【正文】 this seemed to be part of the real world for granted. In the late Victorian period, the empire of British experienced from prosperity to decline. On the one hand, when the dominance of England was challenged by America and Germany, England was intensified to plunder the colonies. On the other hand, the export of capital and the expansion overseas leaded to the depression and atrophy in domestic industry and agriculture. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the economy had further exacerbated the divide between the rich and the poor. What’s worse, the social ethics and values which were highly respected in Victorian period began to collapse. The wave of scientific inventions in Victorian period was surging. Victorians were believed in scientific progress and full of optimism and confidence for the Industrial Revolution. The emergence of steamer made the transport and trade reach 3 an unprecedented prosperity. In conclusion, nieenth century was a century that full of opportunities, a century that made people seem to be much more selfconfident. The private experience of Thackeray Thackeray was born in India in 1881, and his father was a taxman working in the East India Company. Thackeray was the only boy. When his father died, he was only four years old. Therefore, he had a large number of heritages for about seventeen thousand pounds. He went back to England to go to school when he was six years old, then entered several noble schools stepbystep. But this series of education was not satisfactory to him. He was not interested in his lessons when he was studying in secondary school. He was only interested in reading books in other areas. University of Cambridge focus on mathematics but Thackeray fixed his attention on the despise literature which mathematicians had no regard for and the modern literature which the college looked down on. He went to Germany for study tour before he got a degree, and then went back to England for studying the law. However, he hated the law very much. Studying the law was only an excuse. in fact, he was just wandering around, and being familiar about the life in London. In the winter of 1883, the bank where Thackeray deposited his money closed so that his property was almost wiped out. That made him to lift up and helped him get rid of the shackles given by his social status. As usual, the man who was born in that kind of family should be a lawyer, a doctor, a judge, a clergyman or an officer. If you became an artist or a scholar, you would be looked down on. Because of his bankruptcy, he could do the work whatever he wanted. After that, he began to draw pictures but soon after he gave it up because he was only good at drawing sketch which was not sold well at that time. Then he worked as a journalist and in 1836 he got married with the daughter of a Ireland colonel, Isabella Shaw. They went back to motherland and made a living on writing. Although their life was a little hard, they enjoyed it a lot. Thackeray 4 printed several books and received much favorable ment. But only after the publishing of Vanity Fair in 1847, he was recognized as a great novel genius. Then his works had a stable market and his life began to be better and better. He became the editorinchief of Cornhill Magazine in 1859, when he had the highest reputation. He was susceptible to premature aging and sick, died in London in 1863. Some famous writers also praised that Thackeray always observed everything carefully, understood the life and people’s spirit deeply. They thought Thackeray was a genius. In his time he was always being pared to Dickens, but they belong to two entirely different types of writer. For example, they have differences such as the nature of inspiration. The theme of novel Among Thackeray’s novels, Vanity Fair is certainly the most influential one and has great artistic acplishment. It secured Thackeray’s position as literary giant of English literature and was considered one of the English classical. The theme of this masterpiece, that is, English society of that stage in history was an absolute vanity fair. As usual, there are always many kinds of heroes in novels, but in Vanity Fair, Thackeray mainly talked about the mon people and trivial matters. Vanity Fair remains a classical example of social satire up to the present day. In this novel, the major characters were not perfect people but the mon persons so that this novel got another subtitle, “A Novel without a Hero”. This title emphasized on the fact that the author’s intention was not to portray individuals but the bourgeoisie and the aristocratic society. Under such social background, when the money expanded its influence to the social environment, people’s ambition also became larger. However, there were always someone thinking that money or social status should be ing secondary. Vanity Fair exposed the social evils of capitalism. In the first chapter, Rebecca 5 Sharp was on behalf of the middle class. The second chapter mentaries Amelia’s performance of superiority as one of the upper class pared to the middle class. The next chapter tells the impact and assimilation of the middle class to the upper class. In the forth chapter, the author discussed the review of the novel and set off the rise of the middle class. The conclusion of this novel summarized the views expressed in this masterpiece and pointed out that because of the novel showed perfectly the middle class people’s firm, efforts and advantages during the process of entering the center of the Victorian upper social class. So the theme of Vanity Fair s