Vanity Fair
A clever, friendless girl claws her way up through London society — and the steady, honest people she leaves behind
Page 1
On a bright morning in Chiswick, the big gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies stood open, and a carriage waited in the road. Amelia Sedley was leaving school for good, loved by every girl and mistress in the house, weeping happy tears and promising to write to everyone. Rebecca Sharp was leaving too, though no one wept for her. She had come to the school as a teacher of French, poor and friendless, the daughter of a drawing-master and an opera dancer, and she had never once been treated as the other girls' equal. Miss Jemima Pinkerton, kind and foolish, ran out at the last moment with a parting gift for Becky, as was given to every young lady who left the school: a handsome copy of Doctor Johnson's Dictionary. Becky took it, thanked her sweetly, and as the carriage pulled away she opened the window and flung the book back into the garden. Then she sat back and laughed.
Page 2
Becky went down into Hampshire as governess to Sir Pitt Crawley's two young daughters, and before long she had made herself useful to everyone in that gloomy old house. She wrote Sir Pitt's letters, nursed his invalid sister's temper, charmed the servants, and made herself so agreeable that old Sir Pitt himself, a coarse, miserly widower, began to think of marrying her. But Becky had already looked higher. Sir Pitt's younger son, Captain Rawdon Crawley, a big, good-natured dragoon with more debts than sense, had fallen for her completely, and she for the chance he offered. Without a word to his family, Becky and Rawdon were married quietly, by license, far from Queen's Crawley, trusting that his rich old aunt, Miss Crawley, who loved Rawdon best of all her relations, would soon forgive and provide for them. It was a bold, secret, loveless-enough bargain on Becky's side, and she knew it, and went into it with her eyes wide open.
Page 3
The news could not be kept quiet forever. When Miss Crawley, the rich old aunt who doted on Rawdon above every other relation, learned that he had secretly married the governess, she would not hear of forgiving it. She had always said she liked Becky and would have welcomed her as an amusing companion — but as a niece, as her favourite nephew's wife, taking the place she had half-promised to someone grander, Becky was suddenly unforgivable. Rawdon went to Park Lane again and again, writing, calling, waiting on the doorstep, but Miss Crawley would not see him. In the end she struck his name out of her will altogether and left her fortune elsewhere, to Rawdon's elder brother, the dull and respectable new Sir Pitt. Rawdon and Becky were left with nothing but his pay, his debts, and each other's wits, and for the first winter of their marriage, that was very nearly enough.
Page 4
Amelia Sedley had loved George Osborne since she was a girl, and when her father's business failed and the Sedleys were ruined, George's own father ordered him to drop her at once and marry a rich West Indian heiress instead. George, vain and selfish as he was, still had enough feeling left to refuse. With his friend Captain Dobbin's quiet help and money, George married Amelia anyway, in a small, hurried wedding, while his regiment waited to sail for Belgium. Old Mr. Osborne, a hard, proud City merchant, was told the news in his own dining room at Russell Square. He flew into a rage, struck George's name out of the family Bible, and swore never to give him another shilling or see his face again. George walked out of his father's house that day a married man and, for the first time in his life, almost a poor one.
Page 5
By the summer of 1815 both couples, the Crawleys and the Osbornes, were in Brussels with the army, waiting on Napoleon's next move. On the night before the regiments marched, a grand ball was given, and everyone who could get a card was there, dancing as though there were no war at all. George Osborne, restless and already a little tired of his gentle wife, danced again and again with Becky Crawley, flirting outrageously under Rawdon's nose and Amelia's unhappy eyes. Rawdon, easy-going about most things, only laughed at it and went on gambling at cards in the next room. Amelia sat quietly against the wall, too much in love and too proud to make a scene, watching her husband's attentions go everywhere but to her. Only Captain Dobbin, awkward and devoted, stayed near her all evening, saying little, fetching her lemonade, hating George a little for her sake and never once saying so.
Page 6
All that day the guns could be heard from Brussels, a steady dull thunder rolling in from the south, and nobody in the city knew yet which way the battle had gone. Carts and wounded men began to come back through the streets, and rumours ran everywhere that the French had broken through. In the middle of the panic, Becky Crawley kept her head completely. While other women wept and packed to flee, she calmly sold her spare carriage horses to a terrified officer for twice what she had paid, pocketing the gold as coolly as if nothing at all were happening. Amelia Osborne could do nothing but wait in an agony of fear for news of George, Captain Dobbin staying close beside her the whole dreadful day. Night came, and then word came with it: the battle was won at a place called Waterloo, but George Osborne had been killed in the fighting. Amelia heard it and said nothing at all.
Page 7
Years passed, and Rawdon's debts and Becky's wits carried them up into the very grandest London society. Through the patronage of the wealthy, worldly Marquis of Steyne, Becky was taken up by people who would never otherwise have known a penniless colonel's wife, and she made the most brilliant use of every door he opened for her. At a great party at Gaunt House, Lord Steyne's own house, amateur theatricals were got up for the fashionable world, and Becky, dressed as Clytemnestra for a scene of tragic charades, acted the murderous queen so vividly, with such flashing, frightening skill, that the whole glittering room fell silent and then burst into applause. Lord Steyne led the clapping, delighted with his discovery. Rawdon, standing at the back of the crowd in his plain evening coat, watched his wife's triumph with a strange, uneasy pride, not quite liking how close she stood to Lord Steyne afterward, nor how little she seemed to need him there at all.
Page 8
Becky's success had a price Rawdon never fully knew, until the night he came home unexpectedly, having just been released from a spell in a debtor's sponging-house. He let himself quietly into their house on Curzon Street and found Becky alone with Lord Steyne, dressed in diamonds Rawdon had never seen before and could never have afforded, the room full of the unmistakable signs of an intimacy he had refused, until that moment, to believe in. Something in Rawdon broke all at once. He tore the rings from Becky's arms, called Lord Steyne a coward to his face, and struck him one hard blow that sent the older man staggering back against the wall. Then, without another word to his wife, Rawdon walked out of the house, and out of her life, for good. Becky stood alone in the wrecked, candle-lit room where everything she had built so carefully had just come apart in under a minute.
Page 9
Years after Curzon Street, Becky had come down a long way in the world, drifting from one shabby foreign town to the next, living on her wits and a little credit, when who should she meet, quite by chance, in the small German town of Pumpernickel, but Jos Sedley and Amelia, still travelling together with faithful old Dobbin close behind them. Amelia, kind as ever even to a woman society had cast off, took pity on Becky and let her back into their little circle. It was there that Becky, half out of mischief and half out of real feeling for Dobbin's long, patient, unspoken love, finally told Amelia a truth she had been hiding from herself for ten years: that George Osborne, before he died, had written Becky a letter proposing that she run away with him. The shock of it broke the last of Amelia's foolish, faithful worship of George's memory, and for the first time she let herself look honestly at the man who had actually stood by her all along.
Page 10
In the end, Amelia married William Dobbin, the one man who had loved her steadily through every year of the story, though it took her a long time and George's old letter to see him clearly at last. Jos Sedley, as foolish and as easily led as ever, went on being managed and lightly fleeced by anyone clever enough to flatter him, Becky included. And Becky herself, never ruined for long, turned up again in England at a grand charity fair, working a stall for some fashionable good cause, laughing, flattering, selling trinkets to anyone who came near, exactly as clever and exactly as unrepentant as the little governess who had once flung a dictionary out of a carriage window. The world is a vanity fair, and we are all of us vain about something, the great and the small, the honest and the sharp alike. Which of us, after all, is truly happy in this world? Which of us, having got what we wanted, is satisfied?
About this story
- Audience: general readers
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