Unfeeling Omniscience: Empire and Distant Intimacy in Vanity Fair

This article considers how Vanity Fair presents its omniscient narration as the result of an encounter between characters' overly sentimental letters and Thackeray's squeamish narrator, who only reports the contents of such letters after first expunging their emotional excess. Situating issues of letter-writing within the context of imperial careering and settler emigration, the essay offers a reading of Vanity Fair as a post-epistolary novel. Set during the decades when the novel-in-letters was declining, Thackeray's novel explores epistolary failure formally and thematically to disclose tensions in imperial Britain's ideal of distant intimacy. This essay thus argues that Thackeray's unfeeling omniscience instances how imperial affects informed Victorian styles of narration.