of a money and credit economy. It also points to the way in which credit itself replaces tangible notions of property and exchange with intangible ones. Concrete and material notions like land and goods give way to abstract and immaterial ones like credit and sign and the circulation of information. Becky Sharp, supreme manipulator of signs, is quite at home in such an economy, and she herself functions as its main sign in the novel. Becky is the bearer of the new, as signaled from the very opening of the novel when she flings away Dr. Johnson's venerable eighteenth- century dictionary. Without roots or a sense of place, Becky is infinitely adaptable and extraordinarily resilient, as she repeatedly rises, falls, and then recoups to try again. Becky always knows that in her world things are less important as substances than as signs, and she consistently «reads» the world in this way. She (like her author) is keenly aware of the semiotic dimension of culture, and of all the central characters, she is also the most adept at handling money, the pure signifier. For Becky the world is less given than constructed; words and signs do not so much reflect as produce meaning and the world. The most important skills, therefore, are pragmatic ones that enable one to decipher and manipulate the signs that count: money, reputation, status, and so forth. To achieve such pragmatic skill, one needs a sense of how the structure of values in a society works, and Becky achieves this early. By the time she is left alone in Brussels amid rumours of a Napoleonic victory, she has a finely honed sense of the economic rules of supply and demand. When Jos Sedley comes to her in a panic, wanting to buy horses so that he can leave the city, Becky demands a high price: 'Rebecca, measuring the value of the goods which she had for sale by Jos's eagerness to purchase, as well as by the scarcity of the article, put upon her horses a price so prodigious as to make even the civilian [Jos] draw back.' Jos pays, of course, and in this way he gives Becky her start as a businesswoman dealing in what one might call the informal sectors of the economy, a career that cul- 412- minates in her accumulation of a hoard of jewels and money from the cynical but indulgent rake, Lord Steyne.
With Steyne, as in all her dealings, Becky depends on a certain kind of credit. She consistently obtains goods and services and money by manufacturing an appropriate reputation. So it is entirely in keeping that when she and Rawdon live in Paris after Waterloo, they do so entirely on credit. Thackeray recounts the story of their sojourn there in chapter 36, aptly titled 'How to Live Well on Nothing a Year.' The chapter records some of Becky's most effective demonstrations of her skill in handling the abstract counters of credit, for the main source of the couple's income in Paris is the rumor of Rawdon's expectation of an immense legacy from his rich old aunt, Miss Crawley (who has in fact disinherited him). Rawdon's gambling receipts provide a minimum of ready money, but these receipts begin to dwindle, and Becky realizes that their capital will soon be 'zero.' They must seek their fortune back in England.
Unfortunately, there is the little matter of bills in Paris and debts in London. To elude the current bills, Becky mounts an elaborate charade of the «death» of the rich aunt, and she succeeds superbly, getting out of Paris with the unpaid landlord and landlady 'smiling farewell' as she goes. Their smiles do not last long, and the landlord ends up cursing 'the English nation' for 'the rest of his natural life.' Meanwhile, Becky goes to London where she persuades Rawdon's creditors to settle his debts for one-tenth of their value, a success in negotiation that prompts a lawyer involved in the deal to declare that 'there was no professional man who could beat her.' The stage is now set for the assault on English society mounted by Becky on the strength of her investment in Lord Steyne. When that investment fails, a host of other people also lose, as did the unpaid small businesses and working people left behind in Paris. This time the landlord pays an even higher price, for Raggles and his family face ruin. Raggles, former butler to Miss Crawley, has extended credit to Becky and Rawdon for four years, and on the day after her fall, he laments that he has bills coming due and no means to meet them: 'He would be sold up and turned out of his shop and his house, because he had trusted to the Crawley family.'
It is in this general context of dependence on and betrayal of trust in a credit economy that the moralized figure of the Thackerayan gentleman takes his place. Marked by his code of duty, honor, and honesty, the gentleman helps to induce stability into the system. He acts in a -413- sense as an institution, representing an attempt to formally constitute two concepts traditionally set up as oppositions in political and moral thought: virtue and commerce. Through the gentlemanly code, writers like Thackeray attempted to bring virtue into commerce or, more precisely, to encourage the formation of virtues useful to a high-risk and volatile economy. The emphasis on honesty and purity and stoicism represents an attempt to counter the instabilities and uncertainties of the economy at the level of individual performance and response. It operates as a kind of social discipline, encouraging the formation of certain habits and types of behavior, much as the voluntary societies of tradesmen formed in the previous century often encouraged prudence and integrity by making character rather than class or occupation the basis of entry into the society. The code of gentlemanly conduct also acts as a form of reliable information in a system where information is crucial but uncertain. A money economy depends on information and more particularly on kept promises, and the promise of a gentleman (in theory) can be relied upon. A gentleman, then, is literally one who is worthy of credit, and gentlemanliness itself becomes a sign of creditworthiness. The difficulty, of course, is that there proves to be no distinctive, unequivocal sign of gentlemanliness. And the problem is compounded by the fact that the modern gentleman, detached both from the land and from any specific occupation, is a highly abstract construct. The abstract nature of the gentleman indeed provides a useful flexibility for countering the elusive abstractions of a credit economy. But how is one to know that one is dealing with a gentleman? Certain signs (manners, accent, family pedigree) can be readily copied or faked, and the inner «truth» that constitutes the ground of the gentleman does not yield itself up to ready representations. Hence there arises in a writer like Thackeray a virtual obsession with identifying the «true» gentleman.
Vanity Fair is his first full-scale attempt to do so (his earlier narratives offered only partial accounts), and in it two main methods dominate. First, Thackeray provides a historical context for his argument by dramatizing a shift in the notion of the gentleman within the aristocracy itself in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Second, he works didactically by constructing in William Dobbin a model of the exemplary modern gentleman. The Crawley men lie at the center of the historical argument, and in the shift from the old Sir Pitt to the new Sir Pitt Thackeray exemplifies a change in the mode of gentility practiced -414- by the landed classes that signals their accommodation with the mercantile classes.
Old Sir Pitt Crawley, member of Parliament for the 'rotten borough' of Queen's Crawley, is a gentleman by virtue of birth, and that for him is sufficient. Nor do his crude manners, brutal behavior, inferior education, and poverty affect his status. This 'sordid and foul' man, the narrator reports, is regarded as 'a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state.' He has encumbered his estate under a huge load of debt, some of it inherited but much the result of either his frequent litigations or his disastrous financial speculations. He turns his domestic space into a space of rivalry, tyranny, and cruelty. Linked to primary drives and to the body, he is depicted under the negative sign of unreason. Sir Pitt can barely write, and his speech is earthy and direct; his emotions are fierce and elemental, and sexual motifs accompany him right up to his undignified death.
By contrast, his elder son, the younger Pitt, is cast in the rational motifs of restraint and prudence. Equally repellent in his own way-calculating, cold, and hypocritical-the younger Pitt reflects changes in the culture of his class since his father's youth. He writes a pamphlet on malt, illustrating the new authority of economic discourse in his day; he cultivates the new politics represented by Wilberforce and the fight against the slave trade; and his ostentatious religiosity points to the way in which the evangelical religious revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century penetrated even the upper classes. By his behavior and interests, in short, Pitt testifies to a new seriousness and sobriety in hereditary gentlemen, including a new sense of financial responsibility. Upon coming into his paternal inheritance, he immediately clears the estate of debt, and he improves both the country estate and the town house.
Unlike his slovenly and inarticulate father, who was associated with the land and the outdoors, the younger Sir Pitt is linked to texts and to interior spaces like the study. And in all things, he is thoroughly respectable and conventional. His desk, for instance, is covered with precisely those texts appropriate to a serious parliamentarian and Tory gentleman of the new modern age: parliamentary blue books, drafts of legislative bills, political pamphlets, the Quarterly Review, the Court Guide, and sermons. The appropriateness extends to his very appearance: 'fresh, neat, smugly shaved, with a waxy clean face… in a starched cravat and a grey flannel dressing-gown-a real old English -415- gentleman, in a word-a model of neatness and every propriety.' Smug and calculating, Pitt lacks the generous virtues that were central to Thackeray's concept of the gentleman, and on this point Pitt's disreputable younger brother provides an exemplary lesson.
Through Rawdon Crawley, Thackeray suggests that one may in fact acquire genuine virtue rather than simply its outward signs, as does the younger Pitt. At the beginning of the novel, Rawdon is defined as a typical aristocratic young «blood» of the Regency period. He belongs to the fashionable Life Guards, and he lives a fast life,
