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British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) is best known for Vanity Fair (1847), a satirical panorama of upper-middle-class London life and manners at the beginning of the 19th century. Also a prolific journalist, he wrote a series of sketches for the magazine Punch lampooning the English upper and middle classes, which became The Book of Snobs (1846-7). This quotation mocks the growing self-confidence of the rising British middle class, when the empire and national pride were at their height. However, Thackeray believed that British society had been corrupted by capitalism and imperialism, with their emphasis on wealth, material goods and ostentation. All that mattered to society and its institutions – aristocracy, Church, military – were family, rank, power and appearance, and these values had morally crippled and emotionally bankrupted every social class.
