But, even after all of that, the novel still has to be even further removed from Thackeray's own time to seem decent – and to avoid getting him sued! Although he is writing in the 1840s, he sets the novel 30 years earlier, during the reign of George IV and the second invasion of Napoleon. This requires a little prudish cleaning up, since the 18th century guys weren't nearly so straight-laced and uptight as the Victorians about sex and the human body.

What Thackeray does in Vanity Fair is bring this genre out of the 18th century and into his own time. And this novel really does have something for everyone to laugh at: snobby merchants, greedy social climbers, illiterate aristocrats, nosy servants, evil nobles, macho soldiers, bossy women, bumbling men, British people, German people, Belgian people, and every other kind of group of humans that can be crammed in. The idea is to start with a character (a picaro) who is young or looking for a place to settle down, then to lead this character around all the types of people and situations that the author wants to ridicule. This genre of satire is called 'picaresque' and it's part of a pretty long tradition that goes all the way back to Don Quixote in the 16th century and weaves through the awesome Gulliver's Travels in the 18th century. But what's more important than plot is the style of the novel – its bitter and caustic humor. It's the story of two young women whose lives take them in and out of every segment of English society, each of which can be mocked and displayed for laughs in turn.

Vanity Fair is so broad and sprawling that trying to summarize its plot is almost impossible.

Basically, it was a 19th century version of the Daily Show, with each month bringing a new episode. Readers would sit on pins and needles waiting for the next set of chapters to see what part of life Thackeray would make fun of and what would happen to the characters. How on earth? Well, the first time around, Vanity Fair was serialized in Punch – each month, a new section of the novel would come out. Actually, he got the fame and fortune way before the novel's ending was written. After 1848, he became the superstar author of the hilariously mean Vanity Fair, a long satirical novel that made fun of the aristocracy and the middle classes: their greed, corruption, and – ahem – vanity. Before 1847, William Makepeace Thackeray was a guy mostly known for writing short satirical articles for the funny magazine Punch.

The vanity fair book