Pen-and-pencil sketches: The dialectics of toleration

This work is a brief history of those who have debated theological and philosophical concepts regarding toleration from the humanist era through the first half of the Victorian era. The skeptical innovators and those who opposed them eventually forged a necessary tolerance--a separate peace, so to speak. This treaty was created by those whose pen-and-pencil sketches of society debated difference and was signed by William Makepeace Thackeray, a realistic novelist who validated this necessity for toleration through his portrayals of individual diversity within nineteenth-century British society.;I examine the history of the concept of toleration, as it developed from the Renaissance to the Victorian era, in correlation with literary markings which point to the increasing importance of an individual autonomy, requiring a mutual forbearance (Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, Rasselas, D'Alembert's Dream). In closing, I examine three works which expose socially acceptable tolerance and intolerance in an economically privileged middle-class Victorian society: Thackeray's Vanity Fair, The Book of Snobs, and The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond. A statement of philosophy and a definition of toleration comprise Chapter 1. From the Renaissance to the early Victorian era, Chapter 2 is an historical progression of three of the paths Enlightened thinking takes to reach Vanity Fair: the gradual ascendancy of a literary genre, the underlying influence of the middle class, and the struggles for and against toleration. In Chapter 3, I discuss Thackeray's narrative technique, a negative dialectic, that encourages a skeptical reading, which has the potential to create a reader in the end who is more tolerant than when he began to read the text.