Vanity Fair screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes might introduce herself to people as “Mr Thackeray’s assistant,” but while ITV and Amazon’s new adaptation of the literary classic stays very true to the plot and characters of his novel, there’s something very fresh about this drama.
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With a focus on its two female leads and a light, humorous approach to the source material, Vanity Fair is back for 2018 and in very good shape. Here’s how this TV adaptation compares to the novel…
How faithful is Vanity Fair to the original novel?
Judging by episode one, this is a very faithful adaptation of WM Thackeray’s novel. No major plots or characters are omitted from the first 80 pages of this vast 800-page book, although there are some slight edits to keep things moving along.
The novel kicks things off with an introduction from the narrator, who is characterised as the “Manager” of this Vanity Fair puppet show performance. This narrator has received a bit of an update in the TV version, with the figure of Thackeray himself (played by Michael Palin) presiding over an actual fairground as he sets the scene for his story.
And so the story begins at the Academy for Young Ladies, run by the snobbish headmistress Miss Pinkerton (Suranne Jones) in Chiswick. That’s where we first meet orphan Becky Sharp (Olivia Cooke), who teaches French at the school in return for her lessons and lodging. But the headmistress has come to detest Becky since taking her in as a charity case and a cut-price way to get a good French mistress, and so when Becky demands proper pay, Miss Pinkerton retaliates by forcing her to pack her things and leave for a new position as a lowly governess.
But not so fast! In the TV version she has nowhere to go until the job begins the following week, and so she manipulates the wealthy and overly kind pupil Amelia “Emmy” Sedley (Claudia Jessie) with crocodile tears until she’s invited as a guest to the Sedley family home. In the book, it is actually Miss Pinkerton who sends Becky off with Amelia, but in both versions things turn out the same way: Becky leaves in disgrace and chucks her dictionary out of the carriage window as they ride off to Russell Square in the company of the Sedleys’ servant Sambo, who – as Thackeray repeatedly points out – is black.
Becky’s motto is that she must make sure tomorrow is better than today, and so she sets about ingratiating herself with naive stockbroker’s daughter Emmy and her family. Immediately she sets her sights on Amelia’s wealthy, absurd and very fat older brother Jos (David Fynn), who is back from making his fortune in India.
With her new friend’s enthusiastic support she makes it her mission to charm him into marriage. This she does by a) pretending that he is very fascinating and interesting and handsome, and b) valiantly eating a spicy Indian curry. Jos is thoroughly hooked.
But things come to a head at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Amelia persuades her brother Jos and her snobbish fiancé George Osborne (Charlie Row) to take them all out for a romantic night on the town. Also along for the ride is George’s best friend, Captain William Dobbin (Johnny Flynn), who is secretly in love with Amelia. In the book we get a much fuller explanation of the schoolboy roots of the men’s friendship, looking back to when social outcast Dobbin saved George from a beating and defeated his bully in a fight – but in the TV version, this flashback is left out.
At Vauxhall Becky hopes to get her proposal. But nervous Jos gets absolutely wasted and makes a fool of himself singing songs and dancing, and has to be carted home when the night ends in disaster. Alarmed by the low social status of Becky as a potential sister-in-law, George ridicules Jos for his choice of bride and scares him off for good.
Knowing her battle for Joseph Sedley’s heart is lost (because of meddling George!), Becky must now accept her defeat and leave the house in Russell Square to take up her position as a governess for the MP Sir Pitt Crawley (Martin Clunes) at a dreary mansion in Hampshire. He’s not exactly ideal boss material: Becky is alarmed to find that the grubby man who picks her up and drives her coach is her new employer himself, and he shows himself to be crass and tight-fisted.
But soon after arriving at his house to take charge of his two younger daughters, she catches sight of his dashing youngest son Captain Rawdon Crawley (Tom Bateman)…
How is this ITV drama different from Thackeray’s novel?
Vanity Fair has been adapted again and again, from the 1911 silent movie right through to the 2004 blockbuster starring Reese Witherspoon. So what makes this version different from all the other versions? What’s been changed, what’s been left out, and how does it compare to the original novel?
Screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes and actors Claudia Jessie, Olivia Cooke and Tom Bateman tell RadioTimes.com five things that make this adaptation distinctive:
1. It’s about a friendship between two girls
“I noticed when I read it again, something I hadn’t really noticed before, was that really when you strip it all down, it’s about two girls and their friendship,” Hughes says.
“That’s the important thing. I kept saying to everybody, ‘You know that the second lead, the second co-star, is not Rawdon Crawley or Dobbin, even. The second lead is Amelia.’ It’s about two girls, and I don’t think that’s really been thought about in quite that way before. It’s about what a girls’ friendship is like between two girls who have nothing in common.”
That means cutting out some of the bits of the story where Becky and Emmy are separated, and bringing them together more than in the novel.
“If you don’t have a focus on the two girls you end up with a terrible problem, I think, of – they’re apart for so long in the book, you’re trying to touch base with them but they’re not together,” she says.
2. Amelia is less of a “sap”
Hughes continues: “I wanted to give Amelia more of a place in the sun as well. The Victorians thought she was absolutely gorgeous and Thackeray thought she was the perfect woman, but for modern ears she’s a bit of a sap.
“Poor little Amelia has this massive journey towards adulthood, towards an adult understanding of the world. I drew that out of the novel. I mean it’s there, it is absolutely there, it’s not something I’ve invented, but it’s funny because i didn’t really set out to do that, but it was as I was writing it, I realised that was what was there.”
Jessie adds: “Amelia’s described as someone who would die over a dead canary, so there’s a part of me that’s been faithful to that fact. I have cried when I’ve needed to cry. But also I didn’t want to play her so wet that we’d get really, really annoyed with her!”
3. Chunks of the second half of the novel have been cut
A lot of the things that happen later on in the novel have been drastically condensed or cut out entirely to keep things within seven episodes. This has involved “binning a lot of relatives” and “taking out some of the round and round the houses stuff.”
“It struck me that the second half of the book is quite repetitive, and poor old Thackeray was a journalist, writing to order, and he was just keeping it going, keeping it going,” Hughes explains.
4. We see the actual Battle of Waterloo
Vanity Fair is a co-production between Amazon and ITV, which meant there was a lot more money to play with – allowing producers to take us to the actual Battle of Waterloo.
Hughes reveals: “When we first began with this we were just doing it for ITV, and there was a slightly worried conversation along the lines of, ‘Well what are we going to do about the Battle of Waterloo?'”
Thackeray actually stays in Brussels with the women while the men go to fight, but this TV version puts us where the action is – thanks to Amazon.
“Being in co production with them meant that we could do more than we would ever have been able to do before, and one of the things we did was spend a week in a field outside Reading, re-staging the Battle of Waterloo,” Hughes says. “Which is completely mad.”
5. Vanity Fair is actually very funny
It’s easy to forget how much humour there is in Thackeray’s novel, and if anything the TV version is even funnier.
“I think Gwyneth has encapsulated Thackeray’s humour as well, which I think is possibly a little bit different from the other retellings of it,” Cooke tells us.
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