Afterword

Abstract

In reading the opening of Vanity Fair’s first serial installment, one is liable to be struck by the directness, assuredness, and tellingness of the narrative:

While the present century was in its teens, and on one sun-shiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gates of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. A black servant who reposed on the box beside the fat coachman, uncurled his bandy legs as soon as the equipage drew up opposite Miss Pinkerton’s shining brass plate, and as he pulled the bell, at least a score of young heads were seen peering out of the narrow windows of the stately old brick house,—nay the acute observer might have recognised the little red nose of good-natured Miss Jemima Pinkerton herself, rising over some geranium-pots in the window of that lady’s own drawing-room. (Ch. 1, p. 1)