Why Vanity Fair is the greatest novel about Waterloo

The Napoleonic Wars gave the Russians War and Peace; they gave us Vanity Fair. Both novels were written and published long after the events they examined, in 1869 and 1847 respectively. But where Tolstoy’s novel was filled with digressions on battle strategy, Thackeray’s focused mainly on how war affected the ones who weren’t fighting.

Thackeray’s subtitle A Novel without a Hero is usually taken to refer to the amoral and engaging Becky Sharp’s central place in the book. But it also refers to what happens when the typical “heroes” – the soldiers – were occupied with battle, and life went on around their actions. Events of historical significance are a backdrop for Becky Sharp’s climb through society. In Brussels, while other female characters are praying for their husbands fighting at Waterloo, Becky takes advantage of the chaos, selling her husband’s horses to those who believe Napoleon might beat Wellington and pillage the city. Her first act of rebellion in the novel is to fling Samuel Johnson’s dictionary – a begrudgingly given present from a school mistress who hated her – from her carriage with a cry of “Vive la France! Vive l’Empereur! Vive Bonaparte!”. 

But for the benign and insipid Amelia Sedley who isn’t irreverent enough to shape her own fate, Napoleon – or “Bonaparty” as characters often call him – is the god in the machine: his return from exile scuppers her father’s speculations on the stock exchange, ruining the family; her husband George Osborne is the only character to die at Waterloo. In a book full of vitality and wordy playfulness, George’s death is subtly tacked on to the end of a chapter as an afterthought: “Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.”

The battle itself comes and goes in the middle of the novel, and the action itself is afforded only one out of the book’s 900 pages. But the sentence about Osborne’s death has been praised as the most devastating moment in the book. Dying in the war attaches to the ultimately worthless George a poignance which Amelia won’t be able to see past for most of her life. 

 The first installment of the novel appeared in Punch Magazine in 1847, 32 years after Waterloo. Thackeray was reimagining what he calls the “greatest event of history” from his own vantage during the height of the British Empire, and his vision confirms but also interrogates the nostalgia that we still attach to the event 200 years later. For a start the book feels older than it is, being liberally filled with caricature, sermonising and bathos after the fashion of Henry Fielding: the eighteenth century prose pioneer whom Thackeray admired in his lectures on English humorists.

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Craftily, this also makes the book seem bawdier and jollier than it is. It is almost a surprise, therefore, when the hefty authorial hand which produces so many sprawling pronouncements is also brilliant at understatement, and is capable of an advanced, almost modern emotional understanding: far beyond that of Dickens, the premier novelist of his time. 

A moment in which the war is merely context can rival the death of George in terms of pathos. Here, Amelia watches her husband pack for the battle: “By way of helping on the preparations for the departure, and showing that she too could be useful at a moment so critical, this poor soul had taken up a sash of George’s from the drawers whereon it lay, and followed him to and fro with the sash in her hand, looking on mutely as his packing proceeded.” The modern conception of Thackeray is as a sort of public school old boy: the portly, outdated father of slapstick. But readers of his time appreciated his subtlety and sensitivity. Charlotte Brontë called him “a Titan… a purely original mind,” and praised the “sane energy” of his writing.

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As the soldiers are woken up in Brussels to fight at Waterloo, Thackery states that his “place is with the non-combatants”. He doesn’t tell us, as Tolstoy does in War and Peace, what it feels like to have a bullets fly past our ears. But war isn’t just fighting, as we know in our age of worldwide broadcasting. We are more immersed in war now than we have ever been; we experience it and are affected by it remotely even when our country isn’t actively participating. By focusing on how war affects the people who aren’t heroes, Thackeray has given us the greatest novel about Waterloo, and one that is just as relevant 200 years later.

Vanity Fair is published in paperback by Oxford World's Classics (£8.99)