I. Narrative Holes, Bullet Holes

The significance of the Waterloo episode in Vanity Fair remains somewhat obscure. Early reviewers of the novel either ignored it or suggested its downright insignificance: “The battle of Waterloo, it is true, is introduced; but as far as regards the story, it brings about only one death, and one bankruptcy, which might either of them have happened in a hundred of other ways” (Rigby 79). Furthermore, when compared to Stendhal's La chartreuse de Parme and Hugo's Les misérables, two novels where a report of the battle is at least attempted, Vanity Fair looks exceptional.Footnote ¹ The novel's mimetic elusiveness vis-à-vis the battle has been a source of puzzle and the object of some critical contention. In line with John Carey, who argued that “Vanity Fair is built round a thunderous void” (189), John Sutherland suggested that “Thackeray's battlefield reticence” impinged on the novel's “historical fabric” producing “gaping, but evidently carefully placed, holes” (15), the larger being (no pun intended) Waterloo. Some critics explained away this omission by invoking Thackeray's anti-heroic restraint, a position best expressed by Tolstoy: “For an historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men” (1309).Footnote ² Other readers blamed the silencing effect of an elegiac trauma – an “agony of glory,” in Coleridge's terms – not uncommonly affecting the winning side in a violent conflict.Footnote ³ One could also adduce reasons of epistemological honesty, in line with Tolstoy's blunt assertion that “in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie” (1310).

But these explanations are blurred by intimations of deeper ideological irony, for Thackeray's reticence may well harbor a parody of anti-Tory reserve.Footnote ⁴ What no amount of irony can defeat is the suspicion that Waterloo stands in the novel for History as “the experience of Necessity,” and that as such it forestalls “its thematization or reification as a mere object of representation” (Jameson 102).Footnote ⁵ In this view, the battle's resistance to mimesis works as an index to its centrality in the novel's overall design.Footnote ⁶ Thackeray's treatment of the Waterloo material confirms Charlotte Brontë's observation that he “only hints at the dead men's bones . . . but, his hint is more vivid than other men's elaborate explanations” (52). Thackeray's neoclassical instinct, unswervingly committed to decorum, drew him to expostulate along similar lines: “Pathos I hold should be very occasional indeed in humorous works and indicated rather than expressed or expressed very rarely” (“Letter to Robert Bell” 68). Yet, we fear, in Vanity Fair the indication overspilled into expression.

Indeed, despite its descriptive foreclosure, the truncated Waterloo-episode plays a pivotal role in the novel, structurally, thematically, and symbolically.Footnote ⁷ It closes in a famous understated climax, a brutal peripeteia turning on a bullet hole – “Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart” (406; ch. 32) – placed at the exact center of the text, at the end of chapter 32 in a novel with 65 chapters. This closing is, in Ruskin's apt terms, a “hammer-stroke” (87) resonating in all possible directions. From a structural standpoint, Waterloo is the blind locus where various narrative lines, notably George's erotic intrigue and Amelia's mock-epic campaign, are made to converge and ultimately vanish. Evidence of George's intended infidelity, “The Letter before Waterloo,” is momentously produced in the final chapter, thus sanctioning the one twist, Amelia's turning to Dobbin, that brings the plot to rest. No important character in the novel remains unchanged after Waterloo. A complex web of secrecy and shame, concocted at the battle's eve, mars the subsequent trajectory of the puppets. The chiasmus outlined by their lives, in the forms of amor militiae and militia amoris, is abruptly interrupted by a death, George's, almost coincidental with the inception of two children that will in turn shape the new domestic fate of the characters involved. Before Waterloo, the narrator had gone to great lengths to show how ridiculously the imperatives of chronological coincidence placed the petty incidents in the lives of these Londoners alongside the major events in European history. After Waterloo, this history has suddenly become the most crucial ingredient in their lives. It is worth noting that Vanity Fair radically differs from Barry Lyndon, Henry Esmond, and The Virginians — narratives strongly influenced by Scott – in that public history is reduced to a minimum, and yet to that painful minimum that hurts by inscribing itself as a hole.Footnote ⁸

That Thackeray should resort to modes of symbolic indirection in order to register the presence of History in private life is not surprising. He had little interest in the inner workings of historical change, whether at home or abroad. In all of his novels where it is present, the arch-historical phenomenon of war appears as a given without retrievable cause. It is simply there, gross and inexorable, just to remind us that, as Becky urged, “revenge may be wicked, but it's natural” (15). Besides, very little self-deceit is needed to take part in a war: after Fabrice in La chartreuse de Parme, Barry Lyndon, George Osborne, and Dobbin – all three readers of “romantic books” (Vanity Fair 56) – are pricked by dreams of inflated heroism. In his writings as amateurish historian, Thackeray cynically tended to boil down historical violence to inescapable circularity.Footnote ⁹ Military history (a redundant phrase for Thackeray) could only be accounted for in two possible ways, the panegyric and the satire, neither of which afforded the realistic truth Thackeray yearned for.Footnote ¹⁰ Still, as an admirer of Cervantes and Fielding he was drawn to these modes of mock-epic indirection. Vanity Fair abounds in metafictive provisos denouncing its stylistic inability to offer a heroic rendering of its action. The opposite temptation, satire, is less skillfully avoided, for the narrator indulges in heavily burlesque irony, especially in his protracted description of Amelia and Becky's erotic campaign. The tone he pursues, one of unmediated truth, dominates The History of Pendennis rather than the earlier Vanity Fair, probably because the rash contingency of war present in his Waterloo novel sat rather uneasily with the via media of realism. Thackeray famously stated in his preface to Pendennis that “if truth is not always pleasant, at any rate truth is best.” And yet, one must insist, Waterloo's unpleasant truth had been very obliquely conveyed, nearly obliterated, in his earlier novel.

II. Towards a Poetics of Commemoration

In this essay, such obliquity is read as an index of higher significance. Three major hypotheses make up its argumentative thrust. First, that Waterloo is material to the novel's meaning. Second, that George Osborne, dead at Waterloo, is the banished hero of the novel without a hero. And third, that the rhetorical mode that best encapsulates the novel's significance is the epitaph. If, as I will contend, Thackeray was more concerned in Vanity Fair with the cultural economy of death than it has been hitherto admitted, the novel can be then read as a true(r) epitaph for a constellation of human events plagued by epigraphic deception. This reading decidedly harbors a fresh focus on genre. Thus, the fragmentary condition of this novel – conceived by its author as a collection of pen and pencil sketches and received invariably as not quite a novel – may be an effect of its exposure to ideological perforation.Footnote ¹¹ It is as if the writing tried at recursive nodal points to account for a something – a hole, a void – which only admitted a hazy and truncated presentation.Footnote ¹² The hole, in this reading, is Waterloo, “that which is re-remembered, re-written, and above all re- (and mis-) represented” (Hammond 36). Such misrepresentation is registered by three narrative modes – the snob paper, the tour sketch and the private epistle – which arguably underpin the novel's uncertain structure. In my view, these three modes have a substantial bearing on the novel's composition: first, because two of them, the tour sketch and the snob paper, stand out as serious candidates for the novel's conjectural origin; second, because they produce three narrative courses which, operating as quasi-autonomous textual threads, furnish, through their critical intersections, a strong sense of symbolic cohesion; and third, because these three courses meet in a shared attempt to replenish the novel's central void: Waterloo as bullet hole and cenotaph. All but the third (the private epistle) had been already tried by Thackeray as large-scale compositional devices. All three are made to turn on the Waterloo episode, even as they register mimetic insufficiency regarding its truth. In Thackeray's hands, moreover, all three are inherently epitaphial, in that they seek to overwrite, simultaneously to account for and conceal, a void.

Through this tangled and largely impromptu compositional strategy, Vanity Fair emerges as staging an ironic and elegiac meditation on the powers of commemoration. In its relentless undoing of epigraphic inscription, whether tombstones or old letters, the novel aims to scrutinize the effectiveness of cultural memory.Footnote ¹³ The meditation is elegiac insofar as it is concerned with a dead past, and it is ironic because it pits the authenticity of an old emotion against its inability to inhabit the present. Inasmuch as inscriptions (paintings, letters, tombstones) endeavor to keep an emotion alive throughout a time that is intent on changing everything else, time itself becomes the arch-ironist. Few things more ironic, then, than the written perpetuation of an emotion once the emotion is spent. As the narrator in Gaskell's Cranford notes, “I never knew what sad work the reading of old letters was. . .” (42). In them, writing freezes into a reminder of corrupted feelings. For Thackeray this caveat obtained both in the high-political sphere of military monuments and in the low-political circle of domestic mementos: neither the Waterloo memorials erected by the British authorities nor the letters written by the London puppets succeed in passing the test of time. They are just lying epitaphs:

In the novel's first chapter, the narrator had already cautioned that “schoolmistresses’ letters are to be trusted no more nor less than churchyard epitaphs” (6). The present essay explores the relevance of this rhetorical mode, the lying epitaph, for an interpretation of Vanity Fair which underscores the ideological function of cultural memory. This exploration involves structural considerations, since it focuses on the parallel role of the three discursive modes mentioned above. Through this detour I hope to render clearer the significance of the Waterloo episode in the novel. But this exploration must be premised on genealogical grounds, as Thackeray was not the first novelist to dispute the “politics and poetics of commemoration” (Shaw 179). Walter Scott, putative father of historical fiction, stands out as precursor in this act of iconoclastic interrogation.

III. Old and New Mortality

Scott'sOld Mortality opens with the scene of a man “engaged in his daily task of cleaning and repairing the ornaments and epitaphs” upon the tombs at the churchyard of Dunnottar (15). This man, known as Old Mortality, has devoted his life to the sepulchral reconstruction of the tombs of the Cameronians who died during the 1679 Bothwell-Bridge rebellion. His purpose, grafted on solid ideological convictions, is to prevent the defacement of true epitaphs, truer at least than the funeral monument to Archbishop Sharp, the “official” victim of this violent episode.Footnote ¹⁵ The novel Old Mortality emerges then as an elegiac reinstatement, an expanded epitaph, thus aping at narrative scale what the narrator meticulously performs. Since only the great were entitled to heroic monumentalization, the democratic gesture of granting dignified retrospective narration to all the past dead could be seen indeed as implicitly energizing the new novelistic program founded by Scott. To equate a novel with a tombstone may seem farfetched. Yet, Samuel Johnson had implicitly leveled them when suggesting that “to afford a subject for heroic poems is the privilege of very few, but every man may expect to be recorded in an epitaph” (96).Footnote ¹⁶

In this enlarged sense, Vanity Fair too is an epitaph. More specifically, it is Thackeray's protracted epitaph to George Osborne, military snob, killed at Waterloo. This hypothesis can be validated by exploring the connection between Old Mortality and Vanity Fair, a relation seldom noted but already visible in their allegorical titles.Footnote ¹⁷ Both novels share a concern with the (in)significance of death and a distrust of the vanity of immortality. They seek to strip death down to its naked brutality. Scott never declared that the deaths of the Covenanters and their Royalist enemies had been vain in the light of the new dispensation of liberty, common sense, and compromise that characterized post-Union Regency society. The intensity of his narrative resurrection betrays a conciliatory sympathy not exempt of legitimization, even of killing and of dying. It is also unlikely that Scott, anything but an anarchist, would have rebuffed the vanity of Archbishop Sharp's monumentalized death. And yet, Old Mortality rehearses an apology for “peace and indemnity” (316) whose bottom line is that multiple deaths may have been in vain.

One particular corpse haunts Scott's narrative as a reminder of death's inalienable truth. It is the dead body of the Royalist Sergeant Bothwell, with “his een . . . open and his brow bent, and his teeth clenged thegither. . .” (249). This cadaverous irruption occurs at the opening of chapter 23, halfway through the novel, and is followed by an examination of his “warlike spoils,” among which is a pocketbook full of papers of diverse nature, memorandums of tavern bills, commissions, certificates, and even an account of his genealogy and a list of family possessions. But the most interesting is “a secret pocket of the book, which Morton did not discover without some trouble, [with] one or two letters, written in a beautiful female hand.” The words of affection were barely readable, but a proviso in the envelope proudly proclaims the unimportance of this erosion: “It matters not. I have them by heart” (251). This passage echoes one at the novel's beginning where Old Mortality recites the dead Covenanters’ epitaph, “which he remembered by heart” (15). The dialectic between internal memory and external monument is inherently complex, since at stake is the perpetuation of a truth whose solid configuration is contingent on inscribing processes. Reaching such truth involves, at any rate, an act of reading, and Morton plunges into “a copy of verses” found among the letters. The lines reveal the impassioned emotions of a once noble soul. The contrast between these spent feelings and the present corpse gives way to a meditation on the deciduousness of passion: “Alas! what are we, said Morton, ‘that our best and most praiseworthy feelings can be thus debased and depraved. . . . Our resolutions, our passions, are like the waves of the sea” (252). When Burley, the Cameronian leader, inspects in turn these written spoils, his angry reaction, which inverts Morton's moralizing, is only detained by the allegorical locus of Vanity Fair:

This crucial passage seals the transit from Old Mortality to Vanity Fair. The Bunyanesque motif helps to sustain an allegorical figure urged by both novels, the emblem of the warrior-beau, a creature that Waterloo mythography was bound to extol.Footnote ¹⁸ They also partake of a resulting moral, one that certainly lies beyond Bunyan's explicit sermonizing: that the most lasting of human foibles is inconstancy of feeling, disloyalty to an earlier self, a moral blemish that old written mementos rashly advertise. The Bothwell episode in Old Mortality attests to this ironic lesson. In Vanity Fair, it is Osborne's letter to Becky that ironically commemorates the paradox of emotional treason. The parallels between Old Mortality and Vanity Fair are best formulated in terms of a shared subplot: a dandified hero exits the plot, dead, midway through the story, across the epic gate of a historical battle and leaves behind an epitaph-letter revealing the magnitude of his erotic intrigue. Both novels, in turn, take the form of a dubious epitaph to wasted heroism.

IV. The Snob Paper

Chapters 9 and 10 ofThe Book of Snobs, published as weekly installments in 1846 and dedicated to Military Snobs, should figure prominently in the textual prehistory of Vanity Fair. Chapter 9 opens with a critique of the extension of the deferential principle based on rank to military hierarchies, and moves on to illustrate this injustice by introducing the character of “Lieutenant-General the Honourable Sir George Grandby Tufto, K.C.B., K.T.S., K.H., K.S.V. &c. &c. . . . and a most thorough Snob” (The Book of Snobs 335). This man, who dresses in old age like “an outrageously young man,” is fit for no other profession than that of

Thackeray brings here together a number of elements that will prove decisive in Vanity Fair: a critique of snobbery, an elegy to bygone idleness, a historical evocation of English officers at a place commemorating Waterloo, and an ironic glance at the absurdity of obituaries. Further, General Tufto is too a character in Vanity Fair. At Brussels, during the days preceding the battle, he becomes the object of Becky's coquettish attentions. His eager answer to them meets however an unexpected obstacle in the figure of George Osborne, decidedly an “Amateur-Military Snob” (The Book of Snobs) with neither military experience nor pedigree, and yet capable of gaining Becky's momentary favor: “Rebecca saw that [the General's] disengaged eye was working round in her direction, and shooting out bloodshot glances at her and George” (Vanity Fair 351; ch. 29). This admonitory glance is revealing, since it comes from a figure of authority – a virtual surrogate father for disinherited George – eerily foreshadowing his own future persona. George Tufto is a displaced and distorted image of George Osborne, a figure of the Freudian uncanny, casting an ironic and deadly shadow on this vain “woman-killer,” “lost in pompous admiration of his own irresistible powers of pleasing” (354, 351; ch. 29).Footnote ¹⁹ A few hours later, the young officer will be dead, and “the earth will cover” him. The puppetmaster will then have to arrange for the funeral proceedings and search for something more than “a quarter of a column about his services and battles.”

Accessing the novel through the snob paper allows us to place George Osborne, military snob (his surname reads like a cryptogram of hero snob) and revenant of the loyalist Sergeant Bothwell, at the very center of Vanity Fair. And yet his centrality, like that of the Waterloo episode, has seldom been noted by critics. Described by Trollope as a “poor kind of fellow” (105), he is hardly mentioned in the early reviews of the novel, and features very scantily in modern Thackeray criticism.Footnote ²⁰ One remarkable exception is a recent article by Sarah Rose Cole where a great deal of ideological ambivalence in Thackeray's vision of the effeminate snob is successfully restored.Footnote ²¹ Building on previous criticism, Gordon Ray had already implied that the subtitle to the snob papers, “By One of Themselves,” could well be taken at face value, thus suggesting that his critique was informed by anxious admiration (Ray 337). Indeed, Vanity Fair reads as a nostalgic elegy on the lost glamour of the Regency Period, a sort of Jazz Age avant la lettre whose crack-up was effectively sealed at Waterloo, and whose finest creature is George Osborne, “the possessor of every perfection, . . . the handsomest, the bravest, the most active, the cleverest, the most generous of created boys” (56; ch. 5), and yet, rather insidiously, a boy falling out of the sky. George, Thackeray's soundest try at the military dandy, is moreover a refracted, truncated and domesticated counter-image of the Duke of Wellington. In constructing this character, Thackeray was making his particular contribution to the literary type of the Regency gentleman, inaugurated by Bulwer's Pelham (1828) and followed closely by Gore's Cecil (1841), the coxcomb who “knows Brummell in his primer, fights at Waterloo, and goes on the grand tour with Byron.”Footnote ²² George certainly embodies something of the lost Regency spirit, “its love of theatricality and display, its curious amalgam of melancholy and exuberance” (Shaw 2). It may not be outlandish to insinuate, then, that Thackeray, aware that the integrity of the nation-state was conditional on its capacity to resist “the feminized lassitude of perpetual peace” and thus renounce the “endless erotic play” of the pleasure principle, was originally driven to fabricate an elegy to this fallen warrior-beau.Footnote ²³ Vain, idle, beautiful, Narcissus-like, and yet disinherited son to a merchant with frustrated aspirations to gentility, this creature agglutinates the kind of contradictory ideological energy that troubled Thackeray's creative dreams. But his importance in the novel is not restricted to his furnishing Thackeray a fully aestheticized ideologeme fusing historical nostalgia and status inconsistency. As mentioned above, George dwells at the center of the ball the plot will eventually curl into, and he provides the key (a letter) for its dénouement. Furthermore, he is the only character that manages to antagonize Becky.Footnote ²⁴ Only George succeeds in bringing Becky's contradictions fully into the open. When they engage in conversation it is either to flirt or to subject one another to ruthless social deconstruction. Their meetings are exasperating tests of pride ushering in either frustrated erotic elation or moral embarrassment. Their antagonism, Cole argues, is also shaped by a gender reversal betraying deeper geopolitical implications: while George is the effeminate son of a “true British merchant” (25; ch. 3) Becky, daughter to a French opera singer, is a female Napoleon.Footnote ²⁵ Insofar as they are “the most determined social climbers in Vanity Fair” (Cole 162), they become incompatible. No wonder why Thackeray, increasingly pleased with the “flexible [. . .] joints” (2; “Before the Curtain”) of his Becky Puppet, decided to scribble exit snob in the margin of his “little drama.” A terrible hammer-stroke, indeed, but the banished hero refused to leave. He reappears in the memories of all the major characters, and more poignantly, in the figure of his son, little Georgy, riding a pony in the Park (chapter 37), a scene twice adumbrated, first by the family picture where “George was on a pony” (282; ch. 24) and second by Captain Rag, Sporting Military Snob, riding “in the Park, mounted on a clever well-bred Pony” (The Book of Snobs 337). Thackeray approached George's elegy in a variety of incomplete ways. The second half of the novel bears witness to this deferred attempt, and so does the ironic closing of his second paper on military snobs, where the boy George is presciently masked as “dear little Arthur” heading in his father's arms towards military glory and pictorial immortality.Footnote ²⁶

George Osborne epitomizes what Edmund Burke, mourning the age of chivalry, described as “the unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise. . .” (170). The ambivalence of Thackeray's ironic elegy is truly disturbing, and the fact that his funeral homage to the Byronic dandy could have been inspired in a passage of Carlyle's lectures on heroism renders this issue even more vexing.Footnote ²⁷ In his lecture on Cromwell, Carlyle refers in passing “to vain unbelieving Cavaliers, worshipping not God but their own ‘love-locks,’ frivolities and formalities, living quite apart from contemplations of God, living without God in the world. . .” (245). One is led to recall the mirror-gazing George that opens chapter 13, as well as Thackeray's description of the novel in a letter to his mother as staging “a set of people living without God in the world.”Footnote ²⁸ To be sure, no Puritan angst spurs Thackeray's anti-dandyism, but he is unwittingly drawn to remonstrate, with Scott, that “the pleasures of this world, under whatever name disguised, are vanity, and its grandeur and power are a snare” (Old Mortality 253).

V. The Tour Sketch

In 1808 William Wood published An Essay on National and Sepulchral Monuments where he defended the erection of a giant pyramid near London in order to stimulate heroism at the critical juncture of the war against France. In Wood's view, his mercantilist countrymen had not risen to the occasion, and “the ordinary feelings of men are not adequate to the present crisis.” The historian Reinhart Koselleck has drawn attention to this important document which stands out as the “theoretical justification” of the many large memorials of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:

The memorial was never built, but history gave this insane project a second and more legitimate chance. As Koselleck explains, after Waterloo, “a pyramid was erected, together with British lions, by the citizens of Liège. Today, it is still a tourist destination for thousands upon thousands of visitors” (294). In fact, a few weeks after the battle the site had already become a tourist destination of sorts.Footnote ²⁹ A blending of, on the one hand, progressive awareness of modern historicity and, on the other, military antiquarian fascination fueled by Tory chauvinism, contributed to fetishize the site, and, what is more important, to commodify its stolen remains. Battle spoils became marketable objects for collectors. Successive waves of English nationalism kept alive this cultural investment.Footnote ³⁰ What needs to be stressed, however, is that irrespective of Thackeray's inner motivation, Vanity Fair is also a belated memento of the fight, for in it two modern devices of community-formation, the novel and the cenotaph to the unknown soldier, are made to converge.Footnote ³¹ Thus Thackeray's novel emerges as a cenotaph-book capitalizing willy-nilly on a human tragedy symbolically sublimated into national lieu de mémoire.Footnote ³² Thackeray was aware that the Waterloo-epitaph had become an elegiac subgenre in its own right. Influential writers like Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, and Byron had toured the battlefield and registered the occasion. Walter Scott composed The Field of Waterloo, a poetic piece imbued in epic grandeur, during his brief tour of France and the Netherlands which he began in the summer of 1815. But apart from an excuse for patriotic sublimation, the battlefield afforded him unexpected pleasures. According to Lockhart, Scott was compulsively driven to pick through the material – especially textual – remains of the French soldiers: “illegible songs, scattered sheets of military music, epistles. . .” (qtd. in Shaw 45–46). Small wonder, then, that these fragments reappear as the unlikely cargo of Sergeant Bothwell's corpse: Old Mortality was published only one year after this tour.Footnote ³³ Robert Southey's visit to the battlefield is documented in two related texts, the Journal of a Tour in the Netherlands in the Autumn of 1815 and The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo, both of which engage in a traumatic effort to overcome and reduce to a mythical totality the metonymic fragmentation of the site. His final “totalizing vision” allows the pilgrim to “address the sacred underpinnings of individual and national identity” (Shaw 112).

Prompted perhaps by contemporary parliamentary debate about the raising of a national war monument in memory of Waterloo, William Wordsworth wrote in February 1816 a sonnet “Occasioned by the Battle of Waterloo,” whose last six lines are “intended for an inscription.”Footnote ³⁴ A determined monument to the heroism of the “intrepid sons of Albion,” the sonnet however recoils from mimetic ambition by merely designating “the event” (similarly, Burke could only refer to the French Revolution as “the events”). Four years later, Wordsworth visited the battlefield. The sonnet, “After Visiting the Field of Waterloo” is included in his Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820. Foreclosure of the event is more explicit in this second epitaphial sketch. What hampers cultural sublimation – glory-bestowing gods have vanished and monuments “soon must disappear” – is not only a new skepticism fostered during the intervening years, but also the new testimonial dimension built into the poem. Wordsworth is now a tourist at Waterloo, painfully aware of the “dread local recompence,” feeling “as men should feel.” The truth of the event is, now, simply terrifying: “With such vast hoards of hidden carnage near,/And horror breathing from the silent ground!” (4. 10, 13, 14–15). And, in Wordsworth's own terms, if epitaphial reckoning does not manage to counterbalance “the impression and sense of death,” then “a hollowness would pervade the whole system of things” (“Essay Upon Epitaphs” 729). Thus elegiac inflation gives way to a resigned recognition of gaps, holes and hollowness.

The strongly ambivalent impact of Byron's visit to Waterloo in 1816 made its way into Canto III of Childe Harold. Byron, who worshipped Napoleon and respected the reformist spirit of the French Revolution, found little to recommend in the historical recollection. But as befits the tourist at a lieu de mémoire, he was bound to obey the injunction, sta viator: “Stop! – for thy tread is on an Empire's dust!/An Earthquake's spoil is sepulchred below!” Then follows a rhetorical questioning – “Is the spot mark'd with no colossal bust?/Nor column trophied for triumphal show?” – resolved in testimonial gratification: “None; but the moral's truth tells simpler so,/As the ground was before, thus let it be” (3. 17. 1–6). After three reflective stanzas where the voice searchingly queries the moral of the place, the poem narrates the famous events spanning from the Brussels ball through the confusion and mourning that followed the battle. There is much in stanzas 21–28 that will reverberate in chapters 29–32 of Vanity Fair. The most remarkable parallel is the ironic contradiction opposing the “voluptuous swell” of “fair women and brave men” at the great ball to the tragic trepidation pushing young men to death, one that Magdalene De Lancey had expressed with striking economy: “Many of the officers danced, and then marched in the morning.”Footnote ³⁵ In the closing line of stanza 23, the description of the Duke of Brunswick's death achieves an economy – “He rush'd into the field, and, foremost fighting, fell” (207) – only matched by Thackeray's memorable fadeout in George “lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.” But Childe Harold held further attractions to the author-to-be of Vanity Fair. Stanzas 29 and 30 are a panegyric to “young, gallant Howard,” Byron's cousin, killed at Waterloo.Footnote ³⁶ The note Byron himself attached to these lines is worth quoting in full:

The effacement of the “hollow” – once a tomb, now a cenotaph – by the regularity of nature is an elegiac lesson fraught with anti-heroic echoes that can hardly be dismissed. It is not unlikely that Thackeray retained it, as he did the counter-ideological nihilism of Wordsworth. Nor is it improbable that he was moved to imitation by these two radical interventions in the archival repository of Waterloo memory, two disjunctive epitaphial testimonies written in overt opposition to Scott's and Southey's organic commemorations.

Thackeray, who grew up among people “who never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action” (Vanity Fair 405) and who engaged in violent discussion with Charles Lever apropos the battle, decided to visit the site.Footnote ³⁷ The description of this visit, titled “Waterloo,” is the last of the Little Travels and Road-Side Sketches published by Thackeray's heteronym Titmarsh in Fraser's Magazine in 1845, the year he began serious work on Vanity Fair. The sketch, as discursive mode, afforded a compositional freedom particularly congenial to a comic writer like Thackeray. He had already published Comic Tales and Sketches (1841) and even considered for his masterpiece the subtitle “Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society.” The tour sketch was, moreover, one of his favorite modes, his reputation partly resting on the success obtained with travel books like The Paris Sketch Book (1840), The Irish Sketch Book (1843), and Notes of a Journey From Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846).

The road-side sketch “Waterloo” opens in a note of ironic resignation. Thackeray, bored like “any gentleman” by endless dinner-table discussions of the battle considers “what a fine thing it will be in after-days to say that I have been to Brussels and never seen the field of Waterloo” (Little Travels 295). But this ironic triumph lies beyond his courage: “this pitch of philosophy was unattainable.” Thus a certain ethical ambivalence regarding the implicit obligation of this attestation presides over the whole.Footnote ³⁸ Thackeray is unwilling to be identified with “every British party” touring the Continent with a red copy of Murray's Handbook (296).Footnote ³⁹ But he was bound to cast himself in this role and countenance the consequences. At Brussels he mounted on a Namur diligence and set off towards Waterloo. Anxious with expectation, he asks “the conductor if he had been at the battle,” and receives a demystifying answer, “Pas si bête,” which rekindles the ironic innuendo of the outset. A brief account of a conversation with a farmer is followed by comments on Murray's Handbook. Thackeray lavishes ambiguous praise on Murray's choice of a Southey sonnet as lyrical introduction to the site. The poem, “That temple to our hearts was hallow'd now,” ekphrastically tied to the English memorial, is an epitaph to an epitaph. Thackeray has much to object to its high-flown re-monumentalization. What bothers him most is the exclusiveness implicit in the reference to “the gallant comrades’ rank”: “But I confess fairly that, in looking at these tablets, I felt very much disappointed at not seeing the names of the men as well as the officers” (297). A demotic scruple, already broached by William Dundas in the parliamentary debate and akin to Wordsworth's emotional egalitarianism (“we felt as men should feel”), fuels his angry exposure of misallocated social vanity. State symbolic representation has furnished a memorial based on selective computation, thus excluding real men from its “clause of closure and security.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Thackeray proceeds to impugn this false count – “Are they to be counted for nought?” – and to suggest an enlarged representation: “A few more inches of marble to each monument would have given space for all the names of the men. . .” (297).Footnote ⁴¹ This demand for democratic comprehensiveness bespeaks Thackeray's acknowledgment of the “common visual signature of modernity,” one which Koselleck discovers in the war memorial:

Thackeray knew however that no amount of secular immanence and modern inner-worldliness would manage to defeat the estate-ruled hierarchical order of English society, even in postmortem iconography. Inasmuch as the political entity was still non-egalitarian owing to rampant lordolatry and other related vices, to gain an “egalitarian claim on the political entity in whose service” British soldiers died could be seen as a formidably unreachable goal. The remainder of Thackeray's sketch is a ruthlessly dialogized demystification of patriotic glory: “But live or die, win or lose, what do they get? English glory is too genteel to meddle with those humble fellows” (298). A further attempt at sympathetic nationalism (“Let an Englishman go and see that field, and he never forgets it. The sight is an event in his life” 298) leads deceitfully to a final brutal inversion:

Along with the wish to divest carnage of symbolic trappings, the bottom line of this sermonizing is a bestowal of praise on the invisible virtues of the unknown soldier. As in the above-quoted passage from Scott's novel in which the Cameronian leader speaks, the keyword here is vanity. Shortly after this tour, back in his London headquarters, Thackeray surely relished the fierce Punch controversy about Wyatt's statue of the Duke of Wellington.Footnote ⁴² The media's satirical lampooning of the English Achilles yielded a sly restaging of the question “to whom GLORY belongs,” the perfect starting point for a novel with a banished hero.

Thus the road-side tour sketch “Waterloo” contains in nuce the allegorical thrust of Vanity Fair: the vanity of human wishes. The genetic bearing of this small piece on the composition of the novel can be gauged, moreover, by examining the way it becomes literally reenacted at least three times. Vanity Fair incorporates the Waterloo tour in three related versions. The first tour, Mr. Osborne's, is preceded by secret funerary arrangements. Less than three months after the battle, he commissions “an elaborate monument . . . where Britannia was represented weeping over an urn, and a broken sword, and a couchant lion” in honor of his deceased son (441; ch. 35). While the narrator deflates solemnity by evoking the sudden upsurge in the demand for these “funeral emblems” covered with “braggart heathen allegories,” the young ladies of the family are deeply moved when they first notice it in the wall of their London church:

The next surprise is their father's decision to go to Brussels, still “a military hospital for months after the battle” (442; ch. 35). There he meets a sergeant of his son's regiment who offers to guide him in “the journey of Waterloo and Quatre Bras, a journey which thousands of his countrymen were then taking” (443; ch. 35). There follows a brief but detailed account of the battle, in free indirect style, that closes in a hammer-stroke: “the captain, hurraying and rushing down the hill waving his sword, received a shot and fell dead.” The sergeant describes how Dobbin took George's body back to Brussels and had him buried. This tragic report is interrupted by a host of battle scavengers offering war spoils: “The peasants and relic-hunters about the place were screaming round the air, as the soldier told his story, offering for sale all sorts of mementoes of the fight, crosses, and epaulets, and shattered cuirasses, and eagles” (444). Thackeray's strategy is here ruthlessly bathetic, aimed at proving that pathos has fled a symbolic market where heroic death is for sale and the sublime is traded à bon marché.Footnote ⁴³ Mr. Osborne senses this inadequacy, but his anger remains highly idiosyncratic. In his visit to George's burial place he finds “humiliation” in the fact that his son, “an English gentleman, a captain in the famous British army,” should lie in an “unconsecrated garden” of the burial-ground, at very little distance from where “the Roman Catholic dead repose” (444). But the truth is that George himself, while visiting this “pretty burial-ground” of Laeken during an excursion before the battle, “had lightly expressed his wish to have his grave made” right there. This clash of desires, where nothing but the vanity of death is actually at issue, compels the narrator to intone his didactic mantra: “Which of us can tell how much vanity lurks in our warmest regards for others, and how selfish our love is?” (444).

Becky plays the lead in the second tour sketch. Fleeing creditors, she leaves Paris and heads towards Brussels, a city that inevitably awakens strong recollections. This visit, however, harbors a secret agenda: “She went to Waterloo and to Laeken, where George Osborne's monument much struck her. She made a little sketch of it. ‘That poor Cupid!’ she said; ‘how dreadfully he was in love with me, and what a fool he was!’” (820–21; ch. 64). The economy of this crucial passage is overwhelming. This meeting in absentia of the novel's two central characters gathers a disturbingly ambivalent significance. First, because Becky confronts a funeral monument to which no reference had been made before, certainly not in the account of Mr. Osborne's visit, where only a “burial-place” is mentioned. For all we know, George's only monument is the cenotaph sculpted in the wall of a London church. It is likely that either Dobbin or Mr. Osborne after his visit decided to commission a monument, but the narrative is silent in this respect. Second, because Becky reduplicates this enigmatic monument by drawing it in a sketch. A private cenotaph in London, a funeral monument at Laeken, and an official monument at Waterloo: this is openly a case of funerary exasperation. George's memory thus gets disseminated throughout the novel in vestigial traces and memorial inscriptions.Footnote ⁴⁴ Becky's sketch, seemingly the most modest, is actually the most relevant, since it reveals the potential seriousness of her affections towards George. Her reported mental reaction – “That poor Cupid,” “what a fool he was” – is in blatant conflict with her decision to visit these elegiac places. For this is not simply the female Napoleon compelled to survey the site of her defeat. Her real loss, I would suggest, is much deeper and pitched to a different scale.

The last sketch, the narrator's, placed in chapter 28, is but a shortened version of Thackeray's “Waterloo” road-side sketch.Footnote ⁴⁵ In chapter 62, moreover, the narrator breaks again into the narrative in the capacity of direct witness of the small troupe of English characters (Dobbin, Amelia, and small George) who, embarked on a tour through Germany, enjoy “the happiest time” of their lives: “It was on this very tour that I, the present writer of a history of which every word is true, had the pleasure to see them first, and to make their acquaintance” (792, 793; ch. 62). But what is it exactly that he sees? The previous sentence offers a telling illustration: little George climbing trees, Dobbin smoking his cigar, “whilst Emmy sketched the site or ruin.” Note the paradox: while Becky sketches George's Belgian monument, Amelia sketches German ruins. The parallel, quite unmistakable, overflows with irreducible irony. Furthermore, Thackeray deepens the irony by sketching them sketching.

VI. The Letter

Chapter 8 ofVanity Fair, largely consisting of a long letter from Becky to Amelia describing her arrival to the house of Queen's Crawley, is rich in literary evocation, both explicit (The Mysteries of Udolpho) and implicit (Northanger Abbey). Yet the hidden source is Pamela: Becky is after all a vain governess who, exposed to the seduction of her masters, marries the younger, a feat of rank transgression that arouses social indignation. Further, Vanity Fair and Pamela share a moral concern with epistolary secrecy and letter survival, as if in confirmation of Johnson's dictum that “the best subject for epitaphs is private virtue.”Footnote ⁴⁶ True enough, the use of letters in the articulation of narrative hinges (disclosures, revelations) was a common enough device in the nineteenth-century narrative tradition, up to Fontane's Effi Briest. Yet Thackeray's reliance on it in Vanity Fair is exceptionally insidious. The novel abounds in references to semi-clandestine letter writing and transaction – to epistles inside drawers, letters on pincushions, notes on trays, billet-doux among flowers. Two particular letters are of singular importance, both written by George shortly before the battle. The first one, a farewell note addressed to his father, is considered by Mr. Osborne with forensic skepticism:

This is the letter that prompts the narrator to reflect on the irony of “lying epitaphs.” The son's emotions – his contrition for extravagant behavior, his gratitude towards the father – elicit only an irate confirmation of unforgiveness. The father's attention is drawn rather to the quasi-sepulchral ornaments of a letter – the sham coat of arms, the ironic motto – which serve only to mirror back an image of his own worthlessness. The stolen seal – doubly stolen, as it were – is a commanding symbol of inane vanity in a rootless world of marketable pedigrees. Again the seeming extremes of irony and elegy are fused in a deceitful epitaph. The second and more important letter is the note George addresses to Becky, an experienced schemer who “had been used to deal with notes in early life” (358; ch. 29), at the Brussels ball, stuck in a bouquet, “coiled as a snake among the flowers” (356; ch. 29). This note is produced by the latter in a decisive conversation with Amelia that occurs almost at the end of the novel. It is Becky's only way of proving both the worthlessness of George and the pointlessness of Amelia's loyalty to his memory:

This unlikely epitaph, the last one in a sequence that includes two monuments, a cenotaph, a funeral sketch, and the “lying epitaph” to his father, is countered by an act of private iconoclasm: Emmy is grieved “because the idol of her life was tumbled down and shivered at her feet” (866), but elated too inasmuch as she is relieved of her mourning duties. Austenian constancy is not exactly a virtue in Vanity Fair.

Amelia's private fate resonates strongly with political echoes: Was Thackeray in Vanity Fair endeavoring to relieve England from the vain burden of elegizing its heroes? Was he trying to extend the franchise of immortality to all the dead, regardless of their rank and worth, or merely trying to sabotage the underpinnings of heroic commemoration? The answer is unclear. What is adamant is that he envisaged post-Waterloo society as a secular community stripped of its once sacred foundation, hollow and violent at bottom, doomed to revisit its constitutive emptiness in recursive acts of ironic elegizing. Yet no inscription, Thackeray well knew, would ever redeem (replenish, saturate) the original hole. The ravaging effects of epigraphic deception threaten to annul in advance all historiographic attempts, whether heroic or domestic, at mnemonic restoration. If, as Judith Butler argues, “we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building” (34), how shall we consider the self-defeating, ironic obituary? The novel's final lesson is all but reassuring:

A Waterloo field purged of memorials, tablets, pyramids, or a London skyline clean of monuments, where even “Waterloo-bridge had never been thought of” (Dickens 87), effectively reinstates this dystopian dream. Robert Burton cautioned that “tombs and monuments” share with humans the fate of ultimate consumption. Hence the ineffectiveness of mourning the dead: “For what is dear in life that is so dear unto us? . . . The greatest pleasures are common society, to enjoy one another's presence, feasting, hawking, hunting, brooks, woods, hills, music, dancing, etc.; all this is vanity and loss of time” (Burton 181). The vanity, indeed, of death remembered.