VANITY FAIR, published 1847-8, made William Makepeace Thackeray famous - all but the top of the tree, he told his mother, and having a great fight up there with Dickens, if truth be known. Behind him lay an extraordinary life - an intense, Anglo Indian childhood, dominated by the figure of his mother; a fortune lsot by his early twenties: a disastrous marriage to a wife who went mad and left him to bring up their two small daughters in near penury.