Fair, released in 1848 by Bradbury and Evans immediately after the final serial number and before Thackeray's final revisions, contains the full complement of illustrations and steel and wood engravings. There are 191 illustrations in all: full-page engravings, initials beginning the chapters, and vignettes embedded in the written text. I say ‘embedded’ because, in this edition, illustrations are often placed between two paragraphs, between two sentences, even between two words of the same sentence. On the average, every third page has an illustration of some kind. As a result, in the serial numbers and in the first edition, the pictorial text intrudes much more upon the written text than in most subsequent editions. Indeed, to read the written text in these early editions is to consign oneself to a reading ‘interrupted’ by illustrations, so much so that one might be hard-pressed to decide which is the dominant text.

Despite the prominence of this pictorial text, Thackeray's illustrations begin to disappear almost immediately from subsequent editions.¹¹ Many of these editions, produced during the vogue of library and book club collected works editions at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, are the result of some curious and arbitrary editorial decisions: some editors cut not only the initial letters or incidental illustrations, but even some of the full-page engravings.¹² Many editions of Vanity Fair are illustrated by someone other than Thackeray.¹³ Indeed, by the late 1950s, Thackeray's pictorial text had become so insignificant that the Tillotsons, in their preparation of the ‘standard’ edition, decided that all the readers needed to see of Vanity Fair's pictorial text were all the engravings ‘(from the second issue of the first edition) and a representative few of the incidental illustrations.’¹⁴ What we have in the standard edition, then, the edition of Vanity Fair that most people read, is an incomplete text.¹⁵

Obviously, there is more at stake in this selective editorship than missing out on a few pictures. Among the more serious of the problems with this ‘incomplete’ text is that the editorial gesture of removing what are perceived to be needless pictorial interruptions is, however unintentionally, also an attempt to divorce Vanity Fair from the context within which it was produced. Excising the illustrations is an attempt to produce a written text that is supposedly more ‘streamlined’ and less interruptive. In doing so, these editors separate Vanity Fair from the format and politics of 1840s Punch where we find the roots of Thackeray's discontinuous dual text.

When Thackeray joined Punch in 1842, he called it the ‘universal railer,’ and his politics, says Gordon Ray, were at once allied with and distinct from Punch's radicalism. Instead of frontal, inflammatory attacks, he would reserve his ammunition for the ‘ridicule of the snobbish veneration with which the middle classes regarded the court and the aristocracy.’¹⁶ Indeed, when representatives from the so-called privileged class assumed that their economic position made them exempt from any kind of moral accountability, Thackeray would often respond with his own brand of trenchant, common-sense sarcasm. For example, when Lady Londonderry mentioned in the papers that what really bothered her was ‘the appearance of one's maid by one's bedside at four o'clock in the morning,’ Thackeray pointed out in Punch that the Lady's irritation was nothing compared with the maid's, who had to rise at three o'clock to accommodate her.¹⁷

Separating himself from Douglas Jerrold's more radical style of overt attacks on property and government,¹⁸ Thackeray's ‘attacks’ in Punch were much like the one mentioned above: they pointed out what seemed to be obvious indulgences, always with an awareness of the large economic gaps between the classes. Indeed, a thin but steady vein of economic as well as social egalitarianism runs through Thackeray's Punch contributions. Thackeray's brand of egalitarianism does not advocate a leveling of the class structure, however. Instead, he promotes a moral ‘fairness’ that might include breaking some class distinctions. In his poem ‘Punch's Regency,’ for instance, Punch, through Thackeray, speaks of a dream, as if recalling Ben Jonson's idealized dinner in ‘To Penshurst,’ in which economic justice prevails:

A Duchess and her governess
The same quadrille I clapt in;
I asked old Wellington to mess,
And meet a half-pay Captain.(19)

Such egalitarianism, however, was carefully mediated by Thackeray's ability to make his attacks seem ‘fair.’ For instance, the title of Thackeray's most popular series in Punch, ‘The Snobs of England,’ would, at first glance, seem to suggest a frontal assault on the sensibilities of England's upper class. Absolutely not, Thackeray tells us in his first installment:

An immense per centage of Snobs I believe is to be found in every rank of this mortal life. You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of Snobs: to do so shows that you are yourself a Snob. I myself have been taken for one.²⁰

Indeed, the subtitle to the series is ‘By one of themselves.’ With this statement and subtitle, Thackeray situates himself in a rhetorically advantageous position: by including himself among the snobs, he gives himself carte blanche to attack them. (He could, after all, always claim to be talking about himself.) Thackeray never resorts to overt attacks in ‘Snobs,’ but relies instead on gentle poking that was Punch's and Thackeray's stock-in-trade.

This diplomatic facility serves Thackeray well when he decides to march into the fruitful territory of English politics in his ‘Snobs’ column. Before his ‘attacks’ he is careful to point out that anyone in politics is a target, and he makes sure that he does not betray any allegiances, opting instead for a list of possible snobs that takes pains not to exclude anyone: ‘Whig Snobs, Tory and Radical Snobs, Conservative and Young England Snobs, Official and Parliamentary Snobs, Diplomatic Snobs, and About-the-Court Snobs. …’²¹ Thackeray dismisses, in this column, the politics of government as too obvious a topic for ridicule and instead concentrates on the absurd social politics of official ceremonies. Referring to a sketch in the previous issue of Punch that mocked an official ceremony, Thackeray claims that:

… the real pageant is scarcely less absurd—the Chancellor's wig and mace almost as old and foolish as the Jester's cap and bauble. Why is any Chancellor, any Stage-Manager, any Pewter Stick, any John called upon to dress himself in any fancy dress, or to wear any badge?²²

This is familiar territory to any reader of Vanity Fair, in which Thackeray brings the absurdity of the institution, custom, or person into sharp relief by an obsessive—or illustrative—attention to details of dress (as in Lord Steyne's garter), food (Jos at Vauxhall and elsewhere), finance (‘How to Live On Nothing A-Year’), and other mundane details of social life.

Thackeray also appropriates the pretentious ‘Stage-Manager’ from his ‘Snobs’ column as a model for his own role of Stage-Manager in Vanity Fair. In the novel, we have three pictorial representations of this Stage-Manager: on the title page, the Stage-Manager as marionette is dressed in tatters; and later the Stage-Manager appears as a caricature of Thackeray himself, holding the mask of comedy and a jester's bauble that looks strikingly like the head of Punch.²³ The third representation appears on the cover of the serial numbers, and in it the Stage-Manager stands on a barrel lecturing to other clowns. Thackeray refers to this representation in the text of Vanity Fair and, through its juxtaposition with the description of the pageant above, not only revises the notion of ‘official’ uniforms, but dismisses the separation between the ‘moralist’ and the listener, the leader and the follower:

And while the moralist, who is holding forth on the cover (an accurate portrait of your humble servant), professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation is arrayed: yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as far one knows it, whether one mounts a cap and bells or a shovel-hat. …²⁴

As in the pages of Punch, where illustrations revise the written text and vice versa, Thackeray, in this description of the common man-as-moralist, indicates that his novel's illustrations serve much the same function.

‘The Snobs of England’ series was ending just as Vanity Fair was beginning. Indeed, the ‘Snobs of England’ series (or ‘The Book of Snobs,’ as it was later titled in book form) can be read as a workbook for Vanity Fair.²⁵ It not only brought Thackeray into the practice of creating characters that represented social pretensions, but it also forced him to reckon with the problems and possibilities of a serial and pictorial text.²⁶ Indeed, this uneasy relationship between text and image can be exploited, as in the format of 1840s Punch, where reading as a disruptive, playful process was the magazine's trademark. The model of this dual text, in fact, with all its intrusive oscillations and its ability to ‘get at seriousness through the back door’, is what Thackeray helps to shape and then exploit in Vanity Fair.

Most contemporary reviews of Vanity Fair, however, do not even mention Thackeray's illustrations. Other reviews give them only passing notice. Charles Astor Bristed in the American Review, for example, praises the fact that Thackeray undertakes the drawings himself: ‘Michael Angelo [Thackeray's nom de crayon] is an artist himself, and a right clever one, and needs no Cruikshank or Leech to illustrate him.’²⁷ For other reviewers, such as Elizabeth Rigby in the Quarterly Review, the illustrations merit only one clause of a sentence: ‘We follow him through the illustrations, which are, in many instances, a delightful enhancement to the text.’²⁸ Only one reviewer, R. S. Rintoul in the Spectator, acknowledges the textuality of the illustrations:

If only of passable or average merit, they would be creditable, as arguing the possession of a double art; but they strike us as exhibiting powers akin to the literary abilities of the author, besides possessing this further quality: the spirit of the scene and the character—the idiosyncrasy of the persons—is more thoroughly entered into and presented to the reader than is common with professional artists.²⁹

Not only does Rintoul find Thackeray's illustrations ‘literary,’ a quality that he feels a detached ‘professional’ illustrator might not produce, but hints that the narrative capabilities of the pictorial text may be distinct from the written text. Functioning more textually than illustratively, the pictorial text renders the ‘spirit’ and ‘idiosyncrasy’ of the novel's characters.

Perhaps to an audience conditioned by Punch and illustrated novels, Thackeray's text/image combination was not all that extraordinary, and if Thackeray had indeed decided to let his illustrations merely represent things already in the written text, then perhaps his dual text would not have been worth all this discussion. As Rintoul and others have pointed out, however, Thackeray's pictorial text (particularly in editions that carry all the original illustrations) constructs a narrative of its own, one that—in the true spirit of Punch—augments, advances, divides and disrupts the written text.

As might be expected, Vanity Fair protagonist Becky Sharp is the character most affected by this illustrative movement, and she may best exemplify the action of Thackeray's dual text. Through illustration, of course, we learn the elements of her physical makeup—such as the devilish slant of her eyebrows—that the written text does not supply. While this detail augments—indeed helps to create—Becky's mischievous character (as in the first plate where she hurls the Johnson Dictionary), it is a detail that the narrator and characters of the novel either do not notice or do not care to mention. More crucially, we see Becky ‘in action,’ also in ways that the written text leaves out. Thackeray tells us, for example, that the young Becky would make puppets at Miss Pinkerton's for the ‘delight of Newman Street, Gerard Street, and the artists' quarter’ (p. 11). In the illustration, though, we see the particulars of this puppet show: four men leering at Becky, while she touches the knee of the man standing in front of her with the toe of her shoe. The illustration at once stops the written text and pulls us into the pictorial text, which in turn throws us back into the written text with new knowledge.

At the very least, this knowledge is manifested by a marked difference between the pictorial Becky and the textual Becky. The textual Becky is covert and cunning where the pictorial one is conspicuous and predatory. In the seemingly innocuous initials that head the chapters, for example, Becky is represented, in Chapter LXIII, as a sorceress with what look like human skulls at her feet; in Chapter LXIV, as Napoleon; and fishing from the illustrated initial in Chapter IV. Elsewhere, we see Becky looking bemused at the genuflecting Sir Pitt (p. 128), and even sleeping (p. 261). All of these representations suggest another more problematic dimension to the story, an ‘other’ narrative. The illustration of Becky sleeping, for instance, would seem to undermine the distancing that Thackeray often asks us to do with her character, especially considering the serene, almost innocent expression on Becky's face. On the other hand, the sight of Becky symbolically fishing from the initial reiterates the puppet metaphor that Thackeray uses for his own rhetorical distancing.

This other, pictorial narrative is not simply an amplification of what the written text offers. There is clearly more afoot in the pictorial text than the written one allows. As we see in those representations of Becky Sharp not by Thackeray, the absence of Thackeray's pictorial text seems to coincide with a misreading of the written one. When Becky is reinterpreted by other illustrators, for instance, they seem to miss Thackeray's point.³⁰ If Becky and her machinations are the energy that threads the novel, then why the stunningly bland re-presentations of her in other editions? Thackeray's Becky invites us to both judge and applaud her ability to ‘live well on nothing a-year’ by dividing her into two completely interdependent pictorial and written halves that each lose their power when apart. Bifurcating her character would have been unthinkable in Punch. In privileging the written text, as virtually all subsequent editors of Vanity Fair have done, this other, pictorial narrative, however vital, is effectively squelched.

The reasons for this forced division of texts may become more apparent if we examine, as we have done with Punch and Vanity Fair, the conditions under which these other editions of Vanity Fair were produced. It is no coincidence, for example, that most of the editions that feature illustrators other than Thackeray are slick library editions. Tailored to middle-class preoccupations with book collecting, these editions were made not so much to be read, but to appear impressive on the shelf.³¹ Encased in ‘gold’ embossing and faux silk covers, these editions of Thackeray not only oppose the subversive narrative politics of the illustrated serial novel, but ironically repeat the very abuses at which Thackeray's pen and pencil are so often aimed. Thus later editions of Vanity Fair came to exemplify the same pretensions described within the novel.

Likewise, the illustrations in these editions appeal to the same desires: they are smooth and non-obtrusive; they do not narrate, but ‘decorate.’ In them, it is difficult to distinguish Becky from the benign and smiling figures among whom she appears. Indeed, the only thing that distinguishes Becky from edition to edition is the hairstyle that nearly always betrays the edition's copyright date; thus, the reader does not feel too historically removed from the novel's proceedings. Unlike those of Thackeray, the absence of these illustrations from their respective editions would be no great matter.

Perhaps an example of what is ‘missing’ when the pictorial text in Thackeray's Vanity Fair is removed will help explain the importance of this other narrative. Of all the illustrations, perhaps the most significant to this other narrative is the penultimate full-page plate in the novel: ‘Becky's second appearance in the character of Clytemnestra’. In it we see Dobbin standing over the begging and ailing figure of Jos, while Becky stands behind a curtain and appears to be holding a knife. In the written text, Becky is out of the house, and Thackeray gives us no definitive details as to how Jos eventually dies.³² Not only does this plate give us information vital to the plot, but the fact that Thackeray invests this illustration with all the narrative information for this incident suggest a more authoritative role for his pictorial texts. The pictorial text, in this case, radically refigures the written one.

Other such examples abound in Vanity Fair where the pictorial text redefines and problematizes the written ones, many of which were excised in editions subsequent to the first one. In at least one documented case, Thackeray's illustration represents a situation in the absence of the written text. This happens after Jos's drunken performance at Vauxhall, about which Thackeray writes that the ‘next morning … found Sedley groaning in agonies which the pen refuses to describe’ (p. 51). At this point in the original manuscript, according to Nicholas Pickwoad, Thackeray had drawn a box for the drawing of Jos leaning against his dresser that appears in the serial number at this point.³³ Whether this is, indeed, the hungover, rather than the merely contemplative, Jos is beside the point; the drawing does not so much illustrate the written text as it demands to act where the written text—however facetiously—does not, or cannot.

A more consequential example of this pictorial action can be seen in Thackeray's final vignette of the novel where two children kneel next to a box of puppets. Thackeray prepares the way for this illustration with the following afterword: ‘Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?—Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out’ (p. 624). Beneath these words are the children, box and puppets to which he refers, but with added, crucial details: the nuclear family of Dobbin, Amelia and young George sit comfortably propped up inside the box; a bald Jos puppet lies on the floor with his feet against the box; the Becky puppet, on the other hand, appears to have her legs crushed under the box itself while her face is smothered by another, Punch-like, puppet. The fate of the Becky puppet is indeed more ominous than that of the textual Becky (or, for the matter, the ‘rewarded’ Becky in the final plate) who has succeeded, after all apparent setbacks, in her manipulations.

More crucially, the position of these puppets betrays a desire for authorial control on Thackeray's part that the novel's puppet metaphor is supposed to undermine. These are by no means mere puppets, child's toys, painted sacks of sawdust that are supposed to keep us from ‘humanizing’ the novel's characters. Thackeray shows us in this final vignette that both the characters and their final dispensation are his. Moreover, this show of authority is manifested pictorially. It is the novel's last ‘word.’

Thus, eliminating the illustrations favors the editorial act in two ways: on the one hand, it is a decision that demands final authority by claiming this final word; more significantly, this authority is manifested, wittingly or unwittingly, in a rewriting of—an attempt to unify—a text that has staked itself out as the antithesis of such unity. It is an attempt to limit to one voice a text that illustrates the problems with a univocal text.

I do not suggest here that the pictorial text is a single voice that opposes the single textual one. As we have seen in Thackeray's pictorial manipulations of the Becky character, there are many voices to the dual text of Vanity Fair—not the least of which are the carefully situated captions that announce each full page plate. Excised along with the plates in many editions, they too suggest another dynamic surface to this other narrative. In most cases, the captions operate as ironically innocuous counterpoints to the more complex goings-on in the illustrations. For instance, in ‘A family party at Brighton’, the spatial and narrative elements of the plate oppose the apparent harmlessness of the plate's caption. The frame of George and Becky flirting with each other on the balcony recedes into the increasing ranks of obliviousness on the part of the others in this ‘party.’ Rawdon and Jos playing cards frame a solitary Amelia who gazes towards the balcony. Her vague facial details tell us nothing about what concerns her. Finally, the right margin of the plate shows us the dark sea that will lead George to his death on the Waterloo battlefield.

While most of the plates' captions oppose the illustrations in this way, the caption for the final plate—‘Virtue rewarded: a booth in Vanity Fair’—bears perhaps a bit more scrutiny. Thackeray exploits its place as the last full-page plate of the novel by investing both the caption and illustration with meaning that frustrates narrative closure. Questions generated from the juxtaposition of this caption and illustration abound: Whose virtue has been rewarded? What exactly is the ‘reward’? Where is Vanity Fair? How can we reconcile this placid, angelic Becky Sharp with the crushed Becky puppet on the opposite page? Attempting to answer such questions, however, would be to miss Thackeray's point in this plate. Whereas in the written text he dispatches Becky, Dobbin, Amelia and family—indeed, closes the book on them—the caption of this plate reopens the narrative.

Questions such as those above attest to the problem both of narrative closure and, by extension, of the manifold problems with attempting to re-establish this closure by eliminating the elements which problematize it. For a contrast to the complexities of Thackeray's dual text one need only look at other illustrators of Vanity Fair: their plates are safe, smooth, polished drawings. They are given their own page and never spatially interrupt the written text. In their attempt to smooth what they perceive to be marginal or incomplete about Vanity Fair, Thackeray's editors unwittingly produce a narrative that opposes its own aims. While achieving a narrative that opposes itself may be precisely Thackeray's point in Vanity Fair, such a ‘novel without a hero’ may have been too much, despite its financial success, for its many editors.

Notes

1. Quoted in Gordon Ray's Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846, (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1955), p. 433. The original copy of this contract hangs in the offices of the now-defunct Punch.

2. For a useful study of Thackeray's illustrative works and his years with Punch, see Robert A. Colby, Thackeray's Canvass of Humanity: An Author and his Public, (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979). For discussions of Vanity Fair's illustrations themselves, see Jerry W. Williamson, ‘Thackeray's mirror,’ Tennessee Studies in Literature, XXII (1977), pp. 133-53, and Joan Stevens, ‘Thackeray's “Vanity Fair”,’ Review of English Studies, VI (Jan 1965), pp. 19-38; see also Stephen Canham, ‘Art and the illustrations of Vanity Fair and The Newcomes,’ Modern Language Quarterly, 43/1 (May 1982), pp. 43-66.

   Also useful on the topic of Thackeray as illustrator is the 1974 (2) issue of Costerus; relevant essays from this issue include Patricia R. Sweeney, ‘Thackeray's best illustrator,’ pp. 83-111; Joan Stevens, ‘Vanity Fair and the London skyline,’ pp. 13-41 and ‘Thackeray's pictorial capitals,’ pp. 113-140; and Anthony Burton, ‘Thackeray's collaborations with Cruikshank, Doyle, and Walker,’ pp. 141-184.

   For a more recent look at Thackeray's illustrations in the context of the illustrated Victorian novel, see David Skilton, ‘The relation between illustration and text in the Victorian novel,’ Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts, eds Karl Josef Hölton, Peter M. Daly and Wolfgang Lottes (Erlangen: Univ.-Bibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1988).

3. For early histories of Punch, see M. H. Spielmann, The History of Punch, (New York: Cassell, 1985), and R. G. G. Price, A History of Punch, (London: Collins, 1957). After over 150 years of publication, Punch recently went out of business.

4. Anonymous, Untitled, Punch (23 January 1847).

5. Adversity, p. 16.

6. Samuel Reynolds Hole, The Memories of Dean Hole (London: Edward Arnold, 1892), p. 81; and John Frederick Boyes, ‘A memorial of Thackeray's school-days,’ Cornhill Magazine, 1865 (XI), p. 122.

7. James Robertson Planche, The Recollections and Reflections of J. R. Planche: A Professional Autobiography in Two Volumes (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872), I, p. 171.

8. J. R. Harvey, Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators (New York: New York University Press, 1971), pp. 76-77.

9. Jerry W. Williamson, ‘Thackeray's mirror,’ Tennessee Studies in Literature, 1977 (XXII), p. 134.

10. The most thorough such argument is from Joan Stevens's 1965 essay ‘Thackeray's Vanity Fair’. Both she and Jerry Williamson argue that the illustrations are necessary for the novel's unity. Although I agree that the illustrations are not only necessary but crucial, the arguments in my essay implicitly take issue with their claims that restoration of the missing illustrations also restores some lost, previously unified text. As I argue, this unity is, in fact, the prime mover behind the editorial decision to excise the illustrators.

    Nor do I propose a definitive edition of Vanity Fair. Trying to establish a manuscript on which such an edition would be based, as Peter Shillingsburg tells us, is problematic, if not impossible. See, for instance, the ‘Textual Apparatus’ section of his edition of Vanity Fair (pp. 671-677).

11. Thackeray's illustrations began to disappear as early as the ‘cheap edition’ of Vanity Fair that Bradbury and Evans issued in 1853. This edition contained none of Thackeray's illustrations (Shillingsburg, p. 667). The precedent for their future deletion, it would seem, had been set early on.

12. Vanity Fair and Lovel the Widower in The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (New York: Houghton-Mifflin 1889); and Vanity Fair (New York: Modern Library, 1950).

13. Vanity Fair in The Prose Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Walter Jerrold (London: J. M. Dent, 1901); Vanity Fair in The Complete Works of William M. Thackeray, Croxley Edition (New York: Society of English and French Literature, 1904); Vanity Fair (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940); and Vanity Fair and Lovel the Widower in Thackeray's Works, Walpole Edition (Society of English Fiction, n.d.).

14. Vanity Fair, eds. Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. xxxix; emphasis added.

15. In 1989, Peter Shillingsburg prepared an edition of Vanity Fair for Garland whose ‘primary goal … is to present a text of the work as Thackeray wanted it at the time of the first book issue …’ (p. 672). Since it appeared on the ‘gaudy yellow covers’ of the serial numbers and not in the edition to which Shillingsburg refers, one of Thackeray's original illustrations is left out: the one of the clown standing on the barrel.

16. Adversity, pp. 20, 22.

17. Untitled, Punch (27 January 1844).

18. Adversity, p. 368.

19. ‘Punch's Regency,’ Punch (23 August 1845).

20. ‘Prefatory Remarks,’ Punch (28 February 1846).

21. ‘On some political snobs,’ Punch (4 July 1846).

22. Ibid.

23. Thackeray's favorite subject for caricature was himself and his face would often appear in Punch. He once acknowledged that ‘I have pushed the caricaturing of myself almost to affectation.’ See The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, 4 vols, ed. Gordon N. Ray (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), ii. p. 455.

24. Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg (New York and London: Garland, 1989), pp. 71-72. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Vanity Fair are taken from this edition, and will be cited within the text.

25. Robert Colby sees some of Vanity Fair's characters as conforming to the ‘snob’ categories that Thackeray establishes in his series. For instance, he sees the Bute Crawleys as ‘Clerical Snobs,’ Sedley and Osborne as ‘Great City Snobs,’ and George Osborne and General Tufto as ‘Military Snobs,’ and so on (p. 236).

26. The Victorian serial novel remains a productive area for investigation. For a general history of the reading public within which the serial novel appears, see Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). For a more recent study that concentrates exclusively on the serial, see Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991). For a nearly exhaustive chronicle of Thackeray's serial fiction, see Edgar F. Harden, The Emergence of Thackeray's Serial Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979).

27. Charles Astor Bristed, ‘Vanity Fair’, A Review, American Review (October 1848), p. 423.

28. Elizabeth Rigby, ‘Vanity Fair—and Jane Eyre,’ Quarterly Review (December 1848), p. 160. Rigby does, however, mention the problematic ‘Clytemnestra’ engraving that I discuss below, saying that it ‘casts so uncomforatable a glare over the latter part of the volume’ (p. 161).

29. R. S. Rintoul, Spectator (22 July 1848), p. 710.

30. Although we differ markedly on the reasons for the primacy of Thackeray's illustrations, Patricia Sweeney argues along these lines in her discussion of ‘Thackeray's best illustrator.’

31. For an interesting discussion of this desire to collect books for the sake of collecting, see Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking my library: a talk about book collecting,’ Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).

32. In an 1879 conversation with Thackeray John Esten Cooke asked him directly about this ‘mystery’:

    ‘Did Becky kill him, Mr Thackeray?’

    This question seemed to afford the person to whom it was addressed, material for profound reflection. He smoked meditatively, appeared to be engaged in endeavoring to arrive at the solution of some problem, and then with a secretive expression—a ‘slow smile’ dawning on his face—replied:

    ‘I don't know!’

    (p. 252)

    See ‘An hour with Thackeray,’ Appleton's Journal: A Magazine of General Literature, 39 (September 1879), p. 252.

33. Peter Shillingsburg also places the vignette at this point in his edition of Vanity Fair (p. 51). Despite the best of intentions, the 1940 Heritage Press edition attempted to make a definitive edition of Vanity Fair, announcing as much in a foreword that spoke ‘In Praise of Thackeray's Pictures.’ There were, however, several problems with this edition, not the least of which was that it places this vignette of Jos before the full-page plate of his carousing at Vauxhall.