Vanity Fair: A Novel Without A Hero.

THACKERAY, William Makepeace .

Item Number: 140386

London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848.

First edition of Thackeray’s masterpiece. Octavo, bound in full leather, raised bands, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, raised bands, double gilt ruled to the front and rear panels, marbled endpapers, illustrated with 38 engraved plates. With the following first issue points: the engraved title dated 1848, and the “Mr. Pitt” reading on line 31, p. 453. 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.