‘Toto Divisos Orbe’: Placeless Community in Vanity Fair and Daniel Deronda

Abstract

William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda present small communities of British characters amid faceless masses of European travellers. While scholarship has often explored the texts in relation to the contemporary concerns over cosmopolitan moral decline, I instead suggest that the books indicate a hardening of British cultural identity, rather than a dissipation of it within the pan-European atmosphere of continental travel. Vanity Fair and Daniel Deronda, written almost thirty years apart but spanning a period closer to sixty years, share concerns about the blurring of national identity through close interaction with ‘foreigners.’ Yet each novel shows its characters being drawn together across space and time, as though there is a deep connection created by nationhood. This magical bond comes to signify something greater than this, however, as Britishness appears to be not only bolstered by but constructed through these interactions, rather than being an intrinsic quality provided by nationality. In Eliot’s writing, for example, she makes the case that both British and Jewish culture is inherently insular and requires protection from external forces, but the novel instead demonstrates that both identities are fortified by mixing with others, not weakened. For Thackeray, continental excess is presented as potentially infectious, but he also provides the only moments of genuine patriotism while his characters are abroad. These novels suggest not that travel induces the troubling erosion of national culture but instead may be the precipitant for its very existence.