actors, gesticulating and performing on their own. Yet he can be over-praised or
wrongly praised. In the contests run by critics, single novels by Dickens have won in
fields including Wuthering Heights,Vanity Fair and Middlemarch. A general compar-
ison shows him as less fine than Jane Austen, less compelling than Richardson in
Clarissa, less profound than Tolstoy or Dostoievsky, less terrible than Flaubert. If the
comparison with Shakespeare, offered by partisans of the English novel or of the
Victorian age, is taken seriously, the quality and range of character and of language
in Shakespeare’s poetic drama makes the comparison a damaging one. Dickens’s
vision is peculiar; his cultural traditions, though vital, are, compared with
Shakespeare’s, too often sentimental or melodramatic. His women leave much to be
desired. Thackeray threw the number in which Paul Dombey dies onto the desk of
Mark Lemon at Punch with the words: ‘There’s no writing against such power as this
... it is stupendous.’ That particular pathos is no longer quite so stupendous.Wilkie Collins
The perfection of a genre for a middlebrow market began with Dickens’s friend
Wilkie Collins(1824–1889), who made a career out of a new kind of sensation
fiction in The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1865). These detective
novels combine murder mystery with problem-solving in a kind of parlour Gothic.
In true Gothic novels, such as Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
by James Hogg, or Wuthering Heights, horror and the problems of interpretation are
infinite.Dickens’s last book,The Mystery of Edwin Drood(unfinished at his death),
promises to have transmuted the detective story into something bigger.William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray(1811–1863) was born in India but, after his father’s
death and mother’s remarriage, educated in England. He enjoyed Cambridge and a
dilettante period in Europe as a painter, gambling away his money. He married, but
his wife became insane, and he lived by his pen, supporting his daughters, who lived
with his mother in Paris.
These were the miseries from which, financially at least, he emerged in the 1840s
as a brilliant sketch-writer and caricaturist for Punc h.After The Luck of Barry Lyndon
(1844) and The Book of Snobs (1846),Vanity Fair appeared monthly in 1847–8; then
Pendennis (1848–50),The History of Henry Esmond (1852),The Newcomes (1853–4)
and The Virginians (1857–9);also English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century
(1851) and The Four Georges (1855–7). Thackeray is not as other Victorian novelists:
he does not show people behaving well. A gifted parodist and a worldly ironist,
sardonic if not heartless, his reputation was once as wide as it was high. It now hangs
on Vanity Fair, the later novels being little read, perhaps because their focus is on a
gentleman’s conduct. Fewer novel readers today are prepared to see the middle class
from above, as Thackeray did, than from below – as did Thackeray’s ‘Mr Dickens in
geranium and ringlets’. As this phrase suggests, both men saw it from the outside.Vanity Fair
Thackeray illustrated his own books. His Boo k of Snobs sketches with zest a variety
of social climbers. The increasing wealth of the middle classes created an unhappy
interface with the gentry. The ancient theme of upward social mobility is emergent296 10 · FICTION