"Pickwick" was an overwhelming success; Dickens found himself famous and entangled in engagements to produce more concurrent fictions than even Scott could have kept up simultaneously. Yet his high animal spirits and glowing fancy poured themselves out in "Nicholas Nickleby," "Oliver Twist," "The Old Curiosity Shop," "Barnaby Rudge," and "Martin Chuzzlewit" (the American scenes are due to his experiences of the United States), between 1838 and 1843. Consider the immense variety, the humour, the crowd of eternally amusing characters; caricatures, if any one pleases, but the most laughable of caricatures. The Squeerses, the Crummleses, the Dodger, Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Pecksniff, Bailey junior, Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Richard Swiveller, the Marchioness—he who loves them not knows them not! The melodramatic and pathetic characters and scenes are less universally admired; Ralph Nickleby, Monk, and Jonas Chuzzlewit rather try our belief, and all the world does not weep over Little Nell. To say, with R. L. Stevenson, that Dickens, in delineating Little Dombey, Tiny Tim, Little Nell, and Dora in "David Copperfield," "wallowed naked in the pathetic," is to offend many devout admirers. We can take Chaucer's counsel and "turn the other page".
In "David Copperfield" (1849-1850), with the charm of the infancy of David, the pain of his days in the warehouse, with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Spenlow and Jorkins, Peggotty, Mr. Dick, Betsy Trotwood, and the rest, Dickens reached, perhaps, the highest mark of his genius. In "Bleak House" (1852-1853), despite the Jellybys, and Harold Skimpole, he was too much engaged in the work of reform, and trysted with too difficult a plot, to reach similar success. The plot of "Little Dorrit" (1855-1857) is not readily intelligible; the book was disappointing. In "A Tale of Two Cities" he won the votes of very many readers who do not care for his lighter works: In "Great Expectations" he was himself again, and the plot is the best that he ever constructed, his Pip, from childhood onwards, is a masterpiece; Mr. Wopsle, and Mr. Pumblechook are joys for ever; and Miss Havisham, though severely criticized, is not, perhaps, untrue to nature, or at least to the actual facts of the case on which Dickens worked.
Of "Our Mutual Friend," it must be confessed that the plot is difficult: in "Dombey and Son" (1846-1848) Dickens appears to have deserted his idea, on an important point, as Scott did in "St. Ronan's Well," in deference to the wishes of a friend, and the same change seems to have been made, for a similar reason, in the fortunes of Estella, in "Great Expectations".
In "Edwin Drood," written in the last year of Dickens's life, (1869-1870), when he was outworn by the feverish energy of his nature, and by the fatigues of travel and of giving readings in hospitable America, Dickens at least left an unsolved puzzle to his students. What was "the Mystery" of Edwin Drood? Did Jasper murder him, or fail to murder him? Some external and some internal evidence favours the idea that Jasper succeeded, but we have seen that Dickens was very capable of relenting at the last moment. In this novel, as in some of his short stories, Dickens shows that leaning to the "supernormal" which he usually kept well in hand; so much, indeed, that in his "Child's History of England," he treats Jeanne d'Arc as a conceited, hysterical little prig. Dickens had none of the qualities of a historian, and all the contempt of a Liberal of his day for the Middle Ages. He was not a man of much bookish knowledge: he was a unique genius presenting, as in a magic mirror, worlds that appeared to himself alone, but that all were rejoiced to see as he saw them.
He did not see the world of "Society" as others see it who live in it (he avoided it), but then what world did he see as other people do? Other worlds he beheld with more sympathy, indeed, but all things presented a kind of fantastic vividness in that enchanted crystal of his imagination. That some of his mannerisms are vexatious is not to be denied: that there are moments of want of balance, of excitement born of fatigue, of breaking into unconscious blank verse, in the great mass of his work is too manifest in his letters we see the causes and occasions of these defects. But it is ill work, in so brief a sketch, to find faults in the productions of a genius so unique that it has, in our literature, no parallel, and can never be an example. Dickens had imitators, but he could not found a school: he was "the only Boz". His defects were perfectly visible to the critics of his own day, who did not spare them, but the world did not suffer its pleasure to be darkened by the spots on the sun. We flatter ourselves that Dickens is peculiarly English, and so he is in his idealization of punch and other creature comforts; yet he is remarkably popular, even in translations, among the French, and by the Poles he is, among our authors, the most admired.
Thackeray.
It has been the lot of Thackeray to be constantly pitted against Dickens, like Gray against Collins, and Browning against Tennyson. People have taken sides for one or another, as taste and fancy led, for they were contemporaries, they were novelists, humorists, satirists. But while Dickens, like the minstrel of Odysseus, was "self-taught," and was never a man of books, Thackeray (born at Calcutta in 1811) was educated at Charterhouse, and, with Tennyson, at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his career was not unlike that of his Arthur Pendennis, though he took no degree. To Thackeray, Charterhouse was what Christ's Hospital was to Lamb, a constant rather rueful memory; a memory, in Thackeray's case, of fagging, fights (in one he received an honourable scar), of idleness, story-telling, rhyming, caricaturing, and of the classics, stupidly taught. But, like Fielding, he did not forget his classics. His bent was to the art of design: many of his sketches, though often out of drawing, are very humorous; his Becky Sharp, carrying a coal scuttle, is the actual Becky, and Emmy, in the dance at Pumpernickel, wears the charming face that haunted his pencil. On leaving Cambridge he visited Germany and met Goethe: he lost his patrimony, partly to Mr. Deuceace, partly in the attempt to found a newspaper. In Paris, and in London, after an early marriage (1836), broken by a lifelong sorrow (Mrs. Thackeray survived him), he wrote for the press, continuing the vein of his scribbling in undergraduate papers like "The Snob," and of his comic prize poem, "Timbuctoo," with its dominant note "Africa for the Africans".
I see her sons the hill of glory mount
And sell their sugars on their own account.
His Parisian miscellanies in "The Paris Sketchbook" (1840) are of varied quality, but are all characteristic. He had found his style, with its harmonies, as in the essay on George Sand: and his British scorn of some French vagaries is offensive to many cosmopolitan minds. Unlike Dickens he is unpopular in France; he trod the soil with an air of remembering Agincourt and Waterloo. He wrote for "The Times," and in "Fraser," published the "Yellowplush Papers" of that great menial whose Christian names, Charles James, reveal the Stuart "mistry" in which his "ma" wrapped up his "buth". Jeames was a critic, much too personal, of Bulwer Lytton and Dionysius Lardner, that encyclopædist; and, as a momentary capitalist, as de la Pluche, is a satirist of the age of rapid railway-made fortunes. The simple humours of his spelling recall Smollett's Winifred Jenkins in "Humphry Clinker"; while Thackeray's Major Gahagan is a delightful Irish Captain Bobadil. "Catherine" was a burlesque on the heroes and heroines of novels of virtuous criminals, showing that knowledge of the eighteenth century which was Thackeray's favourite period ("Barry Lyndon," "Esmond," "The English Humorists," "Denis Duval," "The Four Georges").
Thackeray was much inclined to historical studies. "I like History, it is so gentlemanly," he said, but a man, not being a professor, cannot live by history alone, and he never finished, probably never began, his contemplated "Reign of Queen Anne".