Vanity Fair

Description

As the director of the Performance sits before the drape on the sheets and investigates the Fair, a sentiment of significant despairing comes over him in his review of the clamoring place. There is an extraordinary amount of eating and drinking, having intercourse and abandoning, snickering and the opposite, smoking, cheating, battling, moving and playing; there are menaces pushing about, bucks staring at the ladies, blackguards picking pockets, police officers watching out, quacks (OTHER quacks, plague take them!) wailing before their corners, and country folks gazing toward the decorated artists and helpless old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered people are working upon their pockets behind. Indeed, this is VANITY FAIR; not an ethical spot surely; nor a joyful one, however extremely uproarious. Take a gander at the essences of the entertainers and bozos when they fall off from their business; and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he plunks down to supper with his significant other and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas. The shade will be up by and by, and he will turn over head and heels, and crying, ‘How right?’

A man with an intelligent turn of brain, strolling through a presentation of this sort, won’t be mistreated, I take it, by his own or others’ silliness. A scene of humor or thoughtfulness contacts and delights him to a great extent—a pretty kid taking a gander at a gingerbread slow down; a pretty young lady becoming flushed while her sweetheart converses with her and picks her fairing; helpless Tom Fool, there behind the cart, muttering his bone with the legit family which lives by his tumbling; however the overall impression is one more despairing than happy. At the point when you get back home you plunk down in a calm, pondering, not uncharitable mood, and put forth a concentrated effort to your books or your business …