Vanity Fair as Photoplay: An Approach to Late Victorian Transmedial Cultural Experience

Minnie Maddern Fiske and Langdon Mitchell’s 1899 Becky Sharp was the first stage adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair to be met with commercial success, even as it relied heavily on audiences having read the novel beforehand to make sense of the plot. I examine how this transmedial experience of Vanity Fair was almost immediately translated and marketed back into private reading space through the Harper and Brothers Becky Sharp Edition of the novel, which consisted of Thackeray's single volume text alongside photographs of “Mrs Fiske and her players” from the stage production. This “photoplay” edition reinscribes the intense exhaustion of Becky’s social performance made central in the stage play into the novel, transforming the fatigue inherent in the narrative structure of Vanity Fair into the affective consequences of Becky’s social circumstances. The Harper and Brothers photoplay makes legible a transmedial experience of Vanity Fair at the turn of the twentieth century, in which the culture-text of the Thackeray’s expansive, multiplot, novel shifts to the story of Becky Sharp.