The tale, however, will not be denied for long. Others – but we will not anticipate those'). Thackeray was highly conscious of his audience and repeatedly breaks off from his story to buttonhole and tease his readers ('the present chapter (8), is very mild. This makes the irruptions of violence all the more shocking, as in the death of George Osborne, 'lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart' on the field of Waterloo, which occurs almost exactly halfway through the narrative. Unlike Tolstoy, whose War and Peace was influenced by Vanity Fair, Thackeray was squeamish about military matters, and chose to leave most of the fighting off-stage. The climax of the novel comes with the battle of Waterloo. In contemporary terms that would be like a modern literary novelist setting their scene during the second world war, or the blitz. Writing mid-century, he set his masterpiece in Regency England during the Napoleonic wars, intending the lessons of his tale to be applied equally to his own times.

Thackeray's intention was satirical and realistic. As a title, however, 'Vanity Fair' set the tone of the novel in its depiction of a society, rather as 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' did for Tom Wolfe (who also illustrated his own work) in 1987.

Unlike Bunyan, Thackeray was hardly a die-hard Christian, but rather a man who relished a life of pleasure and luxury, and who, on the evidence of his letters, found much of the Bible either ludicrous or distasteful. 'Vanity Fair', a title that came in a eureka moment to the author in bed one night, actually derives from Pilgrim's Progress (no 1 in this series) and refers to the fair set up by the devils Beelzebub and Apollyon in the town of Vanity. Early drafts of the book, which had the working title 'a novel without a hero' lacked the all-important figure of William Dobbin, a thoroughly good and likable character who owes much to Thackeray himself.

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