Satire In Vanity Fair

Introduction

William Makepeace Thackeray was mostly known for his short satirical articles for the magazine, “Punch” before he became famous for his Novels. After 1848, he became famous for his famous but mean Vanity Fair, a long satirical novel that made fun of the aristocracy and the middle classes: their greed, corruption, and vanity. Thackeray’s his fame and fortune was created along with the creation of the novel. But his fame reached the ends of the kingdom way before the novel 's ending was written. In the beginning, Vanity Fair was serialized in Punch – each month, a new section of the novel would come out. Readers would wait anxiously for the next set of chapters to see what part of life Thackeray would make fun of and what would happen to the characters.

Vanity Fair is a broad and sprawling novel. It 's the story of two young women whose lives take them in and out of every segment of English society, each of which can be mocked and displayed for laughs in turn. But what 's more important than plot is the style of the novel – its bitter and caustic humor. This genre of satire is called "picaresque" and it 's part of a pretty long tradition that goes all the way back to Don Quixote in the 16th century and weaves through the awesome Gulliver 's Travels in the 18th century. The idea is to start with a character (a picaro) who is young or looking for a place to settle down, then to lead this character around all the types of people and situations that the author wants