Thackeray

Vanity Fair, published in serial parts in 1847-8, made William Makepeace Thackeray famous ''all but at the top of the tree'', he told his mother, ''and having a great fight up there with Dickens''. Behind him lay an extraordinary life - an intense, Anglo-Indian childhood, a fortune lost by his early twenties, a disastrous marriage to a wife who went mad and left him to bring up two small daughters...