Vanity Fair (BBC) Book

Never judge a book by its cover. In the photograph adorning Penguin's paperback edition of Vanity Fair, issued as a tie-in with a new BBC serialisation, Natasha Little's Becky Sharp stares out at the camera, smiling coyly. Around her, indistinct crinolines blur into an all-purpose Victoriana. It's a telling image. In Andrew Davies' TV adaptation, Becky Sharp is a nineties girl, complete with near-estuary English and a developed range of Spice Girl flounces, dropped into an alien culture of stuffed shirts and overstuffed bodices, every other character a proud graduate of BBC costume drama school. As she gazes at the audience, we become complicit in her outrage at the indefensible hypocrisies of the surrounding characters. It's good modern TV, but a far cry from the sensation and scandal caused when William Makepeace Thackeray first serialised his Vanity Fair for the unsuspecting Punch readership in 1847-48. Then, as Lady Eastlake protested in the Quarterly Review: "The personages are too like our everyday selves to draw any distinct moral from it." Then, the point of Thackeray's fast-paced, multi-layered, and bitingly comic narrative was to confront the reader with difficult situations, where initial moral outrage at Becky's behaviour was always tempered with sympathy for her irrepressible spirit. Now we can make up our own minds with this edition of the original text, excellent value considering its 800 plus pages, useful notes and (not least) a selection of colour pics from the show. --Alan StewartRead More