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Vanity Fair and Lady Morgan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

A. Lionel Stevenson
A. Lionel Stevenson*
Affiliation:
Arizona State Teachers College at Tempe
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Extract

Tracing originals for the characters of fiction is unquestionably one of the most dangerous of scholarly undertakings, and should not be attempted without copious insistences that no good novelist is likely to have derived a prominent character entirely from one individual. On the other hand, if a particular character stands out in a novelist's work as exceptionally vivid and human—indeed, as exceeding in plausibility any previous fictitious character of the same general type; and if the novelist is known to have used living prototypes for some of the other characters in the same book; and finally, if it is demonstrable that the novelist was well acquainted with the traits of the person who is suggested as his original, then the imputation deserves some attention. On these premises, I venture to propose a living model for Thackeray's most famous character, Becky Sharp.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 1933 , pp. 547 - 551
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1933

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References

1 W. Hepworth Dixon, Lady Morgan's Memoirs (1862), i, 277, 408.

2 To say nothing of Macaulay's famous diatribe in his review of Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson. In Coningsby, Croker is “Mr Rigby.”

3 Florence Macarthy (London, 1818), ii, 54.

4 Vanity Fair, chap. vii.

5 E.g. iii, 73 seq. (Feb. 1831); iv, 433 (Nov. 1831); viii, 613 seq. (Nov. 1833); xi, 529 (May, 1835); xiii, 80 (Jan. 1836).

6 This outline of Lady Morgan's career is based on Hepworth Dixon, op. cit., and on W. J. Fitzpatrick, Lady Morgan, her Career, Literary and Personal (1860).

7 This is amusingly described by Lady Abercorn in a letter to Sir Walter Scott. See Partington, The Private Letter Books of Sir Walter Scott, p. 22.

8 See, for example, the letter from the Duke of Wellington to Sir Robert Peel. See Parker, Sir Robert Peel from his Private Papers, ii, 73.

9 Quarterly Review, lxxxiv, 153–185.