Becky Sharp Becky Sharp Rebecca Sharp is the main protagonist of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847–48 novel "Vanity Fair". She is presented as a cynical social climber who uses her charms to fascinate and seduce upper-class men. This is in contrast with the clinging, dependent Amelia Sedley, her friend whom she befriends at school. Becky then uses Amelia as a stepping stone to gain social position. Sharp functions as a "picara"—a picaresque heroine—or by being a social outsider who is able to expose the manners of the upper gentry to ridicule. The book—and Sharp's career—begins in a traditional manner of Victorian fiction, that
Vanity Fair (novel) in the hope of receiving a big inheritance. Her portrayal is informed by Thackeray's time in Paris with his maternal grandmother Harriet Becher. George Osborne, his father (a merchant, of considerably superior social status to Dobbin's grocer father, albeit self made, and ironically a mere corporal in the City Light Horse regiment of which Dobbin senior, by this time an alderman and a knight, is colonel), and his two sisters are close to the Sedley family until Mr. Sedley (the father of Jos and Amelia, and George Osborne's godfather, from whom the latter takes his middle name of 'Sedley') goes