How Vanity Fair drew on The Pilgrim's Progress
A documented line of influence: William Makepeace Thackeray demonstrably engaged John Bunyan’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan · 1678
EnlightenmentThe influenced
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray · 1847
The Age of the NovelRelevance
8/10
On Vanity Fair’s page
- The title is a quotation: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress invented Vanity Fair as the worldly snare on the pilgrim's road, and Thackeray made it his entire stage
- Where Bunyan's fair was a hazard to be escaped en route to heaven, Thackeray drops the heaven and leaves only the fair — the inversion is the point
- Reading Bunyan first shows you the moral frame Thackeray is satirizing; contemporaries already compared Becky to the pilgrim and the author to Faithful
On The Pilgrim's Progress’s page
- Thackeray lifted his title straight from here — Bunyan's Vanity Fair, the worldly carnival Christian must pass through on the road to the Celestial City
- Vanity Fair (1847) takes that allegorical fair and makes it the whole world, inverting Bunyan's City of God into a society with no city of God in sight
- Early reviewers caught the debt on sight, reading Becky Sharp as a pilgrim and Thackeray as her Faithful — the borrowing was meant to be seen