Earnest Hypocrisy: The Evangelical Reformer in William M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair

This essay examines William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48) through the lens of nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelicalism, arguing that Thackeray’s portrayal of Pitt Crawley (Junior) crystallizes the paradoxes of Evangelical reform culture in early Victorian Britain. Building on the critical foundations laid by Elisabeth Jay, Mark Knight, and Catherine Hall, the study situates Pitt within the historical context of Evangelical social reform, moral discipline, and political conservatism. Through close examination of Pitt Crawley’s domestic reforms at Queen’s Crawley and his engagement in politics, it demonstrates how Thackeray appropriates Evangelical ideals—domestic propriety, moral earnestness, and reformist zeal—only to expose their susceptibility to self-interest and hypocrisy. In exploring Pitt’s political ascent and eventual collapse following the 1832 Reform Act, the essay further interprets his career as an allegory for the decline of the Evangelical Tory aristocracy amid the rise of bourgeois liberalism. As a disillusioned Evangelical, Thackeray renders Vanity Fair not simply a critique of religious hypocrisy but a meditation on the limits of moral reform in a self-interested age.