Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero. [Cosway].

THACKERAY, William Makepeace [Cosway].

Item Number: 122758

London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848.

The first edition, first issue of Thackeray’s masterpiece. Octavo, bound in full red morocco by Sangorski and Sutcliffe in Cosway-style binding with a miniature portrait of Thackeray inset into the front pastedown, bound for legendary book collector Harry F. Marks, engraved frontispiece, engraved additional title, and 38 engraved plates, spine in gilt compartments, gilt inner dentelles, all edges gilt, ivory silk doublures. The first issue, with the headline on page one in rustic type; “Mr. Pitt” on page 453; and the suppressed woodcut of Mr. Steyne on page 336. Van Duzer 231. In near fine condition.

Vanity Fair was Thackeray’s first major work and established his continued high standing among Victorian novelists. “After that book [Vanity Fair] there could be no doubt about the greatness of its writer… at last the novel of real life on the great scale has been discovered” (Saintsbury, in Grolier, English Prose Fiction, 102). “As Thackeray’s masterpiece this novel has outlasted the great majority of his work… The Waterloo scenes are among the best narrative passages in an English novel. Of her type, Becky has never been bettered, and the author’s famed irony still stings” (Farrow, 50). It has been the subject of numerous television and film adaptations, most recently into the 2004 film directed by Mira Nair, starring Reese Witherspoon, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Bob Haskins. Cosway bindings (named for renowned 19th-century English miniaturist Richard Cosway) were popularized, if not invented, in the early 1900s by the renowned London bookselling firm of Henry Sotheran. The earliest Cosway bindings were created by Miss C.B. Currie who faithfully imitated Cosway's detailed watercolor style of portraiture from designs by J.H. Stonehouse, Sotheran’s manager. These delicate miniature paintings, often on ivory, were set into the covers or doublures of richly-tooled bindings and protected by a thin pane of glass.