They kiss, but this narrator can’t be doing with any false sentiment. When George Osborne arrives, the son of a wealthy neighbour and someone Amelia first met as a child, their futures could not be more clearly set out. Perish the thought-by the morning, she’s forgotten her objections.Īny reader knows how it works, of course, and Thackeray is poking fun at it by way of the man-of-the-world persona he’s been presenting since the start. There must be somebody better in the marriage market for hm, she thinks… until Sedley reminds her that as a shy ‘collector’ in an Indian backwater he’s much more likely to end up with a black wife, and they will end up with a dozen dark grandchildren. When Amelia’s father tells his wife that Becky is ‘setting her cap’ at their son, the mother is outraged. Becky is staying with her innocent friend Amelia Sedley, the stockbroker’s daughter. At the same time he’s reminding us that mothers, in this world, are the most mercenary of all. Becky Sharp, by this time, has shown that she can get on perfectly well without anybody’s help at all, and Thackeray’s mock-sentimental reference to her orphaned state is really a veiled reminder to the reader of exactly this. Not that we should take little asides like this at face value. As his non-heroine reaches the endgame in her attempt to catch a wealthy suitor, we get this: ‘ah! how Rebecca now felt the want of a mother!’ She, a mother, ‘would have managed the business in ten minutes….’ Whatever it takes for her to survive-in fact, it’s about prospering rather than merely surviving-Thackeray is going to present the case for her defence.

He gives us two young women from very different backgrounds, and he wants to remind us how, without the support of either a loving family or their money, the one who isn’t the daughter of a stockbroker is in a very hostile environment.

We’re being offered a satire of life in England in the 19th Century, and this author isn’t in the business of condemning a young woman who has to fend for herself in a harshly unfair world.

So far, ‘Rebecca’ isn’t presented as any kind of villain. Will her decidedly mercenary attempt to make her way in the world continue to be the main driver of everything in it? We’ll have to wait and see. Thackeray’s urbane narrator explains it from the start, and uses these early chapters to take us through her first (failed) attempt to carry it out. Having read this ‘novel without a hero’ a very long time ago, all I remember is the unapologetically anti-heroic nature of Becky Sharp’s project.

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