That Becky is allowed to live, and to live well, is perfectly consistent with Thackeray's view of life and morality…. And while the moralist who is holding forth on the cover (an accurate portrait of your humble servant) professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation is arrayed: yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as far as one knows it. My kind reader will please to remember that these histories … have 'Vanity Fair' for a title and that Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falseness and pretentions. In the pages, Thackeray explains the illustration thus: The first published installment had an illustration on its cover of a congregation listening to a preacher both speaker and listeners were shown with donkey ears. Like all satire, Vanity Fair has a mission and a moral.

Previously, under various comic pseudonyms (such as Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Savage Fitzboodle) Thackeray made clear, both in his role as the narrator of Vanity Fair and in his private correspondence about the book, that he meant it to be not just entertaining, but instructive.

Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, the first major work published by William Thackeray under his own name, was published serially in London in 18.

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