First, try to get your punctuation right: 'relationships'
            is a plural noun - no apostrophe. Second, is the question yours or one set by some
            teacher/tutor/instructor/examiner? On the answer depends how critically I'd advise
            tackling it, since in the way you word it, it seems to presuppose all sorts of things
            which aren't so. And I can't believe any reputable pedagogue would use " 'the' 19th
            century,upper class etc" rather than "19th-century upperclass etc" (note the correct
            inclusion of the hyphen and the elimination of the extraneous comma). That being so, try
            and reproduce any essay question accurately in future.
Now
            let's proceed to the meat of the matter. I assume you mean Thackeray's novel VF.
            (Bunyan's VF doesn't deal with the 19th century.) In future, please say so. As elsewhere
            on this website, unless the question is thought out properly before being put into
            words, and as much useful information given with it, the person providing the answer may
            well be puzzled, hence give an unhelpful response.
VF isn't
            'about' the difficulties of personal relationships, particularly marriage ones etc in
            the sense that they're a central theme. It's 'about' much more. It wouldn't be so very
            great a novel if it weren't. It certainly features many tricky marriages. That said, not
            all the marriages in it are 'tricky'. The O'Dowds', for instance, is happy, even though
            Mrs O'D is presented as absurd and her husband Mick as hen-pecked. (Perhaps because
            Thackeray could only conceive of a marriage as 'happy' if the partners were comic; after
            all, his own wife was a lunatic.)
If VF is 'about' anything
            it is that overwhelming preoccupation of Thackeray's, snobbery - a subject on which he
            is the best novelist in English literature. Now snobbery and its ancillary activities,
            notably social-climbing, often, though not invariably, lead to unhappy marriages. And
            some of the factors involved along the way, such as the deception and ultimate ruin of
            one's creditors, as effected by Becky and Rawdon Crawley, were more typical of the 19th
            than of the 21st century. But they weren't exclusive to it. One might argue that the
            Rawdon Cs' marriage broke up because of their lack of money, a lack caused by Rawdon's
            rich aunt's leaving her money away from him to his elder brother Pitt. And since the
            aunt's aversion to Rawdon's marriage arose in great part from his 'throwing himself
            away' on the relatively low-born Becky, snobbery played an important part But even that
            is not the whole story since Becky's brains and Rawdon's stupidity were incompatible
            long-term whatever their prosperity.
And VF isn't
            exclusively about upper-class English society (again note the preferable hyphen). The
            Osbornes and Sedleys are from the mercantile upper-middle classes to start with. The
            Sedleys through bad luck in business sink to shabby genteel middle-class status. Even
            among the true upper classes there are subtle variations of status, with Lord Steyne
            being as greatly 'superior' socially to a provincial baronet like Sir Pitt Crawley as
            Sir Pitt is to the Osbornes.
Thackeray does duck showing us
            any wholly satisfactory relationships. Would Dobbin and Amelia's marriage have been a
            success? We don't know. Thackeray buries it under a 'happy ever after'
            coda.
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