"Yesterday's Revolutionary, Today's Reactionary"

Considering my experience of Thackeray's Vanity Fair my thoughts turn to what Professor Ron Singer has to say of the classic novel, namely that yesterday's revolutionary becomes tomorrow's reactionary. Professor Singer had in mind the telling of the story--the later "aesthetic stricture requiring objectively, purely descriptive fiction" with which Thackeray's very "talkative" narration is out of line, but one may wonder if that is not the case politically given how, as Singer explains, the book was seen as socially subversive as well. Still, if allowing that a work of two centuries ago can seem more conservative today than it did at the time, it does seem to me that some of Thackeray's contemporaries still come across as having more "edge" that way than he did. If Dickens, getting his history from Thomas Carlyle and loaded with English prejudice against a country "less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident" could see in the French Revolution little but the guillotine that has so dominated conservative (and thus, mainstream) imagination of the event down to Ridley Scott's Napoleon, his empathy for the downtrodden and hatred for their oppressors and consequent disgust for the Old Regime comes through, as does a sense of history as tragedy, so much so that one should never forget that before the first guillotine blade fell France was the kind of country which sentences "a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards," while the conventional stress on Madame Defarge as the villain of the story (rather than the Marquis St. Evrémonde and those he represented) seems exceedingly simple-minded--all as Dickens' virtues rather than his failings have served to make him unfashionable with the makers and unmakers of respectable opinion these days. For now, at least, I do not think anything remotely like that can be claimed for Vanity Fair.