Dobbin’s and George’s regiment, the ‘-th,’ has recently been garrisoned at St. The plantations were worked, until the mid-1830s, by slaves–of whom Miss Swartz’s mother must have been one. Kitt’s, one of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean, had (until well into the twentieth century) a monoculture economy based on one crop, sugar. Amelia’s and Becky’s schoolmate at Miss Pinkerton’s academy, Miss Swartz, is introduced as the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. There is another character in the novel with an interest in the West Indies. What was their regiment doing? Protecting the British interest in sugar cane production in the Caribbean possessions of the Crown (it is, incidentally, the same crop which enriches Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre and the Bertram family in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park the English were addicted to sugar in their tea and cakes).

When we first encounter George Osborne and Dobbin, they are just back from the West Indies. The opening chapters of Vanity Fair are set in 1813. The trade was, of course, abolished by Wilberforce’s act in 1805, but slaves continued to work in the British West Indies on the sugar plantations until the 1830s. He features a couple of times in the first numbers and his presence hints, obliquely, that the slave trade is one field of business that the two rich merchants, Mr Sedley and Mr Osborne, may have made money from. Looked at closely, we may also note a black footman riding postilion in the Sedley coach. Thackeray’s first full-page illustration in the novel shows the coach carrying Amelia and Becky (she hurling her Johnson’s ‘Dixonary’ out of the window) from Miss Pinkerton’s to the freedom of Russell Square. It crops up in the very opening pages of Vanity Fair. Can we-to take one troublesome example-in reading, say, Vanity Fair, ‘Victorianize’ our contemporary feelings about race? Or should we accept the jolt that overt 19 th-century racism gives the modern reader, take it on board, and analyse what lies behind it? It goes beyond stripping out the furniture of everyday life (horses not motorised transport, no running hot water, rampant infectious diseases) into attitudes. To ‘Victorianize’ ourselves, one might say. The challenge for the modern reader is to reconstruct that background as fully as we can. Thackeray and his original readers shared a common ground so familiar that there was no need for it to be spelled out. Nor–however well we annotate our texts–can we read Victorian novels as responsively as Victorians read them.

We can never know the Victorians as well as they knew themselves.

William thackeray novels