Clothing Napoleonic History in <em>Vanity Fair</em> and <em>The Trumpet-Major</em>

This essay argues that William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847–48) and Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet-Major (1880) use the temporal multiplicity and ambiguity of fashion to depict historical time as striated and multidimensional. It challenges the critical paradigm that has long maligned conspicuous clothing in historical fiction as a kind of facile historicism. Such an approach fails to acknowledge the complex temporalities of fictional clothing. In emphasizing the persistence of older styles, offering multiple interpretations of apparently fashionable garments, and depicting the unsynchronized life cycles of clothes, Vanity Fair and The Trumpet-Major undermine the idea that to be historically situated is to keep pace with rapid linear progress. The essay also links these novels' attention to clothing to their shared historical setting during the Napoleonic Wars.