Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray is exactly what its title promises: the Victorian novel, read aloud as a public-domain LibriVox recording, one chapter to an episode. The framing is minimal. A short LibriVox notice names the reader, the chapter heading follows, and then it is Thackeray's text. In the stretch shown here, Michelle Crandall reads chapters 1 to 3, 5 and 6, while Wendy M. Grossman records chapter 4, 'The Green Silk Purse'. Chapter 1 starts, in the novel's own words, while the present century was in its teens, with a family coach drawing up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies on Chiswick Mall. Two girls are leaving. Amelia Sedley is the good one, a pupil who sings, dances, embroiders and wins the love of everyone around her. Becky Sharp is the other, and as the carriage pulls away she flings a dictionary out of the window into the school garden, leaving Miss Jemima too shocked to finish her sentence. The following chapters settle into the Sedley home in Russell Square. Becky, it emerges, used to play the meek ingenue on visits to Miss Pinkerton, then turned a doll the schoolmistress gave her into a caricature of the woman herself. Her new object is Amelia's brother Joseph, a stout dandy in Hessian boots and an apple-green coat, who spent some eight years almost alone at an East India Company post in Bengal. He talks freely among men and goes silent with Becky. A skein of green silk, a thunderstorm that postpones a trip to Vauxhall, and Joseph's private resolve to pop the question there push the courtship along. The chapter called 'Dobbin of Ours' steps back to Dr. Swishtail's school, where Dobbin, a grocer's son the other boys mock, squares up to the bully Cuff to protect little Osborne. At Vauxhall, Joseph orders the waiters about, makes the salad, eats most of the supper and calls for rack-punch. The narrator is the other lead. He ranks a schoolmistress's letters alongside churchyard epitaphs for trustworthiness. He sets Cuff's astonishment beside George III hearing of the American revolt, and beside Goliath facing David. He admits the tune he is piping is a mild one, promises terrific chapters to come, and declares a single bowl of rack-punch the cause of all this history. Chapter titles such as 'Rebecca is in Presence of the Enemy' and 'In Which Miss Sharp and Miss Sedley Prepare to Open the Campaign' borrow the vocabulary of warfare for drawing-room manoeuvres. It is a serial, so 'Chiswick Mall' is the place to begin.