William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India, two hundred and fifteen years ago, the son of an English colonial official. He was sent back to England as a child and educated at English public schools and Trinity College, Cambridge.

After an unsteady start as a journalist, he settled down to a long and successful career as a novelist. The best-known of his works is Vanity Fair, published in serial form in 1847–48. Consistently ranked as one of the best novels written in English, it is a funny but unsparing satirical take on the English ruling class—known then simply as “the gentry.”

Set in the years leading up to Waterloo, it examines a representative cross-section of human types and chronicles their individual rises and falls.

The novel’s title is borrowed from John Bunyan’s 17th-century Christian allegorical tale, The Pilgrim’s Progress. The term Vanity Fair is used to describe a fanciful marketplace where all human vices are easily indulged and all temptations readily on offer.

This is an apt metaphor for the fool’s paradise of lust, greed, and snobbery that so often comprises life in the upper classes, in the 21^st century as well as the 19th.

The critic Seymour Betsky described Thackeray’s central theme as “decent people almost hopelessly submerged by the corrupt world they inhabit and unable to draw upon intelligence that might at least enable them to comprehend the terms of their plight.”¹

With Tom Wolfe’s death several years ago, there is only one contemporary American writer worthy of comparison to Thackeray.

Scott Johnston is a former investment banker and venture capitalist who grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He is, in other words, very familiar with the monied precincts inhabited by our present-day gentry.

In his 2019 novel Campusland, Johnston, like Thackeray, places a decent protagonist in a nightmare not of his own making.

A promising young English professor at an Ivy League college gets caught up in the DEI wars. Up for tenure, he is falsely accused of racism by campus radicals looking for a cause célèbre. When that doesn’t succeed, he is ultimately brought down by bogus sexual harassment charges, which lead to his dismissal. The truth eventually comes out, but not before the protagonist is completely disillusioned and embittered by the betrayal of an institution that he had loved and revered.

Johnston captured the humorless zealotry of “Bias Response teams” and Deans of Diversity and Inclusion, not to mention the Kafkaesque flavor of university Title IX proceedings. What’s uncanny is how his book foreshadowed real-life events.

The year after Campusland was published, a Classics professor at Princeton, Joshua Katz, had the temerity to criticize a campus radical group for threatening other students. At the same time, he dared to take issue with demands by black students and faculty that they make all decisions regarding the hiring, compensation, and tenure of black faculty.

They also called for the right to investigate publications by the white faculty for racism and to mete out punishment to offenders.

Professor Katz was fortunate that the Princeton administration had just signed off on an affirmation of academic freedom promulgated by the University of Chicago. Firing Katz at that point would have been awkward.

However, the Left never sleeps, so it wasn’t long before a closed disciplinary charge against Katz was resurrected. Working with the campus newspaper, the administration contacted a number of Katz’s former students, hoping to show that a relationship with an undergraduate he had already been punished for was not consensual, contrary to prior findings. The case was reopened, with the most serious penalty—dismissal—imposed, something that had not happened to a tenured faculty member in living memory. In the meantime, the administration had not allowed Katz any graduate students to work with and had counseled undergraduates against taking his courses.

The point man in the Princeton administration’s assault on Katz—one of the most popular professors on campus—was a fellow Classics Department member, Dan-El Peralta Padilla, whom Katz had mentored when Peralta Padilla was an undergraduate there. I personally recall Katz asking the other members and me of the Princeton Classics Department Advisory Council for our assistance with young Peralta Padilla’s passport problems. He had been brought here as an infant by his parents on a tourist visa, which had long since expired. We were able to help him out of this predicament. I wonder what the two of them felt when Peralta Padilla led the charge for Katz’s firing. Life not only imitates art, but it often surpasses it, at least in the bitter irony department.

The latest book by Scott Johnston is The Sandersons Fail Manhattan. Another look at an elite institution, this time set on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The plot revolves around a family whose two teenage daughters attend an exclusive private girls’ school.

The father, a hedge fund manager, is a Yale alumnus who would very much like his older daughter, a high school senior, to follow in his footsteps at his alma mater. His wife, the girl’s mother, has a less elite background and is from the Midwest. She is struggling with learning all the social ins and outs of the rarefied world she has married into.

The family gets sucked into a vortex of political correctness through the school and the husband’s employer. Apparently, any breach of DEI shibboleths, however innocent, can destroy your career and even your family, as they find out to their horror.

The villains this time are not just the woke Commissars of the educational world, though they’re plentiful in this book as well. They also include the Sandersons’ personal friends and professional colleagues, who these days will drop you the moment you are branded a racist or homophobe, no matter how baseless the charge.

Just as in Thackeray, bogus moralistic rhetoric (“inclusion,” “equity,” etc.) is used in Scott Johnston’s world to justify who gets all the glittering prizes. These include social standing, a prestigious occupation, and what in Thackeray’s era was called “interest”—that is, clout, power, connections.

Perhaps the most striking resemblance the two authors share is a bemused tolerance for characters who are “no better than they should be.” These are the ones whose cynical view of the ambient corruption and hypocrisy produces not despair but a cool toughness and resilience.

The most familiar of such characters in Thackeray is Becky Sharp, the demimonde heroine of Vanity Fair. Becky uses her feminine wiles to claw her way upward socially in Regency England.

Johnston’s present-day counterpart is a material girl called Lulu Harris in Campusland. An Ivy League coed who comes from a privileged background, she is ill-prepared for some of the hard knocks her own selfishness leads her into.

Like Thackeray’s Becky, however, Lulu in the end doesn’t pretend to be anything she is not. In her newfound candor, she goes from being a leftist feminist icon to becoming a Sydney Sweeney-like sex symbol.

Just as Lulu Harris in Campusland is a worthy contemporary successor to Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair as a fully realized fictional character, so Scott Johnston will be recognized as an equal to William Thackeray as a master of social satire if he sustains the quality of his work to date.

1. Society in Thackeray and Trollope, Vol. 6 of The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford.