A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation

Vanity Fair

Comedian Al Murray plays his great, great, great grandfather William Makepeace Thackeray as the unreliable narrator in this new anarchic dramatisation by Jim Poyser.

Al Murray stars in this anarchic BBC radio reboot of Thackeray’s groundbreaking satirical novel 
 
Comedian Al Murray plays his great-great-great grandfather William Makepeace Thackeray as the unreliable narrator in this radical makeover of his ancestor’s celebrated satire on class, sex, money, hypocrisy and snobbery in nineteenth-century England. 
 
As the curtain rises on our ‘story without a hero’, moneyless Becky Sharp leaves school with her upper-class best friend Amelia Sedley. Clever, cunning and ambitious, Becky is determined to make her way in Regency society – and she’ll trample on anyone who gets in her way. 
 
When her plan to marry Amelia’s brother Jos falls through, she snares the aristocratic Rawdon Crawley – but her hopes of riches are dashed when the couple are disinherited by his wealthy aunt. Meanwhile, Amelia marries the dashing George Osborne, breaking the heart of her devoted admirer, William Dobbin. 
 
But war is fast approaching, and as Napoleon advances towards Waterloo, where will the winds of destiny blow our players? And will the ever-resourceful Becky succeed in achieving her desires? 
 
Pacey, contemporary, fresh and funny, this sparkling dramatisation features Ellie White as Becky, Helen O’Hara as Amelia, Blake Ritson as Rawdon, Rupert Hill as George, Thom Tuck as Jos and Graeme Hawley as Dobbin. 
 
 
Cast and credits 
Thackeray (narrator)……………………Al Murray 
Becky Sharp……………………Ellie White 
Amelia Sedley……………………Helen O’Hara 
Rawdon Crawley……………………Blake Ritson 
Jos Sedley……………………Thom Tuck 
George Osborne……………………Rupert Hill 
Dobbin……………………Graeme Hawley 
Mrs Sedley/Mrs Bute/Aunty Crawley/Jane/Rawdon Junior……………………Emma Gregory 
Mr Sedley/Sir Pitt/Lord Steyne……………………Jonathan Keeble 
Mr Osborne/Bute/General Tufto……………………Malcolm Raeburn 
Pitt……………………Lloyd Peters 
Lady Bareacres/Miss Briggs/George Junior……………………Fiona Clarke 
 
Written by William Makepeace Thackeray 
Dramatised by Jim Poyser, with additional material by Al Murray 
A BBC Radio Drama North production 
Produced and directed by Gary Brown 
 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 26 May-9 June 2019

BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation

Stephen Fry narrates this full-cast dramatisation of the famous Victorian comic novel

Stephen Fry narrates this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of the famous Victorian comic novel. 
 
Orphan Becky Sharp and wealthy Amelia Sedley are best friends at Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies. On leaving school, ambitious, social-climbing Becky looks for a rich man to support her, while the sweet-natured Amelia meets her old friend Dobbin, who is instantly captivated. 
 
Becky takes a job in the service of Sir Pitt Crawley, and uses her charm to hook his dashing son. However, marriage to Captain Rawdon of the Guards does not provide the fortune she seeks. Meanwhile, Amelia rejects the faithful Dobbin and becomes engaged to the handsome George Osborne - but destiny has some shocks in store for her, too. 
 
As time goes by, the girls' fortunes rise and fall. War, financial disaster and the ruin of her reputation leave the resourceful Beckyundaunted, but Amelia finds it harder to bear fate's blows. It will be many years before their story is played out, and their futures finally decided... 
 
William Makepeace Thackeray's classic satire of passion and ambition, first published in 1847 and 1848, is a deliciously ironic portrait of English society and its mores. This engaging 2004 radio production, published for the first time on audio, features a distinguished cast including Emma Fielding as Becky Sharp, Katy Cavanagh as Amelia and Toby Jones as Jos Sedley.

Stephen Fry narrates this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of the famous Victorian comic novel. 
 
Orphan Becky Sharp and wealthy Amelia Sedley are best friends at Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies. On leaving school, ambitious, social-climbing Becky looks for a rich man to support her, while the sweet-natured Amelia meets her old friend Dobbin, who is instantly captivated. 
 
Becky takes a job in the service of Sir Pitt Crawley, and uses her charm to hook his dashing son. However, marriage to Captain Rawdon of the Guards does not provide the fortune she seeks. Meanwhile, Amelia rejects the faithful Dobbin and becomes engaged to the handsome George Osborne - but destiny has some shocks in store for her, too. 
 
As time goes by, the girls' fortunes rise and fall. War, financial disaster and the ruin of her reputation leave the resourceful Beckyundaunted, but Amelia finds it harder to bear fate's blows. It will be many years before their story is played out, and their futures finally decided... 
 
William Makepeace Thackeray's classic satire of passion and ambition, first published in 1847 and 1848, is a deliciously ironic portrait of English society and its mores. This engaging 2004 radio production, published for the first time on audio, features a distinguished cast including Emma Fielding as Becky Sharp, Katy Cavanagh as Amelia and Toby Jones as Jos Sedley.

The Yellowplush Papers

Series of five comic tales by William Makepeace Thackeray, adapted by Stephen Wyatt, recounting the rise and fall of early-19th century footman Charles Yellowplush. 
 
 Episode 1: Charles attracts the attention of an elegant gentleman, Frederick Altamont, who is pursuing the lovely Mary. Charles does his best to matchmake, until the awful truth about Altamont comes to light. With full cast. Directed by Jessica Dromgoole. 
 
Episode 2: Charles helps his new employer Captain Rook, a wily and roguish cardsharp, to fleece a rich but naive gentleman. With full cast. Directed by Abigail le Fleming. 
 
Episode 3:Charles finds himself in Paris in attendance on a young aristocrat of very dubious morals who has fled England to escape his creditors. With full cast. Directed by Jessica Dromgoole. 
 
Episode 4: When a fashionable society novelist comes to stay at Diddlesex Towers, he inspires Charles to undertake an ambitious and scandalous enterprise. With full cast. Directed by Jessica Dromgoole. 
 
Episode 5: Charles suddenly finds himself a very rich man. He leaves service and embarks on a life of opera, society dinners and balls. And goes a little mad. With full cast. Directed by Jessica Dromgoole. 
 
©2013 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2013 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Series of five comic tales by William Makepeace Thackeray, adapted by Stephen Wyatt, recounting the rise and fall of early-19th century footman Charles Yellowplush. 
 
 Episode 1: Charles attracts the attention of an elegant gentleman, Frederick Altamont, who is pursuing the lovely Mary. Charles does his best to matchmake, until the awful truth about Altamont comes to light. With full cast. Directed by Jessica Dromgoole. 
 
Episode 2: Charles helps his new employer Captain Rook, a wily and roguish cardsharp, to fleece a rich but naive gentleman. With full cast. Directed by Abigail le Fleming. 
 
Episode 3:Charles finds himself in Paris in attendance on a young aristocrat of very dubious morals who has fled England to escape his creditors. With full cast. Directed by Jessica Dromgoole. 
 
Episode 4: When a fashionable society novelist comes to stay at Diddlesex Towers, he inspires Charles to undertake an ambitious and scandalous enterprise. With full cast. Directed by Jessica Dromgoole. 
 
Episode 5: Charles suddenly finds himself a very rich man. He leaves service and embarks on a life of opera, society dinners and balls. And goes a little mad. With full cast. Directed by Jessica Dromgoole. 
 
©2013 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2013 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

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Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design 
 
In William Thackeray's Vanity Fair, no one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles - military and domestic - are fought, fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honourable figure in this corrupt world is Dobbin with his devotion to Amelia, bringing pathos and depth to Thackeray's gloriously satirical epic of love and social adventure.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was born and educated to be a gentleman but gambled away much of his fortune while at Cambridge. He trained as a lawyer before turning to journalism. He was a regular contributor to periodicals and magazines and Vanity Fair was serialised in Punch in 1847-8. 
John Carey is Professor of English at Oxford University. He has written on Dickens and Thackeray.

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The Penguin English Library Edition of Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 
 
'Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?' 
 
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles - military and domestic - are fought, fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honourable figure in this corrupt world is Dobbin with his devotion to Amelia, bringing pathos and depth to Thackeray's gloriously satirical epic of love and social adventure. 
 
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1811, but was sent to England at the age of six. After his education at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, having gambled away much of his fortune at university, he settled in Paris and tried a career as a painter. It was here that he met nineteen-year-old Isabella Shawe, upon whom he based many of his virtuous but weak heroines, and whom he married in 1836, before returning to London with her a year later. He was a novelist and journalist, writing prolifically for numerous periodicals and magazines - Vanity Fair was first published as a twenty-part serial in Punch in 1847-8 - and becoming editor of the newly established Cornhill Magazine in 1860. Thackeray, who had a penchant for eating and drinking heavily and led a generally unhealthy lifestyle, died suddenly of a stroke in 1863.

THE CLASSIC NOVEL WHICH INSPIRED THE MAJOR ITV SERIES FROM THE MAKERS OF POLDARK AND VICTORIA

The only English novel which...challenges comparison with War and Peace

The best thing he ever wrote - sharp, brilliant, touching, clever and cruel, with an unforgettable heroine

Witty, sexy, sandy-haired Becky Sharp, whose impoverished background explains her hunger for rich men and high position. She is a rebel from the very first chapter of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Her one final act of kindness derives from her constant virtue: seeing things as they are

A terrific book - bold, funny, scathing and quite unpredictable

Becky Sharp may be one of literature's great schemers, but she's also one of its most memorable and entertaining. More rounded than almost all the simpering Victorian dolls who followed, she alone is worth the read

Becky Sharp is one of the best bad women in literature ...she is deliciously bad in an era when women were not meant to be

Still one of the bitchiest, cattiest, funniest and most entertaining novels ever written

'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year' 
 
 
Becky Sharp is a poor orphan when she first makes friends with the lovely Amelia Sedley at Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies. She may not have the natural advantages of her companion but she more than makes up for it with her wit, charm, deviousness and determination to make a success of herself in the world, whatever the cost. Vanity Fair is the story of anti-hero Becky's spectacular rise and fall as she gambles, manipulates and seduces her way through high society against the backdrop of Waterloo and the Napoleonic wars.

A Novel Without a Hero

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

There are no wholly admirable characters, but you can't help feeling a sort of twisted respect for the gloriously awful social climber Becky Sharp, and a bit of sympathy for the lumpen, love-struck Dobbin. In fact all the characters are alive in their awfulness, and it's no small measure of skill that Thackery can make the reader care so much about such ghastly people. I suppose part of the appeal is that their weaknesses and pretensions are still recognisable today.

William Makepeace Thackeray was born on 18 July 1811 in Calcutta in India. After studying at Trinity College Cambridge he worked as a journalist and studied Art in London and Paris. In 1836 he married Isabella Shawe and they went on to have three daughters, one of whom died in infancy. He first found literary success with The Yellowplush Papers in 1837 and went on to write other works such asThe FitzBoodle Papers, Catherine, The Luck of Barry Lyndon and The Snobs of England before he published his masterpiece, Vanity Fair, in 1847. William Makepeace Thackeray died on Christmas Eve in 1863.

Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer.

His Fortunes And Misfortunes, His Friends And His Greatest Enemy

The History of Pendennis

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811, but sent to England at the age of six. He was educated at Charterhouse and at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1833 he settled in Paris, after a major financial loss, and tried a career as a painter. It was here he met nineteen-year-old Isabella Shawe, upon whom he based many of his virtuous but weak heroines, and whom he married in 1836. A year later they settled in London, where Thackeray turned seriously to journalism. 
His writing for periodicals included The Yellowplush Correspondence, which appeared first in Fraser's Magazine and then in 1841 in book form. Around this time personal and domestic pressures caused the already helpless Isabella to subside into a state of complete and permanent mental collapse and the subsequent breakdown of the marriage formed a central part of Thackeray's consciousness. His early work centred around rogues and villains, most famously in The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844; revised as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. in 1856), and in his masterpiece, Vanity Fair, which appeared in monthly parts in 1847-8 and which most clearly reveals his socially satirical edge. The Book of Snobs, which originally appeared as a series in Punch, also attacks Victorian society with vicious wit. Thackeray's later novels include The History of Pendennis, (1848-50); The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. (1852); The Newcomes (1853-5); The Virginians, (1857-9), which is a sequel to Henry Esmond; and The Adventures of Philip (1860-62). He also wrote a series of lectures, The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853), and numerous reviews, articles and sketches, usually in the comic vein. From 1860 to 1862 he also edited the Cornhill magazine. Thackeray died suddenly on Christmas Eve, 1863.

Written immediately after Vanity Fair, Pendennis has a similar atmosphere of brooding disillusion, tempered by the most jovial of wits. But here Thackeray plunders his own past to create the character of Pendennis and the world in which he lives: from miserable schoolboy to striving journalist, from carefree Oxbridge to the high (and low) life of London. The result is a superbly panoramic blend of people, action and background. The true ebb and flow of life is caught and the credibility of Pen, his worldly uncle, the Major, and many of the other characters, extends far beyond the pages of the novel. Held together by Thackeray's flowing, confident prose, with its conversational ease of tone, Pendennis is as rich a portrait of England in the 1830s and 40s as it is a thorough and thoroughly entertaining self-portrait.

The History of Henry Esmond

'What spectacle is more august than that of a great king in exile? Who is more worthy of respect than a brave man in misfortune?' When "Henry Esmond" appeared in 1852, noted writers and critics of the time acclaimed it as the best historical novel ever written. Set in the reign of Queen Anne, the story follows the troubled progress of a gentleman and an officer in Marlborough's army, as he painfully wrestles with an emotional allegiance to the old Tory-Catholic England until, disillusioned, he comes to terms of a kind with the Whiggish-Protestant future. This change also entails a very uncomfortable switch in his affections. The love story of Henry Esmond is charged with sombre, unconscious emotions, yet is skilfully embedded into historical events which are convincing but never too prominent.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Stephen Fry

Emma Fielding

Toby Jones

Andrew Scott

Sheila Hancock

Adam Buxton

Maureen Lipman

Full Cast

Vanity Fair, Barry Lyndon, The Newcomes, Pendennis & The Yellowplush Papers

Five BBC Radio adaptations of the works of William Makepeace Thackeray - plus bonus features 
 
Best known today for his comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, W. M. Thackeray was regarded in his time as the only rival to his contemporary, Charles Dickens. This collection includes a selection of his finest satirical fiction, as well as two fascinating programmes exploring his life and writings. 
 
Vanity Fair - Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, Thackeray's deliciously ironic tale of passion and ambition follows the fortunes of penniless, social-climbing Becky Sharp and her wealthy, sweet-natured best friend, Amelia Sedley. Starring Stephen Fry as the Narrator, with Emma Fielding as Becky, Katy Cavanagh as Amelia and Toby Jones as Jos. 
 
Barry Lyndon - Forced to leave his native Ireland after an unfortunate duel, young Redmond Barry embarks on a series of adventures that take him from the battlefields of the Seven Years War to the highest courts of Europe and the drawing rooms of English society. Gerard McSorley and Andrew Scott star in Thackeray's picaresque classic alongside Shelia Hancock and Kenneth Cranham 
 
The Yellowplush Papers- Adam Buxton stars in these five comic tales about the rise and fall of canny Regency footman Charles Yellowplush. 
 
Pendennis - Thackeray's semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale charts the youthful exploits of handsome, impoverished Arthur Pendennis as he leaves his home in the country to make his way in London society. Dominic Guard stars as Arthur, with Hugh Dickson as The Writer. 
 
The Newcomes- Featuring characters from Vanity Fair and narrated by Arthur Pendennis, this epic saga tells the story of several generations of a respectable English family, centring around Colonel Thomas Newcombe and his artist son, Clive. Starring Simon Lack, Carleton Hobbs and Nigel Grahame. 
 
Al Murray on Thackeray - Comedian Al Murray talks about his great-great-great-grandfather, William Makepeace Thackeray, and why he thinks Vanity Fair is still relevant today. 
 
Andrew Davies/William Thackeray - James Naughtie and a group of readers chat to Andrew Davies about Thackeray's classic novel, Vanity Fair, which he adapted for BBC TV in 1998. 
 
NB: Due to the age and nature of some of the recordings, the sound quality may vary 
 
First published 1837 (The Yellowplush Papers), 1844 (The Luck of Barry Lyndon), 1848 (Vanity Fair), 1849-50 (Pendennis), (1855 The Newcomes) 
 
Cast and credits 
Written by W. M. Thackeray 
With thanks to Keith Wickham 
 
Contents List 
Vanity Fair 
Barry Lyndon 
The Yellowplush Papers 
Pendennis 
The Newcomes 
Al Murray on Thackeray 
Andrew Davies on William Thackeray 
 
© 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

William Makepeace Thackeray

Books by William Makepeace Thackeray

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