Thackeray[1] emphasizes it in his description of that little world in which he had an almost unholy interest:
"Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all
sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. And while
the moralist * * * 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, whether one mounts a cap and
bells or a shovel hat; and a deal of disagreeable matter must
come out in the course of such an undertaking."
Later[2] he takes it out on Becky and her kind:
"Such people there are living and flourishing in the world—Faithless,
Hopeless, Charityless; let us have at them, dear
friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very successful,
too, mere quacks and fools; and it was to combat and
expose such as these, no doubt, that laughter was made."
Dickens[3] puts it more abstractly:
"Lest there should be any well-intentioned persons who do
not perceive the difference between religion and the cant of
religion, piety and the pretense of piety, a humble reverence for
the great truths of Scripture and an audacious and offensive
- ↑ Vanity Fair, I, 104.
- ↑ Ibid., I, 106. Cf. his Preface to The Newcomes: "This, then, is to be a story, may it please you, in which jackdaws will wear peacocks' feathers, and awaken the just ridicule of the peacocks, in which, while every justice is done to the peacocks themselves * * * exception will yet be taken to the absurdity of their rickety strut, and the foolish discord of their pert squeaking;" 7.
- ↑ Preface to Pickwick (1847 edition), xix. Cf. his letter to Charles Knight: "My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else—the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time—and the men who, through long years to come, will do more to damage the real, useful truths of political economy than I could do (if I tried) in my whole life:" Letters, I, 363.
