gentleman, that is, was modest, true, simple, pure, kindly, and upright in his dealings with others. His social authority depended on the moral notion of personal conduct, rather than on the civic notion of independence that had sustained earlier models. 'What is it to be a gentleman?' Thackeray asked in his lecture on George IV in 1855, having dismissed the monarch himself, in a resonant phrase, as 'a great simulacrum.' Thackeray's answer sums up an important strain of Victorian thought in giving prominence to conduct rather than condition, to virtue as verb rather than noun: 'To have lofty aims, to lead a pure life, to keep your honour virgin; to have the esteem of your fellow-citizens, and the love of your fireside; to bear good fortune meekly; to suffer evil with constancy; and through evil or good to maintain truth always' (The Four Georges).
Such foregrounding of conduct achieved two important things for 'the middling classes' in Victorian England: the notion of conduct allowed for easier entry into the category of gentleman, since conduct is amenable to emulation; and it positioned the gentleman as less a leader than an ideal member of society, thereby widening the normative category. This does not mean that actual gentlemen were not leaders or that socioeconomic status was unimportant to the category. Such was far from the case. But the conduct-based, domestic model of the gentleman placed a premium on what the German philosopher Hegel called 'maintaining individuals,' and hence on the disciplinary virtues appropriate to maintaining a highly stratified and fluid economy of industry and credit. The writing of Thackeray and other realist novelists was instrumental in propagating this disciplinary model at midcentury. At the same time it was also instrumental in exposing, if not always consciously, the degree to which the model itself was highly, and interestingly, unstable. The Victorian gentleman is very much a hybrid construction: in him social and moral values uneasily fuse; aristocratic and middle-class interests compromise with and contest each other; and competing forms of masculinity forge a difficult alliance. -408-
Thackeray's persistent interest in the gentleman is part of his enduring fascination with the workings of social power and authority in the mobile, urban world that he knew. It is no accident that the modern meaning of «snob» derives from Thackeray, notably from the success of a satiric series he produced for Punch in 1846 and 1847, 'The Snobs of England, by one of themselves,' which was later published in book form as The Book of Snobs (1848). The word originally meant a person of the lower class, and it had a special link to Cambridge University (attended by Thackeray), whose members used it to designate anyone outside the university. Thackeray extended the term to refer to anyone who sought after the trappings of a higher class; that is, to those governed by notions of status. In Thackeray «snob» retains its tone of contempt for the outsider, but the contempt is now motivated less by low social status itself than by the ambition of the outsider to be an insider. It thus becomes a term peculiarly tied to the possibility of social mobility, for its special meaning depends on a world where there is sufficient movement between class layers for social ambition to take widespread root. To Thackeray such ambition is a kind of meanness, a form of vulgarity. His celebrated definition of a snob in chapter 2 of The Book of Snobs makes meanness central to the notion: 'He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob.' This of course begs the question of what constitutes 'mean things,' but to a gentleman like Thackeray there would be little doubt that a money economy would be behind all meanness. Through his redefinition of snobbery, he forged for himself a powerful and influential instrument for the critique of a money society, with its social insecurities and easy reproduction of the signs of status and taste. And «snobbery» is all the more effective a weapon because it acts as a gatekeeper concept, policing the boundaries of class and value. To search out snobs, as Thackeray was always doing in one way or another, is not simply to mock meanmindedness but to keep the socially pushy outside the discourse of genuine distinction and status, expelling them as interlopers and vulgar intruders.
In his prefatory remarks to The Book of Snobs, Mr. Snob claims that he has 'an eye for a Snob.' The exhaustive taxonomy of types of snobs that follows certainly bears him out, and Mr. Snob's acute «eye» reflects the way in which Thackeray's own life engendered in him a particular sensitivity to matters of class and status. Born and educated a gentleman, Thackeray's status fell with the loss of his paternal inheritance in the collapse of Indian banks in 1833 when he was twenty-two years old. -409-
He now had to earn a living. After an attempt to become an artist in Paris, he moved to London where he spent over a decade making his way in the precarious (and low-status) world of journalism. Writing under a host of comic pseudonyms he produced reviews, travel books, short novels, satiric sketches, parodies, and so forth. With the publication of Vanity Fair (1847–1848), the novel for which he remains best known, he achieved fame and regained status, moving into London society. Other successful novels followed, and Thackeray left behind forever the scrambling for assignments and fees of his journalist years.
Thackeray thus experienced in his own life a variety of social milieux, and he knew at first hand something of the volatility and unpredictability of a money economy. He was never quite in the mainstream of his class (his family's Anglo-Indian connection set him apart at the outset from the regular English gentleman), but he was never quite outside it either, even when living in the bohemian world of painters and journalists. Not surprisingly, the characteristic terrain of his fiction is that ambiguous border: the obscure territory between classes, especially what his contemporary W. C. Roscoe called the 'debateable land between the aristocracy and the middle classes'; sites of transition like boardinghouses and hotels; or informal public spaces such as clubs or taverns. Charting such fluid terrain in narratives that are themselves fluid and shifting, Thackeray provided his contemporaries with memorable images of the shaping of their culture.
The metaphor of Vanity Fair, which organized his first major success, proved to be the most memorable of these, becoming a byword of the period, and infusing all of Thackeray's later novels as well. Thackeray appropriated the image itself from John Bunyan's famous religious allegory, The Pilgrims' Progress (1678), in which the pilgrims pass through a town called Vanity, where a fair selling all kinds of things (including persons) takes place all year round. Thackeray reaccentuated the image for his own secular purposes, exploiting it to make the key point that in modern commercial society, the «fair» is unbounded and all-encompassing. It is no longer located in a particular place (a marketplace) but is now a definitive condition (an abstract market). A consequence of the abstracting power of money and credit, the market not only translates everything into terms of exchange (Bunyan's point) but renders even those terms themselves precarious and temporary. With its plot shaped by a series of rises and falls, the narrative of Vanity Fair is permeated with a sense of instability. -410-
The motif of bankruptcy is prominent in the novel both literally and as a metaphor (Becky's fall, for example, is called a 'bankruptcy'), and its prominence is in part a response to the unprecedented volatility of the British economy in the first half of the nineteenth century. The 1820s experienced the first modern trade cycle and a huge bank failure, whose ripple effect entangled well-known firms and individuals, including the best-selling novelist Sir Walter Scott. Each decade from 1820 to 1850 witnessed liquidity crises, spectacular rises and crashes in business and banking, booms and depressions in trade and agriculture, and radical changes in industrial technology that led to painful unemployment, notably in the textile sector. As a result economic and political ferment was constantly waxing and waning, and the 1840s (the decade in which Vanity Fair was written) were especially turbulent. Among other things, the decade saw the rise of organized workingclass political agitation with the Chartists; the Irish famine and a mass of Irish immigrants in its wake; violent increases and drops in the price of corn; and a rapid expansion of the railways that produced not only thousands of miles of track but also the speculative frenzy known as the 'railway mania.' Hundreds of different kinds of railway shares were in circulation in the 1840s, and the inevitable crash soon came. There was a serious bank crisis in 1847, and the decade produced spectacular individual failures as well. One of the most striking was that of the selfmade 'Railway King,' George Hudson, and there was also the failure of the second Duke of Buckingham, whose estate went on the block in 1848 while Vanity Fair was in its serial run. Although Sir Robert Peel and his government made some attempt in the mid -1840s to curb through legislation what Peel termed 'reckless speculation,' speculative «bubbles» continued to form and burst. One of the distinguishing features of the failures of the 1830s and 1840s was that these involved many more small speculators; hence they affected a much wider social range of people than the failure of «bubbles» in earlier periods had tended to do. A minor moment in Vanity Fair nicely sums up this sense of the widespread ripples of apparently distant financial disasters. In chapter 56 the narrator refers to the failure of 'the great Calcutta House of Fogle, Fake, and Cracksman.' The bank failed for a million pounds, he reports, plunging 'half the Indian public into misery and ruin.' It turns out that the directors of the bank managed to enrich themselves, but the smaller investors lost everything. The narrator mentions one such smaller investor, Scape, a character who never appears but whose car-411- pets Jos Sedley buys at the forced sale of his estate. Scape is left destitute at the age of sixty-five, for he, unlike the directors, has made sure that all the tradesmen have been 'honourably paid.' In this concern for payment of debts, Scape is also unlike the novel's heroine Becky Sharp. Becky routinely decamps without paying those she owes, leaving devastated lives in her wake.
In moments like these, Vanity Fair suggests something of the uncertainties and complex interdependencies
