De-Romanticizing “Race”

THACKERAY'S REFERENCE TO THE Black Hole of Calcutta is characteristically off-hand. At the novel's start, Rebecca Sharp upon leaving Miss Pinkerton's academy famously tosses her gift of “Dr. Johnson's Dixonary” from Amelia Sedley's carriage in Chiswick Mall (10; ch. 1). When Amelia responds with: “How could you do so, Rebecca?,” a “laughing” Becky replies with: “Why, do you think Miss Pinkerton will come out and order me back to the black – hole?” (14; ch. 2). Becky's “bad girl” rebelliousness in contrast to Amelia's paralyzing naiveté poises “worldly” knowledge (of this event) against the wholesome canons of English civil culture (Dr. Johnson's dictionary) – depicting a cultural contempt that was highly appealing to many Victorian readers (352; ch. 29).⁹

Second and more important, toward the novel's end when Amelia's brother Joseph Sedley, the novel's notorious nabob character, makes his return home to England from Bengal, he chooses to live in an unusual Anglo-Indian neighborhood of retired colonial administrators in London. The narrator writes of this place, feigning that his facts come from upper-class gossip: “Who does not know these respectable abodes of the retired Indian aristocracy, and the quarter which Mr. Wentham calls the Black Hole, in a word?” (761; ch. 60). The “Black Hole” of London, a racial slur for a hybrid metropolitan “colony,” makes fraught the notion that Jos in his fetishized love for all things Indian has really left the East, or that any meaningful distance exists between Anglo culture at home and its “Eastern possessions” abroad (202; ch. 17). In Becky and Jos – the most interesting, morally scrutinized, and nationally hybrid characters of the novel – the “Black Hole” draws readers’ attention to questions of “Englishness” and to the fraught cultural boundaries of nation. But more than this, in Thackeray's hands, this distant event in place and time is imaginatively brought home to England where its historical significance is slowly overturned from this narrator's own playful “insider-outsider's” perspective.

Colonial and racial references not only appear, but abound in this novel. On page one, we meet twice the “black servant, Sambo,” and only a few pages later, “Miss Swartz,” the “rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitts,” who devolves “hysterically” into “a passion of tears” at Amelia's leave-taking (3; ch. 1, 7; ch. 1). Likewise, the novel's central tensions emerge from racialized motifs. Becky fantasizes about marrying Jos because “they say all Indian nabobs are enormously rich”– a dream, we are told, that initiates the novel's action and links it to other exotic tales like “Arabian Nights and Guthrie's Geography” (22; ch. 2, 26; ch. 3). Many of the novel's key turning points also involve colonial references. Miss Pinkerton bids the girls goodbye wearing a “large and solemn turban,” one that Rebecca hopes to see “floating,” along with her teacher, at the “bottom of the Thames” (10; ch. 1, 14; ch. 2). Jos flees Becky's marital pressures by returning to Calcutta, whereas Dobbins takes leave of Amelia's indecision by enlisting as a colonel in Caribbean, Indian, and Canadian campaigns. After they finally marry he snubs Amelia for the more fascinating task of “writing a History of the Punjaub” (877; ch. 67).

These references are handled in a way that produces a consciousness about their representational status – a consciousness that animates the meaning of the novel as a whole. Becky imagines herself in colonialist settings and garb, for instance, dressed in “an infantry of (Cashmere) shawls, turbans and diamond necklaces” and “mounted on an elephant” – ready to “pay a visit to the Grand Mogul” (26–27; ch. 3). To win Jos, she agrees to validate all this “East India Company Civil Servant” has to say about “Boggley Wollah”– “a fine, lonely, marshy, jungly” place “famous for snipe-shooting” and “where not unfrequently you may flush a tiger” (27; ch. 3). Her colonial-inspired “scheming” indeed defines the novel's ending: she finally snares Jos with a representation of the colonies – a portrait of him sitting atop an elephant in an Eastern scene (860; ch. 67). Most tellingly, George Osborne, in a passage that critics cite for its explicit racism, chooses Amelia as a wife to disobey his father's orders to “[m]arry that mulatto woman” – the rich Creole heiress Miss Rhoda Swartz (259; ch. 21). Mr. Osborne's “blood boiled with honest British exultation,” we are told, at his son's refusal of her, and the father further disowns George for “fling[ing] away eight thousand a year” (249, 259; ch. 21) – a move that prompts George to enlist as a soldier at Waterloo in an adventure that ends his life and widows Amelia.

At mid-century, “Great Britain” – a word Thackeray routinely uses – is fast approaching its well-documented imperial apex. At century's end, nearly a third of the world's landmass would be British, with one third of the world's products passing through English ports. If London, therefore, functions as the main entrepôt for the globe, and if India stands as its infamous, lucrative jewel, the absence of a hybrid metropolitan vernacular and its stock types, including racialized ones, would be suspect – not their presence. A language develops at this time to rival the “foreign” goods stocking and flowing from British ports. Yet critics consistently exhibit a squeamishness about the visibility of this language of “race” and empire in Vanity Fair. On the one hand, they normalize Thackeray's racism: Joseph Sherman has argued, for instance, that “racial stereotyping and racist discourse were ingrained not only into Victorian social consciousness at large, but were also part of Thackeray's personal outlook as his many contributions to Punch makes clear.”¹⁰

Edward Said also speaks of Thackeray's use of “race” and the East as certain deployments in a broader cultural discourse of imperialism (Culture 68). Yet, on the other hand, critics recoil at Thackeray's explicitness about the cultural and linguistic facts of Victorian empire. Many point to Thackeray's overt racism, for instance, in George's statement of refusal of his father's mercenary plans to marry Miss Swartz. “I don't like the colour, sir,” George notes summarily, as he compares the Caribbean heiress to “the black that sweeps opposite Fleet Market” (259; ch. 21). As if the point could be possibly unclear, Thackeray includes two illustrations of Miss Swartz, reiterating George's words: “her curly jet-black hair” (as “curly as Sambo's”), a “nose ring,” and a “plume of feathers” all of which makes her look the “perfect Belle-Sauvage” (245; ch. 20).

With such examples at hand, it is, perhaps, no surprise that J. Russell Perkin and Sandy Morey Norton have agreed that this “novel has certainly not been read as an attack on British imperialism and domination,” and that “for all his satire, Thackeray overtly endorses these values in his story.”¹¹

While depiction and endorsement are different literary matters altogether, it still seems that Patrick Brantlinger's early position on the issue (though he speaks mainly of Thackeray's treatment of India) is defining. Thackeray's novels, he writes: While Victorianists know well the ubiquity of racialist discourse throughout the period – they are indeed the “facts of life” – it is Thackeray's explicit reference to such cultural facts and his translation of them into tropes in the novel that critics seem to find troubling, even damning. In certain ways, modern and contemporary critics romanticize “race” in nineteenth-century novels: quite aware of its historical occurrence, they loathe to face – or to explicate – its literary signs and representation.

Such critical delicacy smacks of a lingering, deceptive universalism that Nigerian novelist and critic Chinua Achebe argues defines western or so-called “colonialist criticism”:

While Achebe speaks of a 1970s tendency of western critics of African writing to seek out and to name as “universal” that which is essentially western in literary value and design (a recognition that comes to define a broader postcolonial epistemic break with western philosophical discourse from Descartes to positivism), Thackeray's writing is resolutely of his world. Yet in his case that horizon has been extended to include “all the world,” in part because of the cultural facts of empire, and in other part, because of a deliberate narrative perspective that speaks to this problem of false universalism. That is, if the authority of western canonical literature traditionally lies in its purportedly unbiased, even unlocatable viewpoint – a false universalism historically continuous with western practices of rule – any disruption of that presumed neutral, universal perspective, whether from non-western or western locations, and whether in fiction or in criticism, imperils the reputation of the literary canon as a general civilizational (universal) good. As Said has pointed out, one feature of this false universalism is a schizophrenic approach to key figures of Anglo literary canonicity in literary history. Certain texts are excised from a given signature: the liberal J. S. Mill, for example, is cut off from the Mill of the East India Company Office who writes that “the sacred duties which civilized nations owe to the independence and nationality of each other, are not binding towards those to whom nationality and independence are certain evil, or at best a questionable good” (Culture 80). Likewise, the spiritual Thomas Carlyle of Past and Present (1843) is separated from the Carlyle who writes “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849) in which a figure, “Quashee,” the “emblematic Black,” is doomed “forever to subhuman status” by his “ugliness, idleness, rebellion.”¹³ Such explicit statements are, Said argues, not “obscure, occult, or esoteric,” but “frank” and pervasive in the literature; not disconnected from the subjects of art, but designed expressly to “connect” various “political ideas about British world domination” to “aesthetic” even “moral philosophy” – a connection made obvious in John Ruskin's theory of aesthetics (Culture 104).

One of the curious strengths of Vanity Fair is that such opportunistic separations – and their informing critical delicacy – are impossible to make in this novel. Indeed, to attempt to excise the novel's colonialist and racial references is like trying to separate, as in Ferdinand de Saussure's famous example of the simultaneity of signifier and signified, the back from the front of a single sheet of paper. Thackeray's language is thoroughly Victorian, one might say, replete with elements of an increasingly “scientific” racial classifying system, one more aggressively mobilized as the century wears on. Thackeray's very indelicacy about “race” and imperialism, including his posture as a certain kind of “native informant” who tells of ordinary Victorian obsessions with race, has a curious disarming effect on dominant models of literary history, nationalist myths of autonomous aesthetic culture, and the “faux-universalism” to which the literary canon is still often subtly enlisted – in the assumption that our most cherished English writers are in fact English.¹⁴

If this is one of this novel's curious, albeit difficult, advantages for a historical project, Thackeray is even more helpful. Not only does he layer the novel with obstacles to faux-universalism – a voice he likes to sardonically ventriloquize – he also brings such Victorian alien references and vernacular terms for “otherness” home, not only to metropolitan discourse, but to metropolitan sites. Such toying with spatial distance – a distance that racialist discourse requires – has literary as well as ethical aims.

I have suggested that Thackeray's bluntness – whatever its motivation – in representing the facticity of empire in racial tropes, especially across a broad range of ethnic types (Caribbean, African, Indian, Arabic) for whom the Victorians developed a vernacular, makes this novel useful for confronting more accurately the complexity of Victorian culture and history – a complexity that helps us to build new maps today of literary and cultural history. I would like to go one step further to add that to back away from Thackeray's ample, fictional use of such Victorian racial and imperial motifs is only to continue practicing another related element of western universalism – the belief that English literature and language can remain something other than an ethnic and geopolitical “amalgamation,” the belief that English is purportedly pure, removed, or separate from an imperial history of which it is a constituting part. Unfortunately an immaculate conception of “culture,” forty years after its theoretical debunking by critics as varied as Raymond Williams, Christopher Herbert, James Buzard, James Clifford, Arjun Appadurai, and Homi Bhabha, turns up again in our most ordinary literary habits and evaluative instincts.¹⁵

If Thackeray's bluntness about “race” and empire in this novel has the effect of highlighting the historical specificity of Englishness, it also reveals a Victorian cultural identity and aesthetic whose defining characteristic is both hybridity and universalism – a point Robert Young has explored.¹⁶

Thackeray, that is, exposes the partiality of English universalism in both senses of the word: as elliptical, as only part of a far more complex story, and as narrowly self-interested or willfully political. Indeed, his use of the metaphor “vanity” is the best expression of this critique of false universalism at both levels: the hubris of mistaking one's local, nationalist perspective for a god's eye-view, and its resulting privileged naïveté (best captured in simpering Amelia) which is willfully and self-interestedly blind. As my first epigraph hopes to indicate, “Englishness,” for Thackeray is a mobile and changeable cultural identity and set of values; it is not essentialist or nationalist, but defined by what it “carr(ies) with it abroad,” in this case, notably, “pride,” as well as “pills, prejudices, Harvey-sauces, cayenne-peppers, and other Lares.” For him, “vanity” thus describes an Anglo gaze whose (often petty) desires masquerade as universalist. What gives this novel, then, its precise if disturbing ability to depict Victorian racial classifying systems is Thackeray's keen, complex grasp on this international Englishness, this roaming imperial gaze, captured in this novel's distinct narrative style and structure – one whose unusual approach to history I will describe. This view of history is bound up in complex ways with Thackeray's own Anglo-Indian identity and his sense, from that vantage point, of the internationalization of English culture through various global circuits and its resultant creation of commercial values and vanities.

Before I turn to this narrative style – or what I call Thackeray's accidental theory of history – I want to examine the function of such colonialist and racial references in the novel, especially once “race” is reframed in relation to international Englishness and its institutional life blood, the settler community and their special relationship to “English history.” I then return to Thackeray's critique of English vanity internationalized, itself based in his knowledge of a parallel British Indian history, where events like the Black Hole of Calcutta become markers of an entirely different definition of Victorian culture.

While critics have attended to Thackeray's fictional use of “race,” racism, and imperialism, few have noticed the forced or funny exoticism of Vanity Fair, or the moral undertow that such references exert on the novel's structure as a whole, including the fate of its main characters.¹⁷

I want to return to the example of George's refusal of Miss Swartz – that moment of undisputed racism in criticism – but through a sense of this novel's more flexible architecture built of Victorian cultural discourses of race as its raw materials. While this scene plays to low humor, a point Thackeray's illustrations reiterate, humor is also this narrator's weapon of choice to place a sophisticated, even jaded Victorian reader, well versed in novelistic conventions, off guard and thus to create a more deeply disarming effect. The novel critiques George and Amelia, and more importantly their relationship, through the vehicle of creole Miss Swartz. Defined, at first, by her absence of culture (intelligence, English manners, taste) in this party scene, Thackeray begins to undermine this point and the audience's normative view of this “dark object” (251; ch. 21). Miss Swartz, he writes, “was quite ignorant of all [the party-goers’] plans regarding her, and, taking all the young ladies’ flattery for genuine sentiment, and being, as we have before had occasion to show, of a very warm and impetuous nature, responded to their affection with quite a tropical ardour” (251; ch. 21). While introduced as a mere object of humor – the butt of a well-worn Victorian joke in which culture slips and slides into race – the narrator begins to create sympathy for this character, given her exclusion and ill-treatment by a fickle upper class. Further, he transfers an initial sympathy readers would have pinned onto Amelia and George to Miss Swartz herself. This easy victim of class manipulation – coded in racialist terms – unaware of her society's ulterior motives masked as flattery, begins to exhibit childhood loyalty to Amelia. Indeed, Thackeray uses Miss Swartz's excessive feeling to highlight the serious lack of feeling – his most scathing critique – in the race and class hypocrisies of those around her.

She is contrasted with George's sisters, for instance, who beg George not to mention publicly the now-bankrupt Amelia since her “family has disgraced itself,” a reference to Mr. Sedley's misfortunes in the stock market (256; ch. 21). But Miss Swartz, becoming a speaker in her own right, claims affiliation with Amelia in the face of such shaming tactics, thus eschewing fickle class/caste partialities for genuine feeling: “Spinning swiftly round on the music-stool” she cries out, “Lor! Is it my Amelia? Amelia that was at Miss P.'s at Hammersmith? I know it is. It's her, and – Tell me about her – where is she?” (256; ch. 21). If the point were merely to portray Miss Swartz as lacking in culture, or as a simpleton, unwise to the ways of “Vanity Fair,” there would be no need to continue this contrast with Amelia, George, and his sisters – all to their moral disadvantage. Amelia, we are told bluntly, being “the hypocrite as she was,” remained cool toward her only ally, nursing “a great deal of pretty jealousy” about Miss Swartz: “lest George should forget her for the heiress and her money and her estates in St. Kitts” (247; ch. 20). Likewise, Miss Swartz begins to undo any heroic hopes readers might attach to George, since, while he bluntly tells his father, “I’m not going to marry a Hottentot Venus,” he recasts his overt racism for Amelia's ears into a flattering self-representation (259; ch. 21). He chooses Amelia as a wife, he tells her, no matter “how many plantations in the West Indies” Miss Swartz will inherit – a point immediately refuted by his own covetous detailing of all the heiress's assets: “and a deal of money in the funds; three stars to her name in the East India Stockholders’ list; a mansion in Surrey, and a house in Portland Place” (245; ch. 21). When George does finally propose to Amelia, the narrator shows that surfaces – skin color – are not far from his mind: Amelia is “the only person of our set that ever looked, thought, or spoke like a lady,” he says, a comparison whose meaning emerges from its prior contrast with “that mulatto woman” (247; ch. 20). Miss Swartz's excessive (“tropical”) feeling, that core trope which guarantees (by opposition) western rationality/reason, has slowly shifted to reveal her genuine feeling – that test for Thackeray of moral character.

If there were any doubt about the conclusions that readers should draw here, Thackeray has repeated a similar convergence of race, class, and female respectability in an earlier scene – and hinted toward its treacherous outcome. During Becky's early visit to the Sedley's home, Mrs. Sedley spies her seducing Jos amidst “a chintz of a rich and fantastic India pattern, and a calico of a tender rose-colour” (36; ch. 4). After telling her husband of Becky's artful designs, Mr. Sedley reminds his wife that racial purity must trump even that Victorian touchstone of female respectability in class: “Let Jos marry whom he likes,” he says, “The girl's a white face at any rate … Better she, my dear, than a black Mrs. Sedley, and a dozen mahogany grandchildren” – a nod to this father's recognition of how deep Jos's love for all things Indian goes (36; ch. 4). The narrator then undermines the otherwise funny exoticism of Mr. Sedley's flagrant tone by turning this scene didactic: as Joseph Sherman notes, “there is a jolt when one recognizes” that the narrator “is speaking of Becky Sharp who ultimately [will] make Jos her ‘prey’” in her most “terrifying role as one of the fiendish marine cannibals, feasting on their pickled victims” (82). The narrator's point is clear. Despite this father's advice, a “whiteface” does not prove a better choice than any “dark object,” and further, a larger message becomes clear: such a (racialist, classist) basis for choosing one's love object has disastrous and highly unpredictable consequences.

While satirical of them, Thackeray does not intervene into Victorian discourses of “race” or empire. His use of these tropes is instrumentalist: he seeks to expose the premises by which Victorians and especially Victorian novels declare the propriety of their own conventions. He shows that reigning assumptions about such seemingly benign issues as the good (heroic) or bad character, the nature of a fine match, or even how one defines personal happiness, all involve for Victorians racial discriminations. Racial tropes thus infuse Victorian moral argumentation; they are their most ordinary terms (the “facts of life”). Indeed, it is because Victorian “race” discourse is itself so unformed, shifting, variegated, and discontinuous, as George Stocking, Jr. notes¹⁸

– even at its modern birth – that Thackeray's use of such tropes can remain complex and ambivalent in ways that Sandy Morey Norton has explored (“Boggley-Wollah”). Moreover, to assume that Thackeray could extricate himself from these discourses and their imperialist function is to misunderstand cultural history and the institutional function of discourse, and more problematically, to pass off the work of decolonizing culture and its historic monuments – a contemporary obligation – to the past through the idealist hope that prescient, exceptional Victorians could stem the tide of their own historicity. Neither the past nor the contemporary works that way. Instead, to intervene in how contemporary culture is understood and defined by its appeal to history, including literary history, requires confronting the terms by which implicit claims about Anglo or western identity are deemed tactful, truthful, and legitimate, over time. Thackeray is helpful in such an endeavor, not because he is an under-appreciated progressive hero, but because he targets, not racism or empire per se, but its representation.¹⁹

He does this for formal, not for moral reasons. Critics, for instance, have noticed Thackeray's deflation of Victorian hypocrisies, as well as his general fatigue or resignation over Victorian arbitrary objections to vice. They have also noticed his tendency to expose such artifice indirectly, sidestepping the moralist's wrath, or skirting the policed boundaries of Victorian morality. Yet, rarely have they linked such formal matters with questions of “race.” Few have noticed that Thackeray's much maligned, cynical tone, for instance, one of faux resignation, is a formal strategy (though it appears spontaneous) to capture readers within the matrix of their false assumptions and cultural terms. When the narrator must explain what Becky has been doing before Jos, Amelia, and Dobbins meet up with her again on the Continent, for instance, he frames this chapter (“We Meet an Old Acquaintance”) around what cannot be said – given Victorian hypocritical rules of literary politeness: “We must pass over a part of Mrs. Rebecca Crawley's biography with that lightness and delicacy which the world demands – the moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name” (812; ch. 64). The narrator chooses satire and playfulness over critique, if critique means identifying the conditions of possibility for explaining “what is” (or in his words, the act of calling something by its “proper name”). He does this in order to place readers more fully into “the world of Vanity Fair” without putting them off through a frontal attack on their dearly-held assumptions – assumptions that define the intelligible. His is thus a pedagogical move: once seduced into the “carnival” of “Vanity Fair” through familiar, stereotypical landmarks, including racist ones, the narrator then deploys exaggeration, typecasting, extensions, or reversals to thicken and finally to highlight and undermine readers’ initial beliefs. In this context, the clever deployment of colonial and racial metaphors, like Miss Swartz and the Black Hole of Calcutta, are tropes to carry and slowly unleash layers of subversive meaning at pivotal moments of impact. In effect, Thackeray dismantles such novelistic and cultural certainties without ever having to dictate their “proper names.”²⁰

Indeed, he does this to better arm readers with a history of information with which to interpret the novel, to discern, in this case, George's ultimate false propriety or Amelia's ethical fickleness. His narrational strategy thus teaches readers to read paradigmatically as well as syntagmatically, to accumulate information across the novel's dispersed landscape, to listen for literary clues dropped from scene to scene, and to build from that context the novel's final meaning. As a bi-product of such efforts, racial assumptions and their links to class hierarchies and self-serving conceits of nation are also undone.²¹

To miss this instrumentalist use of colonial motifs and hyper-racialized tropes is to miss Thackeray's more general exaggeration of Victorian literary conventions, the stock types, for instance, that people his novel, or its narrator's on-going dialogue with readers about the tired, arbitrary conventions of Victorian fiction. All Vanity Fair characters are excessively classed, raced, and/or gendered, for instance, including the angel of the house (Amelia); the dull bourgeois hero (Dobbins); the classic nabob (Jos); the philistine business man (Mr. Sedley); the depraved aristocrat (Mr. Crawley); the philandering soldier (George Osborne); the rich mulatto heiress (Miss Swartz); the licentious Frenchman (Monsieur de Steyne). Even Anglo racial stereotypes litter its pages: Dr. Johnson, the symbol of Anglo civility, is poised against “Black Sambo”; soldiers at Waterloo are the “beef-eating British”; George Osborne is obsessed with “complexion” among his friends, including Dobbins's “yellow complexion” after he catches yellow fever three times abroad; Mr. Osborne's “boiling blood” is described as “British,” racializing his bourgeois crass calculations. Thackeray even extends such satirical exaggerations to his own classist narrator: this novel is concerned with “Everybody,” he writes sarcastically, “everybody that was noble, of course, [since], as for the bourgeoisie, we could not quite be expected to take notice of them” (804; ch. 63).

Judging from Charlotte Brontë's astute sense of Thackeray's critique of “bigotry,” this narrative mode can appear contradictory. But such exaggerations of treasured Victorian types extended to their absurd and logical conclusion is designed to unveil bigotry as a Victorian moral mindset with, as I have suggested, a racial charge. Amelia, for instance, the hyperbolic angel of the house of Victorian domestic fantasy, exhibits sadomasochistic tendencies at the base of feminine identity; Joseph Sedley, the colonial administrator, fetishizes the “other” as he drains off their wealth in taxes; Becky, the least good, least respectable woman, could have been “a good woman” if she possessed “five thousand (pounds) a year” (532; ch. 41). No character escapes such flattening techniques; no realist conceit is left unturned. Because such novelistic conventions are in fact linked to larger ideologies of race, class, and gender, however, Thackeray ultimately exposes their irrational, arbitrary, power-laden sources that animate reigning social conventions.²²

In effect, what critics still treat as the endpoint of analysis – the narrative's formal unruliness, the “calculated confusion” in the “very structure of the novel”²³ – is a unique and deliberate narrational mode that highlights representations of race and empire as Victorian.

Locating Critical Internationalism: Thackeray as an Anglo-Indian Writer

Born in Calcutta (1811) of a three generation-old family of colonial administrators who did precisely “the Queen's duty” abroad, Thackeray's maternal and paternal lines “served India.”²⁴

Lionel Stevenson notes that while Thackeray may only dimly recall these early years in India, it was also “the only period of his life when he had been completely happy”– not an incidental memory for a deeply unhappy man (125). Two events kept him connected to India and to its unique “Anglo” institutions beyond his Calcutta childhood. In 1815, Thackeray's father, a Bengali tax-collector like Jos Sedley, died of fever in a district near Calcutta. His mother quickly remarried another Anglo-Indian, choosing to remain among her community. She sent Thackeray, merely five years old, back to England for school, as was customary for Anglo-Indians of his class. He did not see his mother until three and a half years later and spoke poignantly of this early separation, likely compounded by his father's death, “I could never bear to think of children parted from their parents somehow without a tendency to blubbering: and am as weak to this day upon the point, as I used to be at school” (Letters 2: 197, to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth, June 1845). He also treats this issue of separation in The Newcombes (1853–55) where he specifically links it – as a generic theme – to “our Indian story”: This pathos – and its accompanying social analysis – persisted throughout his life and writing.

Second, Thackeray's father left a legacy in part shameful to him. Before his father Richmond Thackeray married his mother, he had a Eurasian partner whom many critics call his “mistress.” As Deborah Thomas points out, ethnic intermarriage, common until the early nineteenth century, became stigmatized after mid-century with the rise of new pseudo-scientific theories of race.²⁶

Definitions of Englishness, identity, and race – concepts thought to be stable, even timeless – radically changed during Thackeray's own lifetime. Indeed, the “floating signifier” of race, as Stuart Hall explains in another context, is no more culturally or historically stable when referring to “Englishness” or “whiteness” than to other ethnic groups. Such changes, however, were not theoretical to Thackeray, but likely went to the core of his own identity definition, causing him pain. His father had a child by his first partner, Sarah, whom he carefully provided for when he died – facts that suggest a more significant connection than the word “mistress” implies. Moreover, Thackeray kept in contact with his half-sister Sarah throughout his own life, though he was reportedly embarrassed by Sarah's own daughter's (Sarah also married a Eurasian) visit to him in London.²⁷ He wrote to a friend of the visit by his “black niece,” a point that some critics believe explains his opinion of his half-sister and her kin.²⁸ Indeed, he is also thought to have sent his own family away during her stay, and he did write of his niece's audacity to his mother.²⁹ But Thackeray also claims Sarah as his “natural” sister in the same letter, and after her death (1841), he writes this in his diary: “It is the sorest point I have on my conscience never to have taken notice of her” (Letters 2: 32, Diary entry for 6 August 1841).³⁰

In the nineteenth century, the term “Anglo-Indian” refers to white/western English nationals born or stationed in India, typically for purposes of commerce or government. Yet given eighteenth and nineteenth-century habits of intermarriage in conjunction with the generational features of rule, many Anglo-Indians, otherwise thought of as westerners in class, status, and ethnicity, could very well be mixed in their ethnic makeup. As in Thackeray's case while critics are certain to refer to Sarah as mixed or “Eurasian,” they do not use this same term for Thackeray himself, even while, as Gordon Ray notes, he was also likely of “mixed-descent,” since his maternal grandmother perhaps “had some Asiatic blood.”³¹

Surely what distinguishes Sarah (whose father was Anglo and whose mother was Eurasian) and Thackeray (whose father was Anglo and whose grandmother was likely Eurasian) is a difference that has little to do with blood – and much more to do with the conflation of class, race, and nationalism. In fact, as Homi K. Bhabha points out elsewhere, rule binds desire, difference, and power together so that actual ethnic makeup – whatever that is anyway – is filtered in its perception by a clustering of other factors (“The Other Question”). In colonial occupation, what counts as pure ethnic identity – especially of the ruling class – is more likely an ideological element of relations of rule and less an empirical description of identity groups. While the Victorian term “Anglo-Indian” refers to the English abroad in India, their presumed Anglo ethnic purity was functionally in question: ultimately this conflation of an ethnic, cultural, and national distinction in the term “English” is to greater and lesser degrees arbitrary.

Despite Thackeray's own experiences and his expressed ties to India and to an Anglo-Indian diasporic community (evident in his on-going correspondence with his mother), few critics have made much of the impact of this history on the form of his writing. Instead, Thackeray is traditionally treated as the consummate English writer: Vanity Fair is seen as gossipy, centered on intimate details of English life and its famous personages, not those of its distant alien counterpart. There are, however, exceptions. Gordon Ray, for instance, provocatively suggests that while Thackeray's own experiences in India were short-lived, they were important, “He was raised among Anglo-Indians whose talk was chiefly about the land that they had left. He was brought up on such books as the histories of India of James Mill and Orme, Bishop Heber's Narrative of a Journey Through India, Southey's Curse of Kehama, and Tom Moore's Lalla Rookh. India thus continued to be a living force in his imagination. Moreover, the indirect effect of Thackeray's Indian heritage and experience was immense” (67). Ray's sense of a lasting “talk” of India as “a living force” in Thackeray's “experience” and “imagination” anticipates a contemporary notion of “discourse” and links questions of writing, identity, institutions, and form. Moreover, Henry James, arguing that “Thackeray's people, on both sides, for generations, had been drops in the great bucket … of English pioneership,” sees Thackeray's Anglo-Indian roots “as making for his distinction” (215).

I would like to suggest that such propositions are not contradictory. While Vanity Fair may not belong to a traditional Anglo-Indian canon like works by W. D. Arnold, Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, or George Orwell, the excessively English voice of Vanity Fair, its preoccupation with what “the English” “do,” how they talk and think, and their most deeply held beliefs and hidden desires, is similar to how Anglo-Indian writers scrutinize the alien “other”– though in Thackeray's case, the “other” is English.³²

³³ Thackeray both studies “Englishness” as if it were an object of ethnic analysis in this novel, as if he were an anthropologist; and his narrator is also excessively English, acting out the part of an Englishman “in the know” – well aware of Anglo jokes, idioms, vices, habits, and desires.³⁴ In his very obsession with “Englishness,” one sees an anxiety of belonging: anxious English types stock this novel, including Jos Sedley, but also Mr. Osborne, who translates bourgeois class anxiety into nationalist terms by constantly referring to himself as a “simple” “British merchant” (248; ch. 21). Both vantage points occupy the novel: the consummate, if excessive English insider, and the outsider-traveler who jots down notes of the culture of his travels – though in this case, his objects of writing are England and Anglo culture (the original subtitle was “Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society”). Indeed, this second dimension of the narrator's voice professes a more distanced, even distracted view, as if the narrator were entering English society from an external vantage point, learnt from entrenched insiders. In effect, the hyper-Anglo voice of the novel has both an insider and outsider dimension – these views are twin sides of a single internationalist perspective. Both, whether anxious insider or distracted outsider, depict “Englishness” not as exclusive to the Island, but as a perspective formed in movement, whether in the spread of Anglo culture through colonization or by Anglo settler communities. Thackeray is fascinated with the appearance and reappearance of Anglo culture in extreme forms or in unexpected places: in the colony of Pumpernickle, Germany, in the Black Hole of Calcutta and London, in the philistine businessman, or in the black servant putting on “English” airs. This double-sided Anglo voice, obsessed with details of English life and highly internally variegated, is not separate from racial or imperial concerns – these, instead, constitute an important part of its affect.

I want to briefly treat the formal complexity of this perspective in examples of the narrator's voice in Vanity Fair – one that operates by several oppositions. On the one hand, this narrator meddles in his own plot (taboo for the realist narrator) and, on the other hand, he shows himself uniquely vulnerable as a narrator, helplessly, even inexorably drawn (like readers) into the “world of Vanity Fair,” including its false conceits, immoral rules, and artificial values. This opinionated and vulnerable narrator with his disembodied and embodied voice functions to trick, cajole, and manipulate readers into confronting their own cultural norms in a flexible enough environment that places ultimate responsibility on them for meaning and decision-making. For example, trained to watch for the eventual union of characters introduced early on in the novel, Victorian readers tacitly assume the moral teleology of domestic realism: the anticipated endpoint of proprietous marriage. While one desires to see Becky snare Jos, as U. C. Knoepflmacher points out, one is also secretly glad for Jos's delay in proposing to see more of this highly enticing “little temptress.” Thackeray feeds this desire, lulling readers into thinking of Becky only as a delightful distraction – not as a dangerous force. In the opening scene, for instance, when she is desperate to “like everything from India,” the narrator shows her easily undone by a single chili pepper lurking in one of Jos's many “Indian curries.” In this initial context, she is seen as still safe, and readers are, hence, still naïve about the act of reading:

It is noteworthy that a colonial object plays a role in exposing Becky's opportunistic exoticism. But while the narrator has here downgraded her scheming, he does leave clues about its import. The key character in this scene, in fact, is not Becky or even Jos at all, but Mr. Sedley, who functions as the narrator's surreptitious cover. His game, like the novel's rules, draws out and echoes readers’ similar position and desires. Like Becky, who eagerly enters the terms of Jos's desires because she hopes to gain something by doing so, the reader strikes up a similar deal with the narrator – comfortably entering “Vanity Fair” and hoping to be rewarded by the final promise of delayed pleasure. Yet like the eventual deadly trap that Becky sets for Jos, Thackeray also traps readers in their own unreflective desires, undermined at the novel's end.

This narrator does this, in part, by taking charge of the novel's narration, entering as a character or a character-cover – even claiming a moment out of its time to reflect with readers upon a character's decision or the novel's direction as a whole. While such “intrusions” appear to be a heightened moment of truth telling, a place where the veneer of storytelling is ripped away in favor of direct contact, Thackeray is actually most deceptive in these instances. He writes, for instance: “[t]he argument stands thus. Osborne, in love with Amelia, has asked an old friend to dinner at Vauxhall – Jos Sedley is in love with Rebecca. Will he marry her? That is the great subject at hand” (60; ch. 6). Beyond satirizing this “great” topic, such “irritating” digressions confront readers with the mechanics of the novel, its formal structure, how and on what basis it constructs truth-effects. He goes on to discuss the various ways he could have handled this same material “in the ‘genteel,’ ‘romantic,’ or ‘facetious’ manners” (60; ch. 6). “Suppose we had shown how Lord Joseph Sedley fell in love, and the Marquis of Osborne became attached to Lady Amelia,” he writes, asking his readers to consider the difference class makes (60; ch. 6). Or “we [could have] resorted to the entirely low,” he writes, with “black Sambo … in love with the cook (as indeed he was),” fighting “a battle with the coachman on her behalf” (60; ch. 6). This approach, he writes sarcastically, “might be supposed to represent scenes of ‘life’” (61; ch. 6). Or we could “take a fancy for the terrible,” he adds, and make “the lover of the new femme de chamber a professional burglar” who “slaughters Black Sambo at the feet of his master, and carries off Amelia in her night-dress, not to be let loose again till the third volume” (60–61; ch. 6). This last tack would “easily … construct a tale of thrilling interest” through whose “fiery chapters” “readers should hurry, panting” (61; ch. 6). Such behind the scenes chats, because they seem to reveal the mechanics of artifice, become the place for this narrator's most devious satire.

In these moments Thackeray uses the conventions of the realist novel – terms he has delegitimated all along – to recover a more adequate social theoretical vocabulary for Victorian life. After disrupting the pleasure readers take in the realist novel's slippage between fiction (artifice) and “real life,” the narrator reverses the realist formula and suggests that the novelistic “artifice,” the highly artificial terms of “Vanity Fair,” are far more descriptive of Victorian society and its peculiar artificial culture, “my reader must hope for no such romance, only a homely story, a chapter about Vauxhall which is so short that it scarce deserves to be called a chapter at all. And yet it is a chapter and an important one too. Are there not little chapters in everybody's life that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?” (61; ch. 6). In this purportedly scaled-down story (no high romance, no allegiance to one genre), the narrator practices an implicated, instead of an omnipotent narrator-position; he uses multiple voices, not one monological view; and he masters a complex, interlaced, arbitrary mode of storytelling, in contrast to the single voice or tidal sweep of narratives in the realist and historical modes. This break defines an accidental theory of history that runs counter to the “monological” voice of so-called “great man theories of history.”³⁵

In Vanity Fair, this narrator examines the accidental, the small, the forgotten, and the unlikely as they powerfully return to structure “all the rest of history.” Indeed, the very course of history may be determined – or thrown off – by a single chili pepper or another incidental object, like the painting of an elephant whose causal role in this plot is only visible in hindsight. This mode of narration preys upon the random, the small, and the forgotten in which “all the rest of history” is gathered up in its single if fleeting image.³⁶

But this curious use of history is also made technically possible through Thackeray's now famous abrupt shifts in perspective or counterpoint – a mode that depends upon treating the nation and Englishness as mere conceits. In perhaps the most well-known example of counterpoint, Thackeray provides an unconventional approach to the Battle of Waterloo and in the process creates an “unhistorical” or anti-historical history.³⁷

In this scene, the narrator builds the familiar suspense: “all that day from morning until past sunset, the cannon never ceased to roar,” until “all of a sudden … the cannonading” stops (405; ch. 32). But, instead of rehearsing that story, readers are treated to a didactic digression on the perils of nationalist pride: Refusing to give way to the easy pleasure of national pride, Thackeray's critique of nationalism, while it appears to target war per se (a worthy enough object) focuses on representations of war: war stories, nationalist “tale(s)” of war, those that “every Englishman” knows – including the novel's contributions. The reader faces an absent battle and bloodless battlefield; moreover, after his talk, when readers expect to return to the battlefield again, the fight has ended. “Darkness,” we are told, has fallen “on the field and city” (32; ch. 406). No bodies litter the place – a mass testament to the necessary sacrifices for England – no traditional wide-angle epic lens hovers over heroic soldiers. Instead, the narrator cuts abruptly to a different site altogether: Amelia at home in the act of “praying for George” who, simultaneously, and unknown to her, is “lying on his face” on the absent battlefield “dead, with a bullet through his heart” (406; ch. 32). When the next chapter begins, the narrator has shifted scenes once again from the despoiled battlefield to Miss Crawley's cozy living room, where she idly reads of her son's promotion in the newspaper.

This switch to Amelia's perspective or to the “‘vanities’ of Brighton life,” as Knoepflmacher explains, “trick[s]” and jars the reader into “ambivalent responses” – ones they must face with incomplete, incompatible perspectives on something normally fully in their view (54). Unlike other realist writers, Thackeray seeks not to establish “a perfect confidence in the author” or a predictable readerly comfort-zone “where the chief characters are constantly before us” in a “uniform setting” (Knoepflmacher 56). Instead, readers are bereft of predictable orientation and lacking heroic characters or an omnipresent narrator to guide them. Without such tools, they must “toss out the ordinary dictionary definitions by which most men order their lives” – like Becky at the novel's start (Knoepflmacher 54). Not only does a reader experience multiple, conflicting impressions about what is real, true, or certain, one is forced into the position as an interpretive agent in the politics of such representations.

I want to extend Knoepflmacher's important analysis of Thackeray's shifting viewpoints by suggesting that this narrator uses counterpoint not only to juxtapose moments in time to thicken interpretation and to displace agency from narrator to reader, but that he also juxtaposes spaces: the Waterloo scene in Vanity Fair critiques national pride from different temporal and spatial perspectives, from the specific communities of its re-production. In the very next scene, Thackeray focuses on English upper-class exiles abroad, whose defining trait is geographic mobility. Indeed, the continental “colony” is one key locus of Englishness as national pride, one important vehicle of spatial counterpoint, and that place to which Jos returns in his fateful reunion with Becky Sharp. In considering the scenes which involve the post-war idle pleasures of the English “colony” in Germany, Thackeray again returns to his disarming tool of choice: humor. At Pumpernickel, nation-based rivals form over a silly, protracted jealousy: who among their group is the better opera singer during evening theaters. Further, the comedic weight of this scene is placed, not only on the players themselves, mere symbols of absurd nationalism (e.g., “we had on our side the Home Minister, the Master of the Horse, the duke's private secretary, and the prince's tutor”), but on their ridiculous conversations which are formalized into often official letters home (805; ch. 63). The narrator details each faction's nationalistic voice in this petty feud, showing how each resorts to official government discourse and to abstract concepts of national culture to win his point. He samples their dispatches:

The narrator makes it plain (“for instance”) that he is rendering conversations and not lulling the reader unaware directly into live discourse. “On their side,” Thackeray continues, “they would say” of the British envoy: Cast to highlight the incremental breakdown in the very conceit of public civility and governance, Thackeray shows how players style themselves (outside their homes) as men of state, no matter how menial, and further, how they sink with little provocation into a rabid defense of their respective “greatest nation[s] in the world.” Indeed, his deft addition of “and so on” at the end of the transcription reiterates his faux-indifference to the devolution of language from superficial civility to rash irrationality. Such opportunistic dispatches, played out entirely through counterpoint, even ensconce parties off scene and on the other end of such communiqués. As if an explanation were needed, the narrator states bluntly: “the fact is,” these women were “the two flags of the French and English party at Pumpernickel, and the society was divided in its allegiance to those two great nations” (805; ch. 63). The humor of this situation arises from how carelessly parties toss about grand terms of state, “the interests of Great Britain,” “the greatest nation in the world,” as if they were private playthings, and how the narrator himself becomes implicated in their tiny war. Thackeray even shows the lightening quick relay between idle classism, self-interested nationalism, and this mobile classes’ cosmopolitan appeal to all of “Europe”– their game's biggest chess-piece. Nationalism, that plaything of leisured pleasure, is the imperial ethos of Anglos abroad, the culture of the nomadic Anglo colony – the culprit in spreading their specific interests as if they were the voice of all of England.

No periodic device infrequently employed, counterpoint is the very narrational mode of this novel: clamoring voices are endemic to its form. Further, this mode is far more descriptive of mid-nineteenth-century nationalism – less a grand monologue or metanarrative, the ventriloquized voice of the great man – and more a disunified discourse, animated by class factions, self-interested parties, and international cleavages. Most obviously of all in this scene, this very mode itself is continuous with an insider/outsider's watchful and satirical critique of Englishness.

The “Black Hole of London”

THE LASTING PRESENCE OF THE REHASHED “Black Hole of Calcutta” incident in mid nineteenth-century England held several truths, many of which Victorians were unhappy to face. On the one hand, the symbol helped advance increasingly popular arguments for a British state in India. This claim itself was based on a Victorian self-congratulating differentiation from eighteenth-century style rule: the scattered network of trading zones and factories like Fort William, shifting military zones of commerce and violence, and localized decisions made on-the-ground, not centralized in London. Indeed, eighteenth-century British India saw personalities defined trade agreements, not parliament; piecemeal commercial networks set a geography of operations in motion;³⁸

and massive, ongoing profits made by self-made merchants who did as they saw fit far from home. The eventual impeachment of national hero Warren Hastings (1784), the second governor-general responsible for making East India Company power paramount in much of India, was the most visible symbol of a Victorian repudiation of this earlier era – indeed, for the systems-building Victorians, such informal rule and ad hoc militarism was an era badly in need of moral-minded reform.

But the Black Hole incident in metropolitan discourse also held another truth – one that Victorians were even less willing to face. From its inception, as early as the seventeenth-century chartering of the East India Company, English colonial power abroad was vulnerable, not stable. The reversal of power at the English factory was a lasting reminder of the ubiquity of so-called native uprisings, themselves an indicator of native views on this or other western fantasies of state power.³⁹

This truth went deeper. Despite nineteenth-century self-representations of this era as one of Pax Britannica – one-hundred years of uninterrupted peace and prosperity post-Waterloo (1815) – such an image was impossible to maintain beyond Europe. By different counts, as Giovanni Arrighi argues, the same period saw fifty to seventy-two major colonial campaigns conducted by the British in India and Africa alone (not including, the West Indies, China, New Zealand, or Australia – many sites mentioned in this novel). Within the horizon of Vanity Fair's own publication, there were three major clashes beyond England: the Jamaican Christmas uprising of 1831 (alluded to in Jane Eyre 1847), the Chinese Opium Wars that included India of 1839–42 and 1856–58, (mentioned by John Ruskin in Sesame and Lilies 1865), and the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857.⁴⁰ British global hegemony “was established through an almost uninterrupted series of wars,” Arrighi et al. concludes, constituting the “coercive underside” of an official discourse of peace, order, international guardianship, the general interest, and, the state's civilizing missions (224). Metropolitan anxiety about the Black Hole was thus linked both to the fear – and knowledge – that English power abroad was incomplete, an imperial gaze partial, not universal, the nature of British official power chaotic, not orderly. The obvious solution to this recognition was, as in the first case, a British state in India, though this time its terms of desire were less magnanimous, less liberal, more defensive and brutal. The Black Hole of Calcutta helped to “ideologically prepare for” the ostensibly inevitable, whether one's slogan was order or vengeance.⁴¹

The belief, however, that the Black Hole of Calcutta can be equated with political factions of the age is precisely why literary history – and Thackeray in particular – must supplement our maps of nineteenth-century empire. After the defeat of the world revolutions of 1848, the shift to what economic historians describe as Britain's changing imperial role after mid-century (or the new imperialism of the 1870s) included an additional, defining dimension: unregulated capital flows.⁴²

Political economist Stephen Gill argues that the aggregate economic developments that define globalization today are in fact reminiscent, not of the contemporary, but of the second-half of the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries (Gill and Mittleman 12–17, 80, 95). Of the seventy most productive countries in the world, for instance, the rate of exports as a percentage of overall world products in 1913 was 13 percent, and in 1999, 14.5 percent; likewise, capital transfers of the same group in the 1890s were actually larger than today (Gill and Law). In general, 1860–1914, the so-called age of British empire, saw trends that define “globalization” today: free capital flows across borders, intensifying foreign direct investment, the construction of a free-enterprise capitalist market system on a global scale, and the creation of appropriate state and commercial institutions including transportation industries (rail) and the manipulation of exchange rates. Justifications for a British state in India – based on liberal-utilitarian principle, cultural-nationalist fears, and broad geopolitical economic shifts – formed around an ingenious argument that involved the symbol of the Black Hole of Calcutta, itself the fictional product of a British desire for a timeless presence in India already visible by the 1750s.

Into this highly variegated discursive site, Thackeray creates his own trope of the Black Hole in Vanity Fair – an image which in re-imagining this symbol conducts a counter-symbolic warfare that ironically gets closer to the truth of the event's actual history and that of his own age. At the most basic level, in relocating this event from colony to metropole, this sign for distant unruly “others” becomes a metropolitan monument, an Anglo-Indian “internal colony” at home in Vanity Fair – and one that plays a peculiar role in the story. That Anglo-Indian transnational interests carried in the culture of its colonies are really metropolitan interests, and that this monument is no relic of distant places but an artifact of English cultural history, becomes clear in Thackeray's narrative treatment of this hybrid ghetto, especially as it amplifies the novel's main themes: reversals of power, twisted fates, “victories” made of unfair fights, and the most important vanity, the appearance of power. Skeptical of vanity in nationalism or war, and no less naïve about rule, this transfer of the Black Hole debate to a ghetto in metropolitan London implies to whom such desires for a British state belong.

At the literal level the “Black Hole of London” is inseparable from Jos, that ingratiating nabob who the narrator never tires of lampooning: Jos even grows larger and more “obsessed with all things Indian” as the novel progresses, like post-Napoleonic Great Britain.⁴³

Indeed, he chooses this neighborhood because, once home, he pines away for Calcutta, desiring to have his England in the nostalgic husk of “Old India.” In this rich nabob's choice of residence – much like the fate of Amelia, Becky and Dobbins, who also make their respective “Return(s) to the Genteel World” (as the chapter title suggests) – the narrator satirizes how such “genteel” aspirations lead to a home that is both English and “not quite white,” respectable and ridiculous, and most importantly, chaotic and unruly, but not for residents alone. If “good fortunes” finally begin to “smile upon” Amelia in her own move back to the Black Hole neighborhood with her brother, the narrator writes ironically of her plight: “we are glad to get her out of that low sphere in which she has been creeping hitherto, and introduce her into a polite circle” (761; ch. 60). This “puppet-master” who consciously pulls the plot strings is only too happy to leave readers “dissatisfied” with his faux-wind down to a happy ending (878; ch. 67). Racially-discriminating Victorians would no doubt question the respectability of anyone living in the London Black Hole.

But this scene also drops additional clues about the novel's final (ir)resolutions: the Black Hole foreshadows Thackeray's equivocal ending in which, as he told one persistent real-life fan who lobbied for Dobbins and Amelia's marriage, his characters may get their “prize[s],” but they may “not be worth the having.” While reversals in fate, fortune, power, and location (from East to West) are not unusual in this novel and so not entirely unexpected at its ending, and while this scene also functions to satirize the whole matter of a happy ending, the ghetto itself has a more direct point: it embodies the insatiability of Victorian desires, as well as their emptiness, and their unruliness, especially in a world defined by capital flows. While divining that one's own desires are empty is no insignificant discovery, more interestingly, this narrator conveys this point by appeal to an alternative “English” history – one in which the Black Hole defines London and the novel's horizon. The neighborhood is first described in this way: “Jos's new house was in the comfortable Anglo-Indian district of which Moira Place is the center. Minto Square, Great Clive Street, Warren Street, Hastings Street, Ochterlony Place, Plassey Square, Assaye Terrace – who does not know these respectable abodes of the retired Indian aristocracy and the quarter which Mr. Wentham calls the Black Hole in a word?” (761; ch. 60). No realist description, few exotic details (endlessly offered elsewhere) are relayed. Instead, readers are assailed with a barrage of signs – street signs – each an emblem of a “great” man or event from British Indian history, now placed onto Thackeray's imaginary London map. “Robert Clive” recaptured the trading post at Calcutta after native and French challenge in the Black Hole incident; Warren Hastings consolidated north and west India for the East India Company – indeed, these first and second governor-generals of eighteenth-century British India encapsulate this era's early, decisive military victories. “Plassey Square” refers to the Battle of Plassey (1757), a war waged less than a year after the Black Hole incident where Bengali territories came under English rule; “Ochterlony” refers to Sir David Ochterlony whose sly victory in the Nepal War (1812–14) repeats the same victory at Plassey, at a different location. In every case, the Black Hole acts as the common spark, the “primal scene” of “native insurgency,” one that both initiates and justifies military intervention afterward. Thackeray in effect maps the metropolitan city of London by the pivotal events of a distant “English” history.

But if London is in part Anglo-Indian in its very map, Thackeray also, by contrast, normalizes this neighborhood. The “Genteel World” of the Black Hole of London is affluent like any upscale London neighborhood – a move that, incidentally, implies a whole city of composite “internal colonies” in London inhabited by different stock ethnic and hybrid types. Jos, we are told, leads a life of “dignified otiosity” becoming “a person of his eminence,” just like other Anglos of his class; Amelia abides the duties of the gentle lady, paying social calls to Anglo-Indian wives and ministering to Jos's brown servants:

The residents of Black Hole, London, happily assimilate to indistinct English upper-class life – Thackeray writes with a knowing wink – as he portrays everyday life in this exotic place as derisively ordinary, even English.

But this landscape of “Anglo” hybrid ghettos in which Jos makes a home is also strange. Jos's “very first point,” Thackeray writes, is “to become a member of the Oriental Club: where he spent his mornings in the company of his brother Indians, where he dined, or whence he brought home men to dine” (765; ch. 60).⁴⁴

Indeed, the very idea of a hybrid ghetto – some Englishmen, Indian in culture and taste, and some Eurasians and Indians, English in culture and taste – is a comic disjuncture. In certain ways it is simply a reversal of an Anglo colony in British India where Anglo-Indians strain to maintain English habits in a place hostile to them, thereby creating their own exaggerated, even perverse Anglo culture manifested in other imaginary ghettoes across the world. From Thackeray's viewpoint, then, we have an early example, not of cultural imperialism – Anglo colonization of the culture of the “other” – but cultural globalization: the spread of Anglo culture or Anglicization, which is culturally hybrid.⁴⁵ Through the imaginary existence of the Black Hole of London one can imagine an England that is itself not a homogenous national space where Englishness, like whiteness, is spread evenly over its geography as the implicit metaphor of “national culture” (as race) implies.

Most important, if the charged and changing symbolic status of the Black Hole of Calcutta at mid-century becomes imaginatively linked to a new kind of imperialism, Thackeray uses this novel to flesh out the details and human logics of this new world's culture – and not in nationalist terms. The unregulated capitalist flows characteristic of the new imperialism mean that, economically-speaking, Britain begins intensively to invest capital in places like India at an unprecedented rate: this poorest colony in Britain's reach was the recipient of one of the most extensive, expensive railroad systems, a byproduct of purposeful capital investment. In certain respects, unregulated capital flows (which begin in earnest in the 1830s and 40s) are reversals of earlier dynamics of capital investment in which Britain shifts from sinking capital into its own industries (the Industrial Revolution) in the first half of the century (1780s–1850s) to its forced industrialization of India on British terms during the century's second half. This means that an English “center” at a certain point in time becomes objectively outside England – and not just in the periphery's buildings, roads, or railways – but in the organized forms of life that follow from such purposeful investments. Not only does the state chase after its capital flows; this dynamic race which includes de-industrializing certain developed sectors of the Indian economy, like textiles, involves the mobility of culture. It means that empire itself is becoming an industry, and further, that once imperialist relations and their institutions are industrialized – or subject to the capitalization of their means of production – new relations of rule emerge. At the most basic level, a British state in India, that Victorian desire, is simply the name for industrializing empire: it is for that reason that Victorians could argue without any apparent contradiction that the eighteenth-century Black Hole of Calcutta incident had exposed a breach of British state authority before any state graced Indian soil.

But what of the making of new desires – and vanities – new kinds of identities, and new notions of Victorian culture? Thackeray, in writing of the impact of such changes on metropolitan culture, begins to imagine what life – morality, language, values, conventions, even novels – looks like in accommodating such reversals in economic flows and relations. While profits were returned to London (the economic definition of imperialism), insofar as empire itself was becoming an industry, other dimensions of captured profits, the commodification of the “other,” were also carried into the metropole as desires. On the one hand, in Thackeray's representation of the Black Hole of London, this lack of separation of worlds, of desires, is made clear. Indeed, the point of his metaphor is thus not only to wind up – ironically – the story of Amelia and Jos's move from uncivilized to civilized worlds, from unhappiness to prosperity, but to implicate them in their own unruly desires, desires also involved in larger international interdependencies. I want to pursue this connection more closely in the unusual stories that Thackeray attaches to his description of the Black Hole of London, stories that are passed off as incidental, but which actually exhibit such complex networks of desires. It is here, on the other hand, that such interdependencies have consequences that also implicate readers.

In describing Amelia and Jos's new situation, the narrator speaks of internal class hierarchies in this unusual ghetto: “Jos's position in life” as a low-level imperial functionary, despite his aggrandized sense of self, was “not grand enough to entitle him to a house in Moira Place where none can live but retired members of Council and partners of Indian firms” (761; ch. 60). If the best homes are reserved for “company men” (East India Company shareholders), this means that class hierarchies are not only indigenous, formed inside England, but emerge in complex interrelations across borders.⁴⁶

Jos, instead, “engaged a comfortable house of a second- or third-rate order in Gillespie Street, purchasing the carpets, costly mirrors and handsome and appropriate planned furniture by Seddons, from the assignees of Mr. Scape, lately admitted partner into the great Calcutta house of Fogle, Fake, and Cracksman” (761; ch. 60). The narrator uses a favorite writerly trick to describe this exchange. Instead, of providing further realist description, he offers a tiny, elaborate digression about insignificant stock characters: Mr. Scape along with his incidental family who will be “heard of no more,” after Jos's act of buying their “comfortable” “second- or third-rate” home and “purchasing” their “carpets, costly mirrors and handsome and appropriate planned furniture” (762; ch. 60). Only in transferring possessions does Mr. Scape's existence become visible and, of course, unremarkable. His story, yet another reversal of fate or fortune, occurs just after he was “admitted partner” in an Indian financial house into which he had invested “seventy thousand pounds” – the total earnings of his “long and honorable life” (761–62; ch. 60) When the house fails for a million only “two years” after Scape had taken “Fake's place,” (a man who himself had profited handsomely and “retired to a princely place in Sussex”), Scape becomes another victim of bad timing and an arbitrary global market, like the Osbornes or Thackeray himself (762; ch. 60).

While this scene is not intended to enlist readers' sympathy – or even their attention for very long – the narrator does detail the consequences of Mr. Scape's ruin for him and his “unfortunate” family. “Scape, ruined, honest and broken-hearted at sixty-five years of age, went out to Calcutta to wind up the affairs of the house. Walter Scape was withdrawn from Eton, and put into a merchant's house. Florence Scape, Fanny Scape, and their mother faded away to Boulogne, and were heard of no more” (762; ch. 60). Thackeray could have, for instance, handled this whole scene differently, using straight description, exotic details of Jos's new home or his anxious mimicking of Anglo-Indian habits – tactics endlessly used elsewhere. Instead he takes the reader in the opposite direction, pulling back from characterization, scene setting, realist details, even the frame of England itself. He does this nonchalantly: Mr. Scape is casually “ruined, honest and broken-hearted at sixty-five years of age”; his son goes from “Eton” to “a merchant's house” while the family's women “fade away to Boulogne.” The point is not to build identification – the novel barely builds sympathy for its own protagonists – but to use accidental encounters to define an otherwise invisible, international chain of events, a non-nationalist realm of action. This dynamic map of London is embedded in an equally fluid account of British imperial relations whose cultural parameters at mid-century are defined, organized, and unleashed by desires which, as we shall see, ebb and flow like capital flows.

Such links depend upon strange equivocations. “Good fortune” is polarized, based on another's ruin or ill fate; happiness is partial; relations are interdependent – but all at the most minute, unpredictable, and intimate levels. It is not only that personal happiness is transpersonal, bound to larger, transnational events.⁴⁷

We are treated, for instance, to another layer of irrelevant information: when the great house “fails” “for a million,” the event also “plunge[s]” “half the Indian public into misery and ruin” (762; ch. 60). This micro-narrative, with little to do with the things of which it speaks – the fate of oblique characters, the demise of rogue financial institutions, distant nations as players – also drags readers into the unexamined fate of another order of actor, the “Indian public.” Their visibility indeed only occurs, like Scape's, in digressive moments, in incidental details (i.e., Jos's fetishized choice of residency), or small moves that somehow come to imbed large bodies of people. If the bad fate of this unwieldy abstraction, “the Indian public,” makes Jos and Amelia's happiness no longer private, it also makes international dependencies human. Thus, while this narrator appears distracted, while he professes a distanced relationship to the random lives of those characters he charts, the Black Hole of London houses a complex chain of accidental events which, by contrast, highlight human affiliations across impossible distances, many borne of casual or unlikely encounters and exchanges.

In being resolutely human, are such vast connections thus informed by moral evaluation; is vanity an analytical or ethical lens? There is no doubt that Thackeray finds such social relations arbitrary, untethered to the manifestation of divine will, the laws of a principled state, a benign ruler. Instead, the marketplace – with its logics of contamination, association, and exchange – organizes this web of haphazard interconnections. But if the world of “Vanity Fair” is, thus, an insular one, with no vision, no higher moral arbiter beyond commodity exchange (afterlife, salvation, redemption), unlike its namesake Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, as many Victorian critics complained, in another sense, this fictional world is not insular at all. All “exotic” spaces (beyond England) are drawn inexorably back into its center, including spatial and civilizational “others” – whether black sweeps, Black Holes, dark mulatto heiresses, or distant colonies. What even counts as “the center” is fractured, dispersed, with Anglo colonies garnering the globe, even returning in changed form to London. The loss of an “outside” to England or to Englishness is thus belied by international motifs, themselves visible only in relational analysis. In certain ways, Thackeray has thus turned the much emphasized temporal logic of “Vanity Fair” another full twist to appropriate the spatial outside and its “others,” whether places, identities, or alien histories. This narrative architecture replaces a more familiar one: that seamless metanarrative containing the real world and a better one, and the novelist's ability to join such worlds together through the teleological progress of the heroic pilgrim.

But if these are precisely the premises which Vanity Fair disrupts, the Black Hole of London is an especially good metaphor to capture the collapse of such conventions, such different orders of reality – ideal and material, national and international, culture and economy – once navigated by a single heroic consciousness, and further, to describe the meaningful ripple effects of such disintegrations. It is not only that the “center” is inside the periphery, the periphery at home in the center, and Victorian culture defined by movement between such non-discreet worlds. Indeed, as profits return to London, peripheries and their hybrid cultures meld and emerge there, just as Anglo “culture” changes as it travels along with unregulated capital flows to settle into alien histories; indeed, the cycle continues, repeats and reverses.⁴⁸

Instead, the Black Hole of London best illustrates how meaning functions in such a novel, in such a panoramic landscape, especially in relation to history. Staple social conventions, the things which Victorians expect to read about – happy marriages, proper women, heroic men – are, first and foremost, replete with energies that subvert their stability and locality. Likewise, the familiar is host to dynamic, far off connections that change what constitutes the known, even the real. The novel itself, that vehicle of realist, familiar knowledge, itself becomes fraught, as a tightly strung web of relations which includes consumption and misery, happiness and misfortune, national consequences and private transactions, extends its boundaries far beyond any characters' ambit of thought or action. That moral vantage point which realist writers had erected by defining boundaries is crossed in this novel.

But more than this, the “real” does return in spades – in small, seemingly insignificant items and in moments which make visible international connections and, thereby, inform new ethical terms – defined outside conventional notions of national culture. Whether black or brown servants, adventurers and colonial wars, the Oriental club, city-spaces, eastern paintings, or a bowl of rack-punch, such objects, linked to imperial spaces and imbedded in “English” common life, re-orient meaning and morality. Meaning, for instance, accrues in miniature, in little, even prosaic events or objects like purchasing carpets, dining at the Oriental club, or looking into mirrors, and ethical judgments are thus made possible by tracking those items in their own expansive journey through the novel. Such a pattern is most obviously the case with characters, whose identities and fates are built of international dependencies which are revealed at key moments of encounter or exchange. Amelia's adult life, for instance, begins from a foreign stock crisis; George Osborne would be rich and alive if he married a West Indian heiress; Becky's husband Rawdon Crawley becomes a good man – and governor – just as he dies of fever in a South American English colony. In Jos's case, such identity/international/ethical circuits are most pronounced and literal – even expressed in metaphors of self-reflection and mirrors. Thackeray writes of Jos's identity-defining moment: “To be brief, Jos stepped in and bought their carpets and sideboards, and admired himself in the mirrors which had reflected their kind and handsome faces” (762; ch. 60). Mr. Scape has, like all characters in this novel's landscape, unwittingly helped to constitute bumbling, unreflective Jos's new genteel identity in a now familiar role reversal – but, in the process, the narrator shows different spaces, different identities, also momentarily captured together in “the mirror” which held and “reflected” both their “faces.” They are indeed trapped together for an explicit instant in conduits of desire and exchange.

To put this point differently, the often-repeated thesis of vanity in Vanity Fair, the narrator's ultimate moral judgment – whether capitulated upon or over-stated, as critics equally argue – is a non- national determination. All its characters are vain and petty in exactly the same way: in their narrow vision, in their inability to see their situation in linked global conduits and exchanges. The victims of “Vanity Fair” do not know their implication in dynamic “other” histories, or the chains of desires that thicken, promote, or undermine their own private happiness. Such is a scathing critique of that world, dominant Victorian Englishness, characterized by its claim to know the real and grand world intimately, even universally. Indeed, this criticized narrow vision juxtaposed against a worldly Victorianism conveys that classic definition of vanity, itself linked with hubris – the narcissistic confusion of human with divine perspectives. But to say that “vanity” – that Christian categorical critique of an overstretched vision, a gaze that confuses its own with a god's eye-view – may carry a resonance with imperialist critique in this novel is to push Thackeray's perspective too far. This is so even while the novel depends upon a view of Victorians as “vain” in their contempt for any moral outside in favor of fetishized commodity relations (the carnival of “Vanity Fair”), in the hubris that English “civilization” stands in for the world. Indeed, by showing the elimination of a moral-religious outside – the traditionally transcendent, stable realm of heaven – vanity becomes an era-defining Victorian condition: the “flaw” of vanity, of narrowed vision, is the cultural identity of Victorian England. This critique implicates “Englishness” in a way not geographically tied to England. But the real purpose of the Black Hole Anglo-Indian colony of “British Indians,” a place of hybrid cultural cohabitation where Anglo-Indians occupy England (not “India”), is to convey this logic in a narrative form where contamination of once separate spaces is no longer a fear – predicated upon the possibility of separations – but a Victorian reality, one that impacts language, meaning, morals and history. The “Black Hole of London” thus exposes the fiction of a national center and its seamlessness with culture; the conceit that Englishness is constituted by national boundaries or that sovereignty is calibrated to geography, instead of a world formed by internal colonies that shift location and purpose within an over-arching international architecture of capital flows. Indeed, any identity of Englishness is just as easily located and constituted elsewhere. Dreams of a British national culture – like a British nation-state in India – are thus but a fantasy of power and a fiction of pure Englishness, this novel contends.