Vanity Fair (1847—­1848) is the best known of Thackeray’s novels.  It was his first great work, and was intended to express his own views of the social life about him, and to protest against the overdrawn heroes of popular novels.  He takes for his subject that Vanity Fair to which Christian and Faithful were conducted on their way to the Heavenly City, as recorded in Pilgrim’s Progress.  In this fair there are many different booths, given over to the sale of “all sorts of vanities,” and as we go from one to another we come in contact with “juggling, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, rogues, and that of every kind.”  Evidently this is a picture of one side of social life; but the difference between Bunyan and Thackeray is simply this,—­that Bunyan made Vanity Fair a small incident in a long journey, a place through which most of us pass on our way to better things; while Thackeray, describing high society in his own day, makes it a place of long sojourn, wherein his characters spend the greater part of their lives.  Thackeray styles this work “a novel without a hero.”  The whole action of the story, which is without plot or development, revolves about two women,—­Amelia, a meek creature of the milk-and-water type, and Becky Sharp, a keen, unprincipled intriguer, who lets nothing stand in the way of her selfish desire to get the most out of the fools who largely constitute society.  On the whole, it is the most powerful but not the most wholesome of Thackeray’s works.

In his second important novel, Pendennis (1849-1850), we have a continuation of the satire on society begun in Vanity Fair.  This novel, which the beginner should read after Esmond, is interesting to us for two reasons,—­because it reflects more of the details of Thackeray’s life than all his other writings, and because it contains one powerfully drawn character who is a perpetual reminder of the danger of selfishness.  The hero is “neither angel nor imp,” in Thackeray’s words, but the typical young man of society, whom he knows thoroughly, and whom he paints exactly as he is,—­a careless, good-natured but essentially selfish person, who goes through life intent on his own interests. Pendennis is a profound moral study, and the most powerful arraignment of well-meaning selfishness in our literature, not even excepting George Eliot’s Romola, which it suggests.

Two other novels, The Newcomes (1855) and The Virginians (1859), complete the list of Thackeray’s great works of fiction.  The former is a sequel to Pendennis, and the latter to Henry Esmond; and both share the general fate of sequels in not being quite equal in power or interest to their predecessors. The Newcomes, however, deserves a very high place,—­ some critics, indeed, placing it at the head of the author’s works.  Like all Thackeray’s novels, it is a story of human frailty; but here the author’s innate gentleness and kindness are seen at their best, and the hero is perhaps the most genuine and lovable of all his characters.