"Vanity fair" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... traditional. The only difference is that their tradition goes back to books instead of life. Middle-sized authors—the very good and the probably enduring—are successful largely because they have gripped a tradition and followed it through to contemporary life. This is what Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," Howells in "The Rise of Silas Lapham," and Mrs. Wharton in "The House of Mirth." But the back- to-nature books—both the sound ones and those shameless exposures of the private emotions of ground hogs and turtles that call themselves nature books—are the most traditional of all. For ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... very slowly. "Catherine," "The Great Hoggarty Diamond," "Barry Lyndon," and several volumes of travel had failed to gain much attention before the "Snob Papers," issued in "Punch" in 1846, brought him fame. In the January of the next year "Vanity Fair" began to appear in monthly numbers, and by the time it was finished Thackeray had taken his place in the front rank of his profession. "Pendennis" followed in 1850, and sustained ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... brush, and half an eye can see it. Every head has a soft place in it, and every heart has its black drop. Every rose has its prickles, and every day its night. Even the sun shows spots, and the skies are darkened with clouds. Nobody is so wise but he has folly enough to stock a stall at Vanity Fair. Where I could not see the fool's cap, I have nevertheless heard the bells jingle. As there is no sunshine without some shadows, so is all human good mixed up with more or less of evil; even poor-law guardians have their little failings, and parish beadles are not wholly of heavenly nature. The ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... gave myself the task of making a little selection from what I had written since last I formed a book of essays, I had no notion that I had put, as it were, my eggs into so many baskets—The Saturday Review, The New Quarterly, The New Liberal Review, Vanity Fair, The Daily Mail, Literature, The Traveller, The Pall Mall Magazine, The May Book, The Souvenir Book of Charing Cross Hospital Bazaar, The Cornhill Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and The Anglo-Saxon Review...Ouf! But the sigh of relief that I heave at the end of the list is accompanied by a smile of ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... "upon the news of the day, topics of business, politics, or the lighter matters of amusement; while religion, though indubitably the main thing at heart, is thrown tastefully into the background." The train stops for refreshment at Vanity Fair. Indeed, the whole arrangements are admirable—up to a certain point. But it seems there are difficulties at the other terminus which the directors have not hitherto been able to overcome. On the whole, we are left with the persuasion that it is safer to go the old road, and in the old ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... crowded like Vanity Fair. There was a railway in progress near, and the navvies and other "roughs" came flocking in by hundreds, so that the municipal authorities, justly apprehensive of a row, concentrated the cohorts of their police, and swore in no end of specials ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... material to the magazines and been paid for it, clap it into book-covers and give it another squeeze. But in the present case the author is of a nice conscience and anxious to place responsibility where it is due. He therefore wishes to make all proper acknowledgments to the editors of Vanity Fair, The American Magazine, The Popular Magazine, Life, Puck, The Century, Methuen's Annual, and all others who are in any way implicated in ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on the couch, and light the brass student lamp at my elbow, and read and read and read one book isn't enough. I have four going at once. Just now, they're Tennyson's poems and Vanity Fair and Kipling's Plain Tales and—don't laugh—Little Women. I find that I am the only girl in college who wasn't brought up on Little Women. I haven't told anybody though (that WOULD stamp me as queer). I just quietly ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... thought of it chiefly as a running fight with the Devil. Outside the covers of the Bible, little existed save temptations for the soul. No sentence in The Pilgrim's Progress is more suggestive of Bunyan's view of life than that in which the merchandise of Vanity Fair is described as including "delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not." It is no wonder that one to whom so much ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... course of study. He began his literary career as a contributor to "Fraser's Magazine," under the assumed name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh, and afterwards contributed to the column of "Punch." The first novel published under Thackeray's own name was "Vanity Fair," which is regarded by many as his greatest work. He afterwards wrote a large number of novels, tales, and poems, most of which were illustrated by sketches drawn by himself. His course of "Lectures on the English Humorists" was delivered in London in 1851, and the following year in several cities ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... suggestive of tender possibilities, expressed now but coldness and obduracy. In a revulsion of feeling he forgot the distance separating the buskined from the fashionable world; the tragic scatterlings from the conventions of Vanity Fair! He forgot all save that she was to him now the one unparagoned ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... regard as the least essential element in the novelist's art. A novel can take the very highest rank without it. There is not any plot to speak of in Lesage's "Gil Blas," and just as little in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," and only a very bad one in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield." Coleridge admired the plot of "Tom Jones," but though one naturally hesitates to differ from a critic of such superb mastery and power, I confess ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... what to do. He was not familiar with Washington, and it was difficult to adjust his feelings and perceptions to its peculiarities. Coming out of the sweet sanity of the Bolton household, this was by contrast the maddest Vanity Fair one could conceive. It seemed to him a feverish, unhealthy atmosphere in which lunacy would be easily developed. He fancied that everybody attached to himself an exaggerated importance, from the fact of being at the national capital, the center of political influence, the fountain ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... diamond-paned window was open and the glittering of the myriad stars flung a light over his room and shone on the little bracket of books above his bed (a Bible, an "Arabian Nights," and tattered copies of "David Copperfield," "Vanity Fair," "Peregrine Pickle," "Tom Jones," and "Harry Lorrequer"), on the little washing stand, a chest of drawers, a cane-bottomed chair, and the little bed. There were no pictures on the walls because of ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... Crawley's collision with the Bishop's wife, Mr. Melnotte dallying in the deserted banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically conceived, fitly embodying a crisis. Or again look at Thackeray. If Rawdon Crawley's blow were not delivered, "Vanity Fair" would cease to be a work of art. That scene is the chief ganglion of the tale; and the discharge of energy from Rawdon's fist is the reward and consolation of the reader. The end of "Esmond" is a yet wider excursion from the author's customary fields; the scene at Castlewood is pure ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... very good at Pfaff's, and to listening to the whirling words of my commensals, at the long board spread for the Bohemians in a cavernous space under the pavement. There were writers for the 'Saturday Press' and for Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day), and some of the artists who drew for the illustrated periodicals. Nothing of their talk remains with me, but the impression remains that it was not so good talk as I had heard in Boston. At ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in 1848, and at once placed its author in the front rank of novelists. It was followed by "Pendennis" in 1850, "Esmond" in 1852, "The Newcomes" in 1855, and "The Virginians" in 1859. Some critics profess to see manifested in "Vanity Fair" a certain sharpness and sarcasm in Thackeray's character which does not appear in his later works, but however much the author may have mellowed in his later novels, "Vanity Fair" continues to be his acknowledged masterpiece, and of all the characters he drew, Becky ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... conspicuous figure of the group. He was an ecclesiastic: he was Pere Silas. Do not fancy, reader, that there was any inconsistency in the priest's presence at this fete. This was not considered a show of Vanity Fair, but a commemoration of patriotic sacrifice. The Church patronised it, even with ostentation. There were troops of priests in ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Cromwell (in his youth better known as the Malleus Monachorum), and had made them dance a break-down. I had also dramatised "The Pilgrim's Progress" for a Christmas Pantomime, and made an important scene of Vanity Fair, with Mr Greatheart, Apollyon, Christiana, Mercy, and Hopeful as the principal characters. The orchestra played music taken from Handel's best known works, but the time was a good deal altered, and altogether the tunes were not exactly as Handel left them. Mr Greatheart ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... a time of life when a man ought to be doing his best; and I almost feel hopeless about Alfred now. I mean, about his doing what he was born to do. . . . On the other hand, Thackeray is progressing greatly in his line: he publishes a Novel in numbers—Vanity Fair—which began dull, I thought: but gets better every number, and has some very fine things indeed in it. He is become a great man I am told: goes to Holland House, and Devonshire House: and for some reason or other, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... he said, in his off-hand way. "If she liked him and he liked her, they would clinch the bargain at once, even if they were so young." And so, when they went down the hill back to the shadow of the elm trees, where Mrs. Dr. Van Buren sat cooling herself and reading "Vanity Fair," there was a tiny ring on Ethelyn's finger, and she had pledged herself to be Frank's wife some ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... deferential compliment of asking what books you are reading. It maybe you are just out of the profound philosophical complexities and pathetic problems of "Les Miserables." Perhaps you have immersed yourself again in the paradoxes of "Vanity Fair," or have been pumping up the flabby tires of your better nature with the fresh air of "David Copperfield." It is possible that "Tess of the Durbervilles," or "A Window in Thrums" has been newly received, and has ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... till Helpful stretches him a hand and drags him out on solid ground and bids him go on his way. Then come Interpreter's house, the Palace Beautiful, the Lions in the way, the Valley of Humiliation, the hard fight with the demon Apollyon, the more terrible Valley of the Shadow, Vanity Fair, and the trial of Faithful. The latter is condemned to death by a jury made up of Mr. Blindman, Mr. Nogood, Mr. Heady, Mr. Liveloose, Mr. Hatelight, and others of their kind to whom questions of justice are committed by the jury system. Most famous is Doubting ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the tobacco smoke and the cheap applause of popular assemblies and on the vanity fair of the professional social patron; in the brilliance of glittering feasts I sought her and in the twilit silence of domestic comfort.... And I ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... Delectable Mountains, and the Celestial City beyond. They were now in a great wilderness, and they walked on together till they came to the town of Vanity, at which a fair is kept all the year long, called Vanity Fair. ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... fellow, who, knowing the weakness of his brothers and sisters in the world, takes advantage of it to make himself a fame and a fortune. Nash, the son of a glass-merchant—Brummell, the hopeful of a small shopkeeper—became the intimates of princes, dukes, and fashionables; were petty kings of Vanity Fair, and were honoured by their subjects. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king; in the realm of folly, the sharper is a monarch. The only proviso is, that the cheat come not within the jurisdiction ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... "Book of Snobs;" "Vanity Fair" with no cover at all; "Scottish Chiefs" in crimson; a brown copy of George Sand's "Teverino;" and next it a green Bailey's "Festus," which I only attacked when mentally rabid, and a little of which went a surprisingly long way; and then a maroon "David Copperfield," whose ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... 'An Anthology of Australian Verse', Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair' and 'Hints to Travellers' in two volumes. McLean spent much of the time reading the Anthology and I started 'Vanity Fair'. The latter beguiled many weary hours in that tent during the journey. I read a good deal aloud and McLean read it afterwards. Correll used to pass the days of confinement arranging ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... wrong,' I returned, with more earnestness than the occasion warranted. 'I feel a strange reluctance to re-enter Vanity Fair. The splendours of a gay wedding are not to my taste. Sara tells me that her reception after the ceremony will be attended by about two hundred guests. To me the idea is simply barbarous. I expect I shall be heartily glad to get back ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... ask how you have been since—since we met last? You are looking extremely well. Has Vanity Fair palled in ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... It was not long before his sketches began to be copied and he became a newspaper favorite. He remained in Cleveland from 1857 to 1860, when he was called to New York to take the editorship of a venture called Vanity Fair. This died soon after. But he did not die with it. A year later, in the fall of 1861, he made his appearance as a lecturer at New London, and met with encouragement. Then he set out en tour, returned to the metropolis, hired a hall and opened ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... led the young art student to believe that he had mistaken his vocation in trying to illustrate the works of other men, and he turned his attention to literature, and afterwards became the one great rival of Dickens, and will be known to all time as the author of "Vanity Fair" and "The Newcomes." None of the writings which made Thackeray's fame appeared during the time of William the Fourth, but his name may be associated with the close of the reign by the incident which brought him into an acquaintanceship ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... receive any glimpses of its meaning, or live a true and divine life in the world; and in the "Sartor" he has embodied and illustrated this in the person and actions of his hero. He saw that religion had become secular; that it was reduced to a mere Sunday holiday and Vanity Fair, taking no vital hold of the lives of men, and radiating, therefore, none of its blessed and beautiful influences about their feet and ways; that human life itself, with all its adornments of beauty and poetry, was in danger of paralysis ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... day when the train thundered into the ancient city of Vanity, where Vanity Fair is still at the height of prosperity, and exhibits an epitome of whatever is brilliant, gay, and fascinating beneath the sun. As I purposed to make a considerable stay here, it gratified me to learn that there is no longer the want of harmony between the town's-people and pilgrims, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sudden decorum, to this Lady Tressady, whom he had been commissioned to take in to dinner. "Quite pretty, but rather—well, ordinary!" he said to himself, with a critical coolness bred of much familiarity with the best things of Vanity Fair. He had been Ancoats's friend at Cambridge, and was now disporting himself in the Guards, but still more—as Letty of course assumed—in the heart of the English well-born world. She knew that he was Lord Naseby, and that some day he would be a marquis. A halo, therefore, shone about him. At the ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... garrulously assured us that Thackeray had spent much of his time as a youth at the vicarage and insisted that a great part of "Vanity Fair" was written there. He even pointed out the room in which he alleged the famous book was produced, and assured us that the great author had found the originals of many of his characters, such as Becky Sharp ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... and Squire Western are not to be found in an age that is busy with railways and telegraphs and the Review of Reviews. Pickwick and Oliver Twist have been improved off the face of the earth by cheap newspapers and sanitary reform. The fun has gone out of Vanity Fair, and the House of the Seven Gables is an hotel ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Into this Vanity Fair the young Marquis de Lafayette was now plunged. The grand world flowed to the feet of the Marquis and Marchioness de Lafayette. More than that, the queen at once took the tall, distinguished-looking young ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... generations of men, who have watched Christian's struggle with Apollyon in the Valley of Humiliation, and followed his footsteps as they trod the Valley of the Shadow of Death, as they passed through the dangers of Vanity Fair, and brought him at last to the Celestial City, and the ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... due to the editors of Ainslie's, The Dial, Pearson's Poetry, Reedy's Mirror, and Vanity Fair, for their kind permission to republish various of ...
— A Few Figs from Thistles • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... The "Vanity Fair" offices impressed me a lot, they're so comfortable, artistic, and full of deathless endeavour. They took the proofs of this book in order to publish one or two extracts from it and sent it back full of the loveliest corrections. I was duly ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... he said, "I had known of this Christian before he started. Step you down to Vanity Fair, Sir Stranger, if the mood take you; and we'll show you as pretty a persuasion against pilgrimage as ever you saw." He opened his mouth where he stood between me and the stars. "... There's many more!" he added with difficulty, as if his rage was too ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... is devoted to a portrayal of existing men and manners. The field is a wide one. The characters may be taken from any class of society. The society novel may bring before us, as in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," what is known as fashionable life. It may again, as in George Eliot's "Adam Bede" or Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," introduce us to the lives of plain people. It may acquaint us, as in Du Maurier's "Trilby," with the Bohemian or artist ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... earlier, belonging to an age already vanishing or vanished; but what could she know about civil war who had been almost an infant at the time? At this moment, she happened to be interested in the baffle of Waterloo, for she was reading "Vanity Fair," and had cried as she ought for poor little Emmy, when her husband, George Osborne, lay dead on the field there, with a bullet through his heart. But how was she to know that here, only a few rods before her, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... will ye that I bring?" Said the King to his daughters three; "For I to Vanity Fair am boun, Now say ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... is the club most difficult of access in the world. To be placed on its rolls distinguishes the new member as greatly as though he had received a vacant Garter or had been caricatured in "Vanity Fair." ...
— In the Fog • Richard Harding Davis
... it is the same thing. Popular authority and the recognition of popular authority are fatal. Thackeray's 'Esmond' is a beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself. In his other novels, in 'Pendennis,' in 'Philip,' in 'Vanity Fair' even, at times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by appealing directly to the sympathies of the public, or by directly mocking at them. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... the tyrant gets them into his power. For a time the way of transgressors is made easy and pleasant. The broad road is shaded, and edged with fair fruits and flowers. The down-hill path is strewn with glittering jewels, the booths of vanity fair are fitted with all manner of delights, and the poor slave goes on, scarce feeling his chains, or knowing of his slavery, till the day of reckoning comes. "There is a way which seemeth right unto ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... first time. The event was of supreme interest to all the world. The engagement that followed next day was fought at Quatre Bras; the great battle of Waterloo took place June 18th, Sunday. Read Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" for description of this night in Brussels. This is a great martial poem—the greatest ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... she had, but it was combativeness with the edge taken off. It served to direct her choice of topics, but not to give asperity or polemical form to her discourses. Suddenly introduced to the very heart of Vanity Fair, she had caught her first inspiration by opposition, and this led her to hold forth on such themes as consecration. But as her acquaintance with people of wealth extended she found that even they, conservative by very force of abundance, were affected by the unbelieving spirit of a critical ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... the past fifty years has been the novel of real life. The failure of "Les Burgraves" in 1843 not more surely signalised the end of French romanticism, than the appearance of "Vanity Fair" in 1848 announced that in England, too, the reign of romance was over. Classicism had given way before romanticism, and now romanticism in turn was yielding to realism. Realism sets itself against that desire of escape from actual ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... again, let as look at the present position of American women in society. In its best aspects social life may be said to be the natural outgrowth of the Christian home. It is something far better than the world, than Vanity Fair, than the Court of Mammon, where all selfish passions meet and parade in deceptive masquerade. It is the selfish element in human nature which pervades what we call the world; self-indulgence, enjoyment, the ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... the way from France to the other side of Belgium in a barge, threading your way through fields, and meadow-lands, and villages, and stopping every now and then at some of the big towns. If you read that charming book "Vanity Fair," you will see that Mr. Thackeray, who wrote it, says that once an Englishman, who went to Belgium for a week, found the eating and drinking on these boats so good that he went backwards and forwards on the canal between Bruges and ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Belgium • George W. T. Omond
... good sample of the way things go in Vanity Fair. We trudge away to our daily work afoot, we treat ourselves to a humble cab through the mud, pause in the park to watch the rich and great, get whisked into a ducal carriage, and come home in state, feeling rather exalted, don't we?" asked the Professor as they went upstairs, ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... speaking, when his mistress came in. The colloquy between him and Beatrix had lasted but a few minutes, during which time Esmond's servant had carried the disastrous news through the household. The army of Vanity Fair, waiting without, gathered up all their fripperies and fled aghast. Tender Lady Castlewood had been in talk above with Dean Atterbury, the pious creature's almoner and director; and the dean had entered with her as a physician whose place was at a sick-bed. Beatrix's ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sights were common in that locality. They were on the high-road that leads to Lingmoor, and to nowhere else. The way seemed as typical of their outcast life-path as a page out of the Pilgrim's Progress. Vanity Fair, where they would fain have tarried if they could, was left far behind them, while to some of them the road was doomed to be the veritable Valley of the Shadow. They were never to see the world, nor partake of its coarse and brutal pleasures—the only ones they cared ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... following books in handy volume size:—Montaigne's Essays, Palgrave's Golden Treasury of English Verse, Lockhart's Life of Napoleon, Autobiography of Cellini, Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers, Lorna Doone, Prescott's Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, Les Miserables, Vanity Fair, Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, Pepys' Diary, Carlyle's French Revolution, The Last of the Mohicans, Westward Ho, Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers, A Tale of Two Cities, and Tolstoi's War and Peace. When these became exhausted I was hard put for reading ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... said he, 'we chose to walk back to our lodgings; but never shall I forget the wicked scenes wherewith we were encountered on the way. Good Master Bunyan, of Elstow, might have added some pages to his account of Vanity Fair had he been with us. The women, be-patched, be-ruddled, and brazen; the men swaggering, roistering, cursing—the brawling, the drabbing, and the drunkenness! It was a fit kingdom to be ruled over by ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... trust in this case we have managed to rise a little above the usual atmosphere of Vanity Fair. ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... such as is seldom convened, even in England. The three speeches which came before Thackeray was called upon were admirably suited to the occasion, and most eloquently spoken. Sir John Potter, who presided, then rose, and after some complimentary allusions to the author of "Vanity Fair," introduced him to the crowd, who welcomed him with ringing plaudits. As he rose, he gave me a half-wink from under his spectacles, as if to say: "Now for it; the others have done very well, but I will show 'em a grace beyond the reach of their art." He began in a clear and charming ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... profit only to ourselves: even in its best conditions it is merely one of the forms of gambling or treasure hunting; it is either leaving the steady plough and the steady pilgrimage of life, to look for silver mines beside the way; or else it is the full stop beside the dice-tables in Vanity Fair —investing all the thoughts and passions of the soul in the fall of the cards, and choosing rather the wild accidents of idle fortune than the calm and accumulative rewards of toil. And this is destructive enough, at least to our peace and virtue. ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... every now and then dwelling for a moment or two upon his own mental and physical declension from the admirable being he once was. He reached the height of his absurdity in describing the resistance of the two pilgrims to the manifold temptations of Vanity Fair, which he so set forth as to take from Christian and Faithful the smallest possible appearance of merit in turning their backs ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the poor man's own, he throws it all back again upon God every day, and thus holds all he has as his instant purchase of the great Merchantman. The poor man's market is as far as possible from being a Vanity Fair, but the catalogues and the sale-lists of that fair may be taken as a specimen of the things that change hands continually in the poor man's market also. For here also are sold such merchandise as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, pleasures ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... illustrates one side of war. It is only when you are ten years away from it, or ten thousand miles away from it, that you forget the dull places, and only the moments loom up which are terrible, picturesque, and momentous. We have read, in "Vanity Fair," of the terror and the mad haste to escape of the people of Brussels on the eve of Waterloo. That is the obvious ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... Bedford Gaol. Each of the three had something to say about the world. To Cromwell it was, as he told his daughter, 'whatever cooleth thine affection after Christ.' Bunyan gave his definition of the world in his picture of Vanity Fair. Milton likened the world to an obscuring mist—a fog that renders dim and indistinct the great realities and vitalities of life. It is an atmosphere that chills the finest delicacies and sensibilities of the soul. It is too subtle and too elusive to be judged by external appearances. In his ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... gesture by silently pointing to heaven." The Wandering Jew may be gone, but the theater of that appalling prologue still exists unchanged. That sigh will penetrate the gloomy cell of the Abbe Faria, the frightful dungeons of the Inquisition, the gilded halls of Vanity Fair, the deep forests of Brahmin and fakir, the jousting list, the audience halls and the petits cabinets of kings of France, sound over the trackless and storm-beaten ocean—will echo, in short, wherever warm blood has jumped in the veins of honest men and wherever vice has sooner or later ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... and Micromegas Goethe's Faust, and Autobiography Thackeray's Vanity Fair Pendennis Dickens' Pickwick David Copperfield Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii George Eliot's Adam Bede ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... 1857. Thence he went to Cleveland, Ohio, as local editor of the Plain Dealer. Here appeared the humorous letters signed "Artemus Ward" and written in the character of an itinerant showman. In 1860 he went to New York as editor of the comic journal Vanity Fair. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... his recapitulation. Sir Ralph's eyes were fixed on a "Vanity Fair" cartoon of the Commissioner of Police hanging framed on the wall. He was trying to readjust his thoughts. From a man who believed himself under deadly suspicion he had suddenly become a confidant of Scotland Yard. He had been released of all fear for himself. And Bob ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... voice was trembling. No answer. A faint string of smoke was rising from a cigarette-tray—a number of Vanity Fair ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... best hat on the hook; The rush of hot air as the door opens wide; And your entry,—that blending of self-possessed pride And humility shown in your perfect-bred stare At the folk, as if wondering how they got there; With other tricks worthy of Vanity Fair. Meanwhile, the safe topic, the beat of the room, Already was losing its freshness and bloom; Young people were yawning, and wondering when The dance would come off; and why didn't it then: When a vague expectation was thrilling the crowd, Lo! the door swung its hinges with utterance proud! And ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... look upon the amazing spectacle presented by the dwellers at the capital was afforded. The things seen by the Pilgrims in a dream were at this Vanity Fair visible in the flesh: "all such merchandise sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, states, lusts, pleasures; and delights of all sorts, as bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, greenbacks, pearls, precious stones, and what not." The ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... to attract attention in a crowd; but still, girls well calculated to 'bring a man to book,' in the country. Mr. Thackeray, who bound up all the home truths in circulation, and many that exist only in the inner chambers of the heart, calling the whole 'Vanity Fair,' says, we think (though we don't exactly know where to lay hand on the passage), that it is not your real striking beauties who are the most dangerous—at all events, that do the most execution—but sly, quiet sort of girls, who do not ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... Ladyship, "I have heard of such a place. It is a kind of Vanity Fair, isn't it, for ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... a stable door, just before there was a fall against it of four shot corpses; and Robert barely managed to get home across the bridges. He had been out walking in the city, apprehending nothing, when the storm gathered and broke. Sad and humiliating it all has been, and the author of 'Vanity Fair' might turn it to better uses for a chapter. By the way, we have just been reading 'Vanity Fair.' Very clever, very effective, but cruel to human nature. A painful book, and not the pain that purifies ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... or the Bard of the Dimbovitza. Tolstoy's novels are good at one time and those of Sienkiewicz at another; and he is fortunate who can relish "Salammbo" and "Tom Brown" and the "Two Admirals" and "Quentin Durward" and "Artemus Ward" and the "Ingoldsby Legends" and "Pickwick" and "Vanity Fair." Why, there are hundreds of books like these, each one of which, if really read, really assimilated, by the person to whom it happens to appeal, will enable that person quite unconsciously to furnish himself with much ammunition ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... finds a place for all. Sometimes he criticises as a far-off observer, gazing with a sort of cynical amusement at this human raree-show; at others he speaks as though he himself were in the very midst of the bustling frivolity of the Roman Vanity Fair, and a sufferer from its follies. Then his tone seems to deepen into a grave intensity of remonstrance, as he exposes its hollowness, its heartlessness, and its blindness to the ...
— English Satires • Various
... much-abused earth. But he wipes his spectacles, and clears away the mist of speculation and fancy, which has bedimmed his eyes, and looks about him more hopefully and trustfully than in the days when he walked through Vanity Fair and saw how Mr. Timms, with not a penny in the bank, pinched himself to give a little dinner in imitation of a great lord who gave a great dinner, and had gold beyond his count; snobs, who wore paste jewels and cotton-backed ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... famous passages in all of Thackeray's works is the description of the battle of Waterloo in "Vanity Fair," ch. XXXII: ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... of them rogues—has been the country most slandered by history precisely because it championed the Counter-Reformation. And because its arrogance has prevented it from stepping down into the public forum, into the world's vanity fair, and publishing its ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... counterpart of Johnson's end and of one striking part of his character may be found in Mr. Fearing in The Pilgrim's Progress, part ii. '"Mr. Fearing was," said Honesty, "a very zealous man. Difficulty, lions, or Vanity Fair he feared not at all; it was only sin, death, and hell that were to him a terror, because he had some doubts about his interest in that celestial country." "I dare believe," Greatheart replied, "that, as the proverb is, he ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... been a business man in New York. I started "Vanity Fair," with Charles Browne [Artemus Ward] as an assistant, and I remember how I used to suggest the subjects to him, and how he used to write out the series of articles which have since become so widely known. The "Revue des Deux Mondes" recently gave a detailed account ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... and have drawn out the persons who were involved in Hosley's career by many conversations. If this statement does not satisfy, then I have one that will. I quote that great authority, William Makepeace Thackeray, who tells us in Vanity Fair that a novelist is supposed to know everything, and am I not treating the subject as a novelist, using for the most part fictitious names and places to shield from public ridicule the good people whose judgment may seem weak, ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... and on some maiden faces there hovered that look of adoring ecstasy with which the old maidens graced their angels. Then, when all the due rites had been performed, the company turned and began to walk towards the booths of their small Vanity Fair. Lord Beamys led the way with Mrs. Gervase, Mrs. Dixon followed with Sir Vivian Ponsonby, and the multitudes that followed cried, saying, "What a dear old man!"—"Isn't it kind of him to come all this way?"—"What a sweet expression, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... was going into the wilderness after his own stray sheep, and he had a conviction that any path of duty is a safe path. He said little to any one. The people looked strangely on him. He almost fancied himself to be Christian going through Vanity Fair. ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... exact reverse of this. In the present work of men, meanness, aimlessness, unsightliness: thin-walled, lath-divided, narrow-garreted houses of clay; booths of a darksome Vanity Fair, busily base. ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... most desponding view of the situation. Thus Englishmen reading the accounts of men who fought at Waterloo are too ready to disbelieve representations of what was taking place in the rear of the army, and to think Thackeray's life-like picture in Vanity Fair of the state of Brussels must be overdrawn. Indeed, in this very battle of Waterloo, Zieten began to retreat when his help was most required, because one of his aides de camp told him that the right wing of the English was in full retreat. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... all, went astray on several points of history and geography. The authors of the Old Testament talked about "the hare that cheweth the cud." And, if any reader should fail to see the application of these instances to modern fiction, I can only recommend him to read Vanity Fair and find out how many children had the Rev. Bute Crawley, and what were their names. No, the trouble with Manalive is not in its casual, happy-go-lucky construction. It is rather in a certain lack of ease, a tendency to exaggerate effects, a continual stirring up ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... a good many works, too, of general literature, but rather oddly selected, as will happen where one makes up his library chiefly by writing book-notices: Peter Bayne's Essays; Coleridge; the first volume of Masson's Life of Milton; Vanity Fair; the Dutch Republic; the Plurality of Worlds; and Mommsen's Rome. That very attractive book in red you need not take down; it is only the history of Norwalk, Conn., with the residence of J. T. Wales, Esq., for a frontispiece; the cover is all there is to it. Finally, there are ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... entertaining. The famous Sidonia, the Jew financier, is a favorite with the author, and betrays his affection and respect for race. Lord Monmouth, the wild peer, is a rival of the "Marquis of Steyne" and worthy of a place in 'Vanity Fair'; the political intriguers are photographed from life, the pictures of fashionable London tickle both the vanity and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... which she was able and willing to furnish; he was a commonplace man and his desires were commonplace—easily understood and satisfied. He liked a pretty wife, a handsome house, a good dinner with fine wine and jolly company; he liked high-stepping horses, a natty turn-out, and the smile of Vanity Fair. Ethel's tastes were similar, and their lives so far had fitted into each other without a single crevice. The Cumberlands were grim and unbending, it is true, and after that one concession to fraternal feeling, made no more; they held themselves rigidly aloof from the pair, and invested all intercourse ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... excuse for these expeditions. Sir Herbert Tree had staged "Colonel Newcome"; we had ourselves plotted a dramatization of "Pendennis"; Mrs. Fiske had given "Vanity Fair"; so off we went, down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, searching for the place, duly placarded, where Thackeray lunched in the days of the "Paris Sketch-book" and the ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... that Thackeray wrote his first great novel, his greatest some people think, Vanity Fair. I cannot tell you about it now, but when you are a very little older you will like to read of clever and disagreeable Becky Sharp, of dear Dobbin, and foolish Amelia, and all the rest of the interesting people ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... who has worked among the insane, and done his duty by them, can testify to cases in point; and even casual observers have noted the fact that the insane are oftentimes appreciative. Consider the experience of Thackeray, as related by himself in "Vanity Fair" (Chapter LVII). "I recollect," he writes, "seeing, years ago, at the prison for idiots and madmen, at Bicetre, near Paris, a poor wretch bent down under the bondage of his imprisonment and his personal infirmity, to whom one of our party gave a halfpennyworth of snuff in a cornet or 'screw' of ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... sure, an allegory, but one of those allegories which seem inherent in the human mind and hence more natural than the most direct narrative. For all men life is indeed a journey, and the Slough of Despond, Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair, and the Valley of Humiliation are places where in one sense or another every human soul has often struggled and suffered; so that every reader goes hand in hand with Christian and his friends, fears for them in their dangers and rejoices in their escapes. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... myself!" she said. "My name is Bertha Haughton. I'm a neighbour of yours. No!" she added, laughing, as Peggy glanced involuntarily across the way. "That is Vanity Fair. I don't live there; I live in the Owls' Nest, some way down ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... rattles against the young men's backs, and the young men return the compliment. There were theatrical booths, fighting men and jugglers, and in the midst of the confusion little boys very solicitous to brush your boots. The scene reminded me of Bunyan's description of Vanity Fair. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... pass through the dismal Vale of Humiliation, and there meet in deadly fight the terrible monster Apollyon; then through the Valley and Shadow of Death, with all its doleful sights and sounds; then through the wicked city of Vanity Fair; then through the gloomy domains of Doubting Castle and Giant Despair,—all before he could hope to set foot on these Delectable Mountains ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... of "The New York Idea" was not Mr. Mitchell's first dramatic work for Mrs. Fiske. At the New York Fifth Avenue Theatre, on September 12, 1899, she appeared in "Becky Sharp," his successful version of Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which held the stage for some time, and was later revived with considerable renewal of its former interest. Two years after, rival versions were presented in London, one by David Balsillie (Theatre Royal, Croydon, June 24, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... N. fashion, style, ton, bon ton^, society; good society, polite society; monde [Fr.]; drawing-room, civilized life, civilization, town, beau monde [Fr.], high life, court; world; fashionable world, gay world; Vanity Fair; show &c (ostentation) 822. manners, breeding &c (politeness) 894; air, demeanor &c (appearance) 448; savoir faire [Fr.]; gentlemanliness^, gentility, decorum, propriety, bienseance [Fr.]; conventions of society; Mrs. Grundy; punctilio; form, formality; etiquette, point of etiquette; dress &c 225. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... "Like Christian in Vanity Fair as long as she did endure, for she retired to the spinsters on the back stairs. I offered to bring her home, and she accepted with delight, but I dropped her in the village to bestow her presents. I was determined to come on ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... also be stated as an effect of this excursion into Vanity Fair, that when he woke the next morning he was in some doubt as to whether he should visit his Congressman or send for that individual to call upon him. He had felt the subtle flattery of attention from that section of colored society which imitates—only imitates, it is true, ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... was very quiet, and his bearing had none of the keen intentness that characterized his associates. The trio carried General Belknap safely through his troubles. The evidence was very remarkable and gave a curious picture of "Vanity Fair." The bargain made by Marsh with the first wife; the huckstering and business matters growing out of it, talked about and discussed over her coffin; the marriage of the Secretary soon after with the sister of the then dead wife; the frequent and enormous sums paid ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... sports of Stratford and surrounding villages than in the production of corn, cabbage, turnips and potatoes. Where fun was to be found William raised the auction and the highest bidder at the booths of vanity fair. He was athletic in mind and body, and forever like a cribbed lion or caged eagle, struggled to shake off his rural environments and dash away into the ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... and unlike London these places sound: but meetings were not only held in secluded spots, such as the garden in White Cross Street, and the house in Rainbow Alley, they were also held in the tumultuous centres of Vanity Fair. ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... well worth while looking upon. There were no fine houses at that time, and no great counting houses built of brick, such as you may find nowadays, but a crowd of board and wattled huts huddled along the streets, and all so gay with flags and bits of color that Vanity Fair itself could not have been gayer. To this place came all the pirates and buccaneers that infested those parts, and men shouted and swore and gambled, and poured out money like water, and then maybe wound up their merrymaking by dying of ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... narrow bye-street of Piccadilly he had gone, and up into those 'digs' on the first floor, with their little dark hall, their Van Beers' drawing and Vanity Fair cartoons, and prints of racehorses, and of the old Nightgown Steeplechase; with the big chairs, and all the paraphernalia of Race Guides and race-glasses, fox-masks and stags'-horns, and hunting-whips. And yet, something that from ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... should be delicately clean, the birds, the fishes she lived on, and she be bred amidst running sores and vermin, was one of the mysteries I pondered over when we took to our canoes. For such a pair of eyes, for those exquisite features, some scraggy denizen of Vanity Fair would have given a king's ransom. Yet here was a thing of beauty, dropped by a vile freak of Nature into an appalling environment of filth and ignorance; a creature destined, no doubt, to spring into ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... the ball, all ascribe a certain pleasure to their employment, which they themselves give it. Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat. We fancy that our civilization has got on far, but we still come back to our primers. Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" is pathetic in its name, and in his use of the name. It is an admission from a man of the world in the London of 1850, that poor old Puritan Bunyan was right in his perception of the London of 1650. And yet now, in Thackeray, is the added wisdom or skepticism, that though this be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... whirlpool!—'tis seething and seething: On! No time for shrieking out, no time for breathing; All toiling and moiling—some feebler, some bolder, But each sees a fiend-face grin over his shoulder: Thus merrily live they in Vanity Fair! ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... best known, but by some critics acclaimed as the finest, of Thackeray's works—appeared originally as a serial a few years before VANITY FAIR was written; yet it was not published in book form, and then not by itself, until after the publication of VANITY FAIR, PENDENNIS, ESMOND and THE NEWCOMES had placed its author in the forefront of the literary men of the day. So many years after the event we cannot help wondering ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lady Audrey's Secret, Canterbury Tales, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Plain Facts About Life, Arabian Nights, Golden Treasury, Childe Harold, To Have and to Hold, Tales from Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, Old Curiosity Shop, Diary of Marie Baschkertcheff, Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Les Miserables, Stories of the Operas, and a red volume rescued from propping up ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst |
