Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use all her wit, charm and considerable sex appeal to escape her drab destiny as a governess. From London's ballrooms to the battlefields of Waterloo, the bewitching Becky works her wiles on a gallery of memorable characters, including her lecherous employer, Sir Pitt, his rich sister, Miss Crawley, and Pitt's dashing son, Rawdon, the first of Becky's misguided sexual entanglements.

Although scholars are aware that serialization was the usual publication format for the Victorian novel, few take into account how this special reading experience affected the meaning of Thackeray's novels for his audience. Thackeray used a number of techniques to encourage his readers to take an active and prolonged part in his installment fiction. Michael Lund's study focuses on the reading of Thackeray's novels and investigates how Victorian understanding of Vanity Fair and Thackeray's other major texts was significantly shaped by the manner in which readers encountered these novels. Situating modern readers in the context of the Victorian audience, particularly within the monthly serial mode, Lund demonstrates in what ways Thackeray made use of his readers' prolonged commitment to his fictional worlds to shape and refine Victorian culture in positive ways.

A rich and evocative portrait of one of the greatest authors of Victorian England Who was William Makepeace Thackeray? Was he the wealthy dilettante who came to London in the 1830s and squandered his fortune on newspapers? Was he the impoverished freelance author of the 1840s who scrapped for every penny he could get? Or was he the great writer who published Vanity Fair in 1847, skewering Victorian society and ensuring his literary legacy? Throughout the many phases of his life, Thackeray remained an enigma. He was friendly but standoffish, generous yet miserly, confident and utterly terrified of failure. A century and a half after Thackeray’s death, D. J. Taylor has produced a biography that tackles the complexities of these contradictions and restores Thackeray to his place in the literary pantheon. His fortune lost by the time he was thirty, his personal life in constant torment, Thackeray’s story is as dramatic as that of any of his characters. In Thackeray, the man can finally be seen in full.