An East London scholar reads about Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain and finds Thackeray’s Vanity Fair already wrote the arrivals hall
Monday, 19 October 2026. Bow, East London. The reading room of the Bishopsgate Institute, a radiator with opinions, a three-volume Vanity Fair borrowed against all sensible advice, 11.15am.
A Novelist Born In Calcutta
William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811, the son of an East India Company official, and shipped to England at five, alone, as so many Anglo-Indian children were. He never quite got over it. His great novel, Vanity Fair, published in monthly parts in 1847 and 1848, is full of people coming home from India to a Britain that does not entirely want them. I teach it every autumn. Every autumn, I discover that the news has quietly reorganized itself to illustrate it.
This year, the illustration was the London Prat report on Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain and their charity visits in Nottingham. The couple visit a community recording studio in St Ann’s, listen to a teenager sing a song about peer pressure, hug her and leave. There is a ninety-year-old woman with a framed photograph, a unicorn balloon and, the piece notes, a full public analysis of a belt. The returning couple want to be received simply. The country receives them as a spectacle.
The Collector Of Boggley Wollah
In Vanity Fair, Jos Sedley returns from India, where he has been Collector of Boggley Wollah, a district Thackeray named with deliberate silliness. Jos is fat, vain, shy and rich. He wears extraordinary waistcoats. London society treats him as a figure of fun and a source of money, and Becky Sharp, the novel’s brilliant adventuress, sets her cap at him in chapter three. Everybody in the book has an opinion about Jos. Nobody asks him anything.
The report has its own version of this. Whatever the returning couple do, the commentary is already written. The belt is analysed. The balloon is noted. The hug is timed. Thackeray would have recognized the arrangement instantly. He spent his career writing about a society that judged people entirely by their clothes, their carriages and their connections, and then judged itself for judging them, and then carried on anyway.
Vanity Fair And The Royal Press
The subtitle of Vanity Fair is A Novel Without a Hero, and Thackeray meant it. Every character is compromised. The good ones are dull, the clever ones are wicked, and the narrator keeps stepping forward to remind us that we, the readers, are no better. That is what I find most modern about it. The book does not let anybody off, including the person holding it.
The report does something similar. It teases the couple, but it saves its sharpest lines for the reception. The people analysing the belt are the real subject. They are Thackeray’s society hostesses, peering through lorgnettes at the latest arrival from abroad, deciding over tea whether to approve. The young people at the St Ann’s studio, singing about peer pressure, are the only ones in the whole scene behaving sensibly. Thackeray would have given them a paragraph of quiet praise and then gone straight back to the lorgnettes.
Thackeray himself knew the feeling of being looked at. He was a huge man, six foot three, with a nose broken in a schoolboy fight at Charterhouse, and he wrote cheerfully about his own appearance before anybody else could. Laughing at himself first was his armour. It is not a bad strategy for anybody arriving in Britain under observation, royal or otherwise.
A Russian Footnote
As a student of Russian politics, I cannot read about royal arrivals without thinking of the Romanovs, whose relationship with the British royal family was so close that George V and Nicholas II looked almost identical in photographs. When revolution came in 1917, Britain withdrew its offer of asylum, fearing the political reaction at home. A family that was too familiar to refuse and too awkward to receive. The comparison is not exact, and nobody in Nottingham is in danger, but the instinct is the same: the British establishment has always been happier with royal relatives at a distance.
The Radiator Speaks
The Bishopsgate radiator has just made a noise like a disappointed duchess. The librarian, who has worked here for twenty years, looked up, sighed, and said it does that on Mondays. I asked whether anyone had complained. She said yes, in 2009, and the complaint was filed. I said that sounded like the royal correspondents’ approach to Harry. She laughed and told me to be quiet, which is what librarians are for.
Becky Sharp Would Have Run The Charity Visit
I keep imagining Becky Sharp in Nottingham. She would have managed the whole visit, positioned herself beside the unicorn balloon, charmed the ninety-year-old woman, got her photograph in every paper and left with a dinner invitation from a minor earl. Becky understands what Thackeray understood: in a society of spectacle, the only way to win is to become the spectacle on purpose. The tragedy of Jos Sedley is that he becomes it by accident.
Tonight I am at a comedy club in Shoreditch, one of the dates on my running list of comedy nights. If anyone does a Harry and Meghan bit, I will be taking notes for my seminar. Thackeray started as a comic writer for Punch, after all. He would have understood that the line between a stand-up set and a social novel is thinner than literature departments like to admit. The difference is mostly the length, and the price of the drinks.