Experiencing History and Encountering Fiction in <em>Vanity Fair</em>

Abstract

Abstract William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48) puts forward a theory of historical experience. Though the novel revolves around the Napoleonic wars, the narrator famously avoids recounting this military history as it occurs. This essay argues that the narrator finally encounters history in a way that he can both narrate and experience when, five chapters from the end of the novel, he appears as a character in the fictional town of Pumpernickel, which belatedly rehearses the Napoleonic wars through its aesthetic representations. With the narrator’s appearance, Vanity Fair offers a self-reflexive historiography that trumpets belated aesthetic revivals—the fictional town, the fictional novel—as the best and perhaps the only ways to confront not only military but even personal, domestic history.