The present generation affirms that it cannot away with Pickwick, and is not attracted by Vanity Fair. The balance of modern opinion would be rather in favour of Thackeray than of Dickens. Take, for example, the two works already quoted, Pickwick and Vanity Fair. A common modern objection made to Pickwick is, that the characters in Pickwick are perpetually guttling or imbibing, or both simultaneously. This is, to a certain extent, true. But how about Thackeray's characters in Vanity Fair? A careful student has sent us a list of the numerous eatings and drinkings in both novels. In Pickwick, reckoning from the brandy-and-water partaken of by Mr. Jingle, at the Pickwickians' expense, after the scene with the pugnacious hackney-coachman, and finishing with the breakfast that celebrated the marriage of Mr. Snodgrass with Miss Emily Wardle, there are exactly (so we are informed) one hundred and one instances of drinking and eating; some of them being of drinking only, unqualified.
In Vanity Fair, from the introduction of Miss Pinkerton's "seed cake," to Becky taking Amelia a cup of tea, vide chapter sixty-seven, we learn, on the same authority, that there are one hundred and fifteen cases "allowed for refreshment" in some form or other.
A collection of the meals of heroes and heroines in the most popular works of fiction, and menus compiled therefrom, might be found interesting, especially if carefully criticised by Sir Henry Thompson in a separate chapter to be added to the next edition of his really invaluable work, namely, Food and Feeding. Do the modern novelists feed their characters as plentifully as did Dickens and Thackeray theirs? Be this as it may, these two great Twin Brethren—so utterly dissimilar in every thing except in the possession of the gift of genius—fed their readers well and bountifully.