I’ve just realised that I haven’t explained the comment that I made in my last University Challenge review that there is a strange connection between “Jane Eyre” and “Vanity Fair”. Allow me to remedy that situation. Charlotte Bronte was rather taken with Thackeray’s book, and in the preface to the second edition of “Jane Eyre” she waxed lyrical about Thackeray’s crusading zeal for social reform in his satire and dedicated the edition to him.
She was rather overstating the crusading zeal for social
reform. I yield to no one in my admiration for and love of Thackeray and his
greatest work, but I somehow feel he was far more interested in making his
readers laugh than making them rise up and demand social justice in the way
that Dickens, for example, did. But then Charlotte Bronte did have something of
a lack of a sense of humour. She visited Thackeray and stayed with him for a
while in 1851 to pay a visit to the Great Exhibition and by all accounts her
found her intense nature and lack of humour to be quite trying. Personally, I don’t
think Charlotte Bronte quite ‘got’ “Vanity Fair”
Thackeray’s wife Isabella had been confined to a mental
institution before Jane Eyre was published and she remained there for the rest
of her life, which ended decades after Thackeray’s. This was well known in
literary circles in London. So when the unknown author Currer Bell published
this story in which the main male protagonist had a wife who was locked up in
an attic, speculation linked the unwitting Thackeray with the mysterious Currer
Bell.
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