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Daily · Classics

Vanity Fair

William Makepeace Thackeray · novel, 1848·24 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version24 hrs → 50 sec
  • Becky Sharp flings her farewell gift into the garden. Leaving Miss Pinkerton's academy for good, she is handed a parting copy of Johnson's Dictionary by kindly Miss Jemima. Rebecca hurls it back onto the pavement and tells Amelia she is out of Chiswick, thank God.
  • Rebecca prices out exactly what virtue would cost her. Playing companion to a rich old lady, she works out what goodness would take: apricots, geraniums, half-a-crown's worth of soup for the poor. I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year, she decides.
  • George Osborne dies off the page, mid-sentence. Waterloo is fought without a single scene inside it. Darkness came down on the field and city, and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.
  • Rawdon Crawley catches his wife with Lord Steyne and turns violent. He strangles Steyne with his own neckcloth, strikes him twice across the face, and tears a diamond ornament from Becky's breast to fling at the Peer, cutting his forehead. Steyne wore the scar to his dying day.
  • Jos Sedley dies abroad under circumstances the insurer refuses to accept. Three months after Dobbin begs him to flee Becky, Jos is dead at Aix-la-Chapelle, his fortune gone and his life insurance split between Amelia and Rebecca, who is named administratrix. The insurer calls it the blackest case that ever came before it.
  • The narrator closes the toy box on everyone, winners included. The last line drops the entire cast to puppets: Vanitas Vanitatum, which of us is happy in this world? Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is subtitled A Novel without a Hero and means it, running an anti-heroine through decades of English society without a single reliable moral center to root for.

A penniless schemer claws her way through English high society while her sweet, passive best friend gets used by everyone around her, and Thackeray refuses to give either of them a hero to marry.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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