Thackeray the sentimental sceptic - writer William Makepeace Thackeray

The process of social subsidence and replacement has curious effects. The haughty but impoverished House of Bareacres vainly tries to come to terms with the Industrial Revolution. The upper crust is crumbling: the masters depend on their former servitors. Major Pendennis is driven from the lodgings he has occupied for fifteen years by his valet, now his landlord. The Earl of Bareacres is waited upon by bailiffs persuaded to dress in livery (Vanity Fair, chapter 32). Mr. van der Bosch of New York puts Henry Esmond's Virginian estate in order (Virginians, chapter 72). Miss Higg of Manchester, whom the Prince de Moncontour has married for her money, sits up, uneasy in her curl-papers, and stares in alarm into the immense looking glass built into the canopy of her Louis XVI bed (Newcomes, chapter 46).

Thackeray presents two generations of the nineteenth century nobility. The Regency generation, to which the Marquis of Steyne and his sister, the Countess of Kew, belong, is for the most part depraved but clever, or at least sly. Lady Kew, 'tramping about in her grim pursuit of pleasure', is one of Thackeray's most exactly observed characters:

And Lady Kew, advancing in the frankest manner, with a smile, I must own, rather awful playing round her many wrinkles, round her ladyship's hooked nose, and displaying her ladyship's teeth (a new and exceedingly handsome set), held out her hand (Newcomes, chapter 24).

Lady Kew is so gracious here because she is bent on mischief.

The Victorian generation is also for the most part depraved, but stupid too. Between Viscount Colchicum and the Marquis of Farintosh there has been a marked diminution of wit. The Victorian generation is generally poorer, partly through its dullness and sloth, than the Regency one. Lord Steyne frankly tells his daughter-in-law, Lady Gaunt, who is the daughter of the Earl of Bareacres, when she refuses to meet Becky Sharp, 'Who are you to give orders here? You have no money. You've got no brains. You were here to have children, and you have not had any' (Vanity Fair, chapter 49).

Whilst the proprietors are on their way down, the adventurers are on their way up. Becky Sharp, abler and more adaptable than the Bareacres and their kind, readily outdoes them. Unlike the better-born English ladies in Paris, she can speak French: 'She fought the women with indomitable courage, and they could not talk scandal in any language but their own' (Vanity Fair, chapter 34). She is not awed by the Countess of Bareacres: 'To stare Becky out of countenance required a severer glance than even the frigid old Bareacres could shoot out of her dismal eyes' (Vanity Fair, chapter 37). Becky is the Darwinian fittest, and survives into The Newcomes as the hymn-writer, Lady Crawley. Her life is a campaign of revenge upon fashionable society for the privations she smartingly endured in her youth. She leaves school with 'an almost livid look of hatred', angry in particular with the elder Miss Pinkerton's respectable duplicity. She competes from the beginning with the more privileged Amelia, whose school-report notes as her outstanding merits the unenterprising qualities of industry and obedience. Her liaison with George Osborne, Amelia's husband, is a triumph over them both and the advantages they enjoyed when she left school. Incensed by the injustices of social class, she is secretly pleased when her lordly seducer, the Marquis of Steyne, is knocked down and humiliated by her husband, Rawdon Crawley: 'She admired her husband, strong, brave and victorious' (Vanity Fair, chapter 53). Although the incident is ruinous to her own future, she rejoices in the downfall of birthright.