The great example of this pushfulness is Thackeray’s most delightful creation in “Vanity Fair,” Becky Sharp, though she assuredly was no snob. With all her doubtful antecedents, however, Becky, at least, married into the ranks of the aristocracy; and in her husband our author has created so real a person that one is actually disposed to question whether he was rightly judged by the author of his being. We are told that Rawdon Crawley was stupid, badly educated, unaccustomed to good society, at least when ladies were present. But if he were such an oaf why did his rich aunt Miss Crawley, who had known Sheridan and the wits, make such a fuss about him and make him sit at table with herself and Becky because “we are the only Christians in the county.” Why was he allowed to act in the Charades at Gaunt House on that memorable night of his wife’s triumph? The fact is that Thackeray was obsessed with the idea that all young men of fashion were necessarily stupid. It is a thoroughly middle-class tradition and we find it constantly in his pages. Because of certain mannerisms and affectations, because they cared little for literature, because they fought duels and gambled, all young men about town were not necessarily fools; and it was a mistake to depict Rawdon Crawley as on the one hand uncommonly sharp and also a fool. But it is because Thackeray’s genius has created such a living being that we are indignant at his failure to make him conform to our ideas of what we think he really was. We regard him as a living man whom his creator has misjudged, and not as the figment of the brain of the author.