Brave New World and Vanity Fair: A ‘Draught that Will Make You […] Lighthearted and Gay’

Abstract

From 1926 to 1928, Aldous Huxley had a feature page in Vanity Fair, the stylish American magazine that served upwardly mobile readers as a guidebook to modern art and culture. Although Jerome Meckier noted in 2000 that Huxley’s essays should be ‘required reading’ for students of Brave New World (1932), scholars have given scant attention to the novel’s periodical context.¹ Yet Huxley’s Vanity Fair essays—which envision pleasure as an ‘appalling’ toxin and the comfort of modern society as enfeebling—clearly prefigure his dystopia’s critique of a culture of vapid consumerism, ease, and amusement.² There is considerable irony in Huxley penning his screed against modern society within the glossy pages of an American magazine that largely promotes the values he satirizes, for Vanity Fair styles itself as a ‘draught that will make you […] lighthearted and gay’, presenting a fashionable new world of wealth and leisure, full of labor-saving technologies, thrilling diversions, and the trendiest art and ideas.³ However, by examining Huxley’s Vanity Fair essays in their original periodical context, we recover not only a greater appreciation of the satirical vision that shaped Brave New World, but also a more nuanced view of this deceptively light publication.