Interfaces.

Image-Texte-Langage

‘The Author’s Own Candles’: Notes on the Illustrations to

Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
Ellen Lévy

Abstract
Rare among Victorian serial publications, the original numbers of Vanity Fair were illustrated by their author. This paper attempts
to explore the relationship between Thackeray’s designs and the narrative technique of his novel, highlighting in particular how
the narrator’s shifting and ironic stance is reflected in the interplay of written and graphic text and how the narrator’s special
relationship to Becky Sharp is developed.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Lévy Ellen. ‘The Author’s Own Candles’: Notes on the Illustrations to Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. In: Interfaces. Image-Texte-
Langage 15, 1999. Le livre, l'image, le texte (1) pp. 153-168;

doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/inter.1999.1167

https://www.persee.fr/doc/inter_1164-6225_1999_num_15_1_1167

Fichier pdf généré le 14/03/2023

 ‘The Author’s Own Candles’:
Notes on the Illustrations to Thackeray’s
VanityFair

In 1833, William Makepeace Thackeray was living in Paris,

studying art and dabbling in journalism as a young — he was twenty-
two — gentleman of independent fortune when the failure of a Calcutta
bank left him with £100 a year and a sudden obligation to earn his own
living. He had been drawing all his life — his childhood letters to his
mother are decorated with his sketches — but now the question arose of
whether a career as an artist would allow him to regain the fortune that
he had lost. 1 A long struggle was beginning, a struggle that would only
come to fruition with the publication of Vanity Fair in 1847-1848.
It was a struggle on two fronts that led Thackeray to a unique
career as illustrator of his own writings. Debarred from illustrating such
works as Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (he applied for the job) by a lack of
proficiency in the technical aspects of woodcutting and steel engraving,
Thackeray would eventually turn his artistic skills to the illustration of
letterpress which he produced with the prodigious energy that we have
come to associate with the Victorians, first to accompany the copy he
produced for magazines and newspapers, eventually for the serialized
novel that would establish his reputation.2

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154 Interfaces 15 (1999)

By the time he began work on Vanity Fair in 1846 he had

produced three travel books which successfully combined his literary
and artistic talents.3 He had been improving his abilities as an engraver
on steel, so that he was able to do the hard-ground etchings for Vanity
Fair himself. The wood block initials that he designed for each chapter
would be cut by a professional craftsman. To these were added designs
for vignettes and occasional tailpieces that functioned as fillers for
monthly numbers of prescribed length.
In all, Thackeray produced initials for sixty-six chapters (one
chapter, written almost entirely by Becky Sharp, begins with a
vignette), two full-page engravings for each monthly numbers except
the final double number for which there are three, and from two to
twelve supplementary vignettes per number for a total of some 190
illustrations, including the frontispiece and cover — a plethora of
graphic material whose connection to the written text will be the focus
of these remarks.
The illustrations are intimately connected to the protean
narrative voice of Vanity Fair — the voice now of a satirist, now of a
preacher, a preacher because a satirist, ironising, vituperating,
appealing, uplifting, sympathizing, condemning, sentimentalizing,
aligning itself subversively sometimes with the greedy and the
rapacious, sometimes with the craven and the punctilious, here with the
timid and amorphous, there with the bold and ambitious,
apostrophizing the narratee in his club or in her drawing room,
confiding in female readers about men and in male readers about
women, transferring them all to the chapel of his exhortations,
pronouncing, extrapolating, aphorizing, moralising, chiding, eclipsing
itself behind the flow of its narration the better to re-emerge, whip or
kid glove at the ready, to chide, to startle, to comfort, to amuse. A
narrative voice whose instability is in the image of the narration itself,
with its intervening panoramas and digressions, its embellishing
analyses, observations and glosses, its intertextual enrichments,

cartoons,
labour’ . Christmas books — a period, according to Buchanan Brown, of ‘unremitting
3 The Paris Sketchbook (1840), The Irish Sketchbook (1843), and Notes of a Journey from
Cornhill to Cairo (1846).
Ellen Lévy : ' The Author ’s Own Candles ’ 155

metatextual commentaries and metaleptic surprises. All of these

functions
text of his will
illustrations.
find their reinforcement in Thackeray’s other text, the

The narrator of Vanity Fair underscores his connection to the

illustrations, speaking in the first lines of Chapter VI of the piping
figure of the illuminated letter T as self-representation [see figure 1]
or, in Chapter VIII, calling the fool preaching to fools who ornaments
the cover of the monthly numbers [fig. 2] ‘an accurate portrait of your
humble servant’ — playful ‘likenesses’ that establish the illustrations as
both exempla and countertext.
Lest the reader prove visually remiss, the designs call attention
to the act of looking, parallelling pictorially the connection drawn in
prose between narrator, reader and Vanity Fair. ‘O brother wearers of
motley!’ the narrator exclaims,4 a fool before fools, a fool in self¬
contemplation — reminding us that Vanity Fair is the world reflected in
our sight [fig. 3]. The illustrative text disseminates figures of
representation : the mirror is mirrored, watching, spying, eavesdropping
are repeatedly depicted [fig. 4], If the ‘accurate portrait’ of the author
was manifestly tongue-in-cheek, the illustrator obligingly includes a
superior facial likeness in the tailpiece to Chapter IX establishing the
connection between his eyeglasses and the signature (these self-same
spectacles) that adorns many of the adjacent designs [fig. 5]. This
foregrounding of viewing, these reminders of the duty to remain
visually alert, this incitation to perceive, link and relate, are
accomplished by the emblematisation of spectatorship.
Embedded paintings offer ironic interplay with their containing
designs : a cowardly Jos dons his spurious military frock coat before an
image of more heroic combat, the wastrel George lights his cigar with
one of the faithful Amelia’s letters beneath the portrait of a ballet girl;
the mortified Becky is obliged to refuse the marriage proposal of Sir
Pitt while family portraits that mockingly recall the role she might have
played had she not settled for the baronet’s insolvent younger son look
on [fig. 6]. The novel’s most conspicuous picture-within-a-picture is
the portrait of Jos Sedley on an elephant [fig. 7] first encountered in the

4 William Makepeace
Subsequent referencesThackeray,
will be givenVanity
in the Fair,
text. New York : W.W. Norton, 1994, p. 190.
156 Interfaces 15 (1999)

drawing room at Russell Square where Amelia consoles a Becky

bereaved at not having subdued the bashful nabob. It reappears twice in
Chapter XVII, transformed into a sign of fortune’s fickleness, for this
chapter narrates the Sedley family’s fall and the dispersal of their
worldly goods at auction where the now triumphantly married Becky is
able to purchase it. 5
With two exceptions the full-page engravings that Thackeray
provided for the monthly numbers of Vanity Fair have a narrative
function.6 It was in the illuminated initials and in the vignettes that he
allowed himself the kind of textual play so prevalent in his prose. Here
the designs announce or comment upon action, set the tone or sabotage
it, digress, divert, embellish, embroider, often satisfying the artist’s
penchant for comic extravagance.
The narrator’s love of the parodie and the peripheral, the
analogic and the allegorical may be seen in a set of tangential initials
depicting figures of mock-Arcadian simplicity [fig. 8], The first
initiates the chapter in which Becky, removed to the country estate of
Sir Pitt Crawley to serve as a governess, begins her campaign for the
capture and surrender of her employer’s younger son, the bucolic
innocence of which activity seems to have set the illustrator’s sheep a-
laughing. The second nicely functions as way-marker, announcing a
return to London in a chapter (XII) which explores George Osborne’s
most unpastoral neglect of his fiancée. The third Arcadian initial,
whose costumed protagonists would not fail to awaken memories of an
earlier century’s sentimental romances, again relates to the chapter’s
(XVI) content in ironic ways : here, the ingenuous maiden who is about
to cross one of life’s high fences is none other than the demure Miss —
or rather Mrs — Becky whose elopement with Rawdon Crawley is
about to be discovered.

5 A fuller discussion of the portrait is provided by Joan Stevens in ‘Thackeray’s Pictorial

Capitals,’ Costerus II (1974) 136-137. Stevens’ article, discovered after the presentation of
this paper, complements many of the points included herein.
6 The illustration for Ch XXIX curiously belies the text, showing Amelia being handed into a
carriage by an attentive husband, whereas in the course of the chapter George Osbome
deeply humiliates his wife. The more famous illustration to Ch LXVII goes further than the
text in accusing Becky of the murder of Jos Sedley. For a discussion of it, see Alain Jumeau,
‘Le Dialogue entre le texte et l’image au chapitre 67 de Vanity Fair, ‘ Cahiers Victoriens et
Edouardiens 38 (1993).
Ellen Lévy : ‘The Author ’s Own Candles ’ 157

If Thackeray’s proclivity for the emphatic line of caricature, his

predilection for the grotesque form and the mocking trait are evident
throughout his work, it is in the smaller designs under discussion that
these features are particularly apparent. In this sense, the designs fulfill
the same subversive function that the narrator’s versatile, unstable and
destabilizing stance suggests. Devils, fools and clowns peep impishly
from the page [fig. 9], a continual reminder of the existence of a
subtext, of the duty to read double.7
If we linger a moment over some of these demons and jokers,
we find a leering lucifer at watch over the meditations of a crestfallen
supplicator (initial to Ch XV), an ironic introduction to the chapter in
which Becky repents her precipitous marriage, one of the few occasions
when, according to the narrator, her remorse is sincere. This image is
followed by another devil (initial to Ch XL VII) bearing the features of
Lord Steyne, Becky’s later protector, leaning not on his customary
pitchfork but on the silver forks of the novelistic tradition to which
Vanity Fair is in part an antidote. Finally, we find a small decorative
fool (initial to Ch XLII) which sets the mood for an account of the fate
of the Osborne sisters — one sold to a banker at a reduced price, the
other sacrificed to her tyrannical father’s domestic comfort. These are
followed [fig. 10] by the repeated motif of a clown on stilts.
In the second of these initials [fig. 10b] no fewer than three
Thackerayan motifs converge — the clown, the fool and the child. It
marks the incipit of the chapter (XLIX) devoted to Becky’s entry into
high society, a moment when all the vanities of the fair are at their
frenzied zenith. Two chapters later, in a moment of saturated ennui and
conscious that the obstinacy of her social scrambling is only equalled
by its futility, Becky complains to her patron, T would rather be a
parson’s wife, and teach a Sunday School than this; or a sargeant’s lady
and ride in the regimental waggon; or, O how much gayer it would be
to wear spangles and trowsers, and dance before a boothe at a fair.’ In a
rare pensive mood, Becky, who is generally only nostalgic for a
purpose, evokes a childhood memory : ‘... my father took me to see a

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158 Interfaces 15 (1999)

show at Brookgreen Fair ... and when we came home I made myself a
pair of stilts, and danced in the studio to the wonder of all the pupils’
(504). This little clown on stilts is, then, a figure of the heroine of this
novel without a hero in a moment of awareness of the self as performer,
be it in her father’s studio or on the stage of the greater world. Becky’s
ironic gloss on her life joins the narrator’s playful commentary in
images, ratifying his choice of the child as emblem of the novel-as-
play, in the sense both of game and of theatre.
Indeed, an abundance of children populates the initials : from the
author-narrator whose portrait we have already seen [fig. 5a] to a
Becky-child building her house of cards, an Amelia-child burning her
bridges (the snake of temptation wrapped round her wrist), a Dobbin-
child longing for the tasty morsel (Amelia) he may not have, Becky and
Rawdon-children flying their kites on nothing a year [fig. 11]. The
series ends [fig. 12] with the reader himself, requested by the narrator
to tidy away the puppets with which he has been entertained : ‘Come,
children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played
out’ (689). This final tailpiece operates both a return and an evolution,
for the very first chapter provided a portrait of reader Jones [fig. 13]
who was upbraided by the narrator for his fatuousness and
incompetence.8 Now, however, as the curtain descends, the reader has
been integrated into the text’s predominating metaphor and holds the
key to the diegetic casket. He no longer holds the book at a distance,
dissociating himself from the universe of Vanity Fair.
In the final tailpiece [fig. 12a], the Dobbin family dolls peep out
over the edge of the toychest, but the Becky doll lies outside of the
normative container in the embrace of the Fool [fig. 12b] whom the
illustrative system of the novel has taught us to associate with the
narrator himself. A satirist with a bent for bending language in ways
that make it speak the unspeakable, a mistress of the empire of words,
Becky is in many ways the narrator’s alter ago in the text.9 An

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Ellen Lévy : ‘The Author ’s Own Candles ’ 159

accomplished ironist, a natural mimic, Becky has not sprung from the
union of an artist and a French dancing girl unarmed. Alone among her
fellow Fairians, she is endowed with the qualities of the showman [fig.
14], allowed to manipulate the puppets much as the narrator / Manager
of the Performance does himself. It is she who, having proved on
innumerable occasions that she can mesmerize an audience with song
or satire, pathos or flattering gratification, is given the task of
organizing Lord Steyne’s Gaunt House charades, an occasion when her
theatrical and social powers — the implication is that they are the
same — converge.
Becky’s singular relationship with the narrator is made manifest
when in the early chapters of the novel he turns the narration over to
her. Her long letters to Amelia not only provide a satiric portrait of the
family at Queen’s Crawley but intermesh with the narrator’s diegetical
scheme. Here, too, Becky is granted a unique privilege not accorded to
any other member of the cast: one of her own little tapers is included
among the ‘candles’ with which the narrator illuminates his scene —
Becky’s own drawings [fig. 15] of Admiral Blackbrook’s daughters
sent to Amelia that she might judge of Becky’s success in eclipsing her
rivals. Not all of Becky’s drawings are so flattering, however; in
Chapter XL VI she proves herself so adept at the art of caricature, that
her sketch of the younger Sir Pitt preening in his new court suit is
carried off by Lord Steyne as a prize.
An artist herself, a daughter of Bohemia, Becky in turn becomes
the narrator-illustrator’s favorite model in an exploration of the
representation of feminine mythos [fig. 16]: Becky-Ariadne [a], Becky-
Melusina [b], Becky-Circe [c] — stereotypes of undomesticated female
energy, energy constrained and grown destructive. She is associated, by
the narrator as well as by the other characters, with snakes: ‘this rebel,
this monster, this serpent, this firebrand,’ he says of her (15). The very
diamonds she wheedles from Lord Steyne twist round her wrists in
serpentine strands. Snakes and snake-like forms coil themselves about
the initials, reminding the reader of the motif even in the heroine’s
absence. She is the Tittle Circe’ who winds George Osborne in her toils
(663), a Tittle viper’ (189), a ‘wild vixen’ (192); she is Dalilah to her
husband’s Samson, Omphale to his Hercules (162).
160 Interfaces 15 (1999)

She plays the parts of Clytemnestra and Philomela, murderess

and victim, in the Gaunt House charades that she herself has conceived
as a vehicle for her social triumph. The self-cancelling nature of these
roles as well as the theatrical setting of their exposition suggest that
what is being highlighted is not so much the validity of these visions of
the feminine as the masquerading that being female entails. Has not the
narrator declared, quoting his grandmother in a doubly ironic bid to
make an iconoclastic precept acceptable, that the best of women are
hypocrites, ‘watchful ...when they seem most artless and confidential’
(175), amiably slavish, with a ‘pretty treachery’ that the unperceiving
call truth? Has he not demonstrated, even in the case of Becky’s sweet
foil, Amelia, how circumscribing, impairing, alienating from the self,
the fetters of feminine conditioning are? Becky, who in the very first
chapter of the novel, refused definition by throwing Johnson’s
dictionary into the garden of the school that she was leaving — an
image of woman as defined by official culture meeting the earliest of
Judeo-Christian female myths — comments famously shortly after
accomplishing this revolutionary gesture, as if to distance herself once
for all from the prevailing ethos, ‘I’m no angel’ (10).
What the illustrations really offer is a kind off anti-conduct book
for clever survivors. Here [fig. 17a] is a perfectly bucolic vision of a
young girl pursuing innocent country pleasures. Note the serpent-like
shape of the branch she sits on. This initial corresponds to a remark
made by Mr Sedley to his wife concerning their son Jos, recently
returned from India: ‘It’s a mercy he did not bring us over a black
daugther in law, my dear — but mark my words the first woman who
fishes for him hooks him’ (28). Becky — at this point in her career a
relative novice at the piscatorial arts — fishes and spins but misses her
prey. She courts the fat nabob [fig. 17b], plays at grief when he gets
away [fig. 7a], postures that both text and image imply to be feigned. A
key illustration [fig. 17c] pictures Becky contemplating the roles that
life may offer her, conscious of the choices she must make in her one-
woman assault on the stronghold of society. It is not insignificant that
Thackeray makes Becky half French, a nationality that in the historical
context of the novel, which begins in 1813, is redolent of a certain
insurrectional sulphur.
Ellen Lévy : ‘The Author’s Own Candles ’ 161

Her identification with Napoleon begins early when, in leaving

Miss Pinkerton’s Academy, she cries out, to Amelia’s horror, ‘Vive la
France, Vive l’Empereur, Vive BonaparteV, as much as to say, the
narrator explains, ‘Long live Lucifer’ (10). Later, her husband will see
in her a match for the emperor : ‘By Jove, Becky,’ he tells her in one of
his not infrequent moments of adulation, ‘you’re fit to be Commander-
in-Chief, or Archbishop of Canterbury’ (162). And if the greatest roles
go to the most accomplished comedian, as the narrator suggests,
perhaps she is. The novel’s male counterpart to her devilry, Lord
Steyne, recognizes her astonishing talent as an actress, her instinctive
ability to adapt herself to the expectations of an audience, fulfilling its
wishes while simultaneously satisfying her own ambitions.
Here she is winnning the favour of her brother-in-law Pitt with
the appearance of downy maternity: ‘... she listened with the tenderest
kindly interest [...] hemming a shirt for her dear little boy. Whenever
Mrs Rawdon wished to be particularly humble and virtuous, this little
shirt used to come out of her workbox. It had got to be too small for
[little] Rawdon long before it was finished, though’ (441). Indeed,
motherhood is the one role that Becky resolutely refuses when not on
the social stage. It is the biological reminder of the societal boundaries
against which her life is a long campaign. This negotiator of aplomb,
this advocate who can outlawyer the sharpest shyster — ‘there was no
professional man who could beat her’ declares one of her adversaries
(369) — this intrepid little soldier for whom every day is a combat to
stave off another social Waterloo, is as ‘unsex’ d’ as her Shakepearean
forbear. She turns men’s passions to her advantage while entirely
devoid of sexual passion herself. On the contrary, it is Amelia, that
model of purity and submission, whose desire is obsessive and all-
consuming.
Thackeray’s narrator, adept at turning issues on their heads,
makes simillar attacks to those of Becky on the sacrosanct
underpinnings of pet gender prejudices. Are women shallow,
preoccupied by the surface? Perhaps, but they are not alone. The
gentlemen sometimes outpreen the ladies: ‘We have talked of Jos
Sedley as being as vain as a girl — Heaven help us! the girls have only
to turn the tables and say of one of their own sex, ‘She is as vain as a
162 Interfaces 15 (1999)

man,’ and she will have perfect reason. The bearded creatures are quite
as eager for praise, quite as finikin over their toilettes, quite as proud of
their personal advantages, quite as conscious of their powers of
fascination as any coquette in the world’ (22). While the elephantine
Jos procures himself a bright tight-fitting Beau Brummelish wardrobe,
Becky entertains visions of bestriding the elephant itself, richly be-
turbanned and be-jeweled, marching to the music of Colman’s
Bluebeard.10 Female Bluebeard, lady Napoleon — these, the text
suggests, are Becky’s true prototypes, although the Napoleon
Thackeray parodies in the initial to Chapter LXIV [fig. 18], when
Becky is down on her luck, is not the lofty Olympian of an Ingres or of
a David, but Benjamin Robert Haydon’s exile.11 The vanity of the fair
precludes triumphant finalties.
I should like to conclude by mentioning an illustration that
Thackeray did not provide. Four-fifths of the way through Vanity Fair
Becky’s social ascension comes to an abrupt halt when her husband
Rawdon, who has been ambushed and taken to a spunging house,
obtains his release, returns home and finds his little general alone with
Lord Steyne. Becky flings herself at her husband’s feet protesting her
innocence, Rawdon strikes his rival, orders his wife to remove the
diamonds in which she is arrayed, flings one of these perfidious
ornaments at Lord Steyne, marking him with the jewel forever — it is a
scene of culmination, climax, recognition and reversal all in one. But
Thackeray chooses it neither for a full-page illustration nor for a
woodcut filler. The initial for the chapter, it is true, announces the
catastrophe with an allegory [fig. 19]: a small boy is leading a
vagabond in the way of what a polysémie bourne-marker suggests is
the cross, while a woman with features not unlike Becky’s, but
coarsened, turns her face towards the gibbet. Rawdon, after a life of
thoughtless selfishness, will be brought, through love of his child, to a
better existence, while Becky will not know the saving grace of

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Ellen Lévy : ‘The Author’s Own Candles’ 163

Matthew 18:3 ‘Except ye be converted, and become as little children,

ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. ’
Yet the scene of disclosure itself, the most dramatic in the novel,
is left unpictured. It might be appropriate here to recall that the author’s
prologue, entitled ‘Before the Curtain’, presented Vanity Fair as a
theatrical space, inviting the reader to ‘step in for half an hour and look
at the performances’: ‘There are scenes of all sorts; some dreadful
combats, some grand and lofty horse-riding, some scenes of high life,
and some of very middling indeed; some love making for the
sentimental, and some light comic business: the whole accompanied by
appropriate scenery, and brilliantly illuminated with the Author’s own
candles’ (xv). Footlights to the pageant, Thackeray’s designs shed light
on a spectacle forever at an ironic remove. The narrative voice, which
has never ceased to display itself as arbiter of the real and its
representations, as an expression of fictionality itself, is reinforced in
this undertaking by visual reflections of its own instabilities. The
illustrations, in their codification of the attitudinal, their
perennialization of the pose, their satirical undercuttings, their
allegorical expansions, reinforce the notion of distance illuminated.
Small wonder then that at a moment of high sincerity, the lights go out,
as though the code must be broken when the masks drop.

Ellen LEVY12
Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail

Ellen Lévy teaches at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail. Originally a student of the
eighteenth-century with a special interest in James Boswell, she has also worked on
nineteenth and twentieth-century British literature, on the detective novel and on
contemporary American fiction.
164 Interfaces 15 (1999)
Ellen Lévy : ‘The Author ’s Own Candles ’ 165
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Ellen Lévy : ‘The Author’s Own Candles ’ 167
168 Interfaces 15 (1999)