Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray · first published 1848
Twelve screen versions of a novel whose narrator will not let you like anybody.
12 versions · 1911–2005
Thackeray subtitled it “A Novel without a Hero” and meant it. Adaptations have been arriving since 1911, and almost all of them make Becky Sharp more sympathetic than the book does, because a camera has to point at somebody.
What no adaptation has managed to carry is the narrator: a showman who calls his characters puppets, interrupts to tell you what they are worth in pounds, and closes the book by shutting them in a box.
Published in parts, 1847–48
It came out in monthly numbers while revolutions broke out across Europe — Paris in February 1848, then Vienna, Berlin, Milan — and while England, alone among the great powers, did not have one. Thackeray was writing about the generation of Waterloo for readers who were watching another old order come down.
The serial form shows: he was writing each number close to publication, watching sales, and adjusting. The famous last line about the puppets going back in the box was written by a man who had spent two years living with these people in public.
On screen
12Film and television, earliest first.
- 1911 Vanity Fair Charles Kent
- 1915 Vanity Fair Charles Brabin
- 1922 Vanity Fair Walter Courtney Rowden
- 1923 Vanity Fair Hugo Ballin
- 1932 Vanity Fair Chester M. Franklin
- 1935 Becky Sharp Lowell Sherman
- 1956 Vanity Fair
- 1998 Vanity Fair Marc Munden
- 2005 Vanity Fair Mira Nair
- — Vanity Fair David Giles
- — Vanity Fair
- — Vanity Fair Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.