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Updated: May 12, 2025
"There is a note needed to show the good side of human nature and to condone its frailties which Thackeray will never strike." To others it seems that Thackeray was eternally striking this note: at that time in General Lambert, his wife, and daughters, not to speak of other characters in The Virginians. Who does not condone the frailties of Captain Costigan, and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong?
It is interesting to compare the world-wide appeal made by the novels of Turgenev, Dostoevski, and Tolstoi with that made by Thackeray and George Eliot, not to mention Mr. Hardy or the late Mr. Meredith. The combination of the great age of Russia with its recent intellectual birth produces a maturity of character, with a wonderful freshness of consciousness.
Mr Thackeray has lately imparted much delight by delivering lectures on the literary personages of last century; and in this very act has gracefully raised the public estimation of living authorcraft. We may extract the following passages respecting the early career of Mr Dickens: 'Dickens, Charles, the most popular writer of his time, was born in February 1812, at Landport, Portsmouth.
But why should he be troubled by my presence here if " Miss Thackeray put an end to the discussion in a most effectual manner. "Oh, for the Lord's sake, cut it out! Wait till he's dead, can't you?" she whispered fiercely. "You've got all the time in the world to talk, and he hasn't more than ten minutes left to breathe unless that rube doctor gets here pretty soon.
The verdict of critics is that only some half-dozen authors are now read with the interest and glow which their works called out a hundred years ago. Even the novels of Sir Walter, although to be found in every library, kindle but little enthusiasm compared with that excited by the masterpieces of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and of the favorites of the passing day. Why is this?
Could Raphael paint Madonnas the week of his betrothal? Did Thackeray write a chapter the day his daughter was born? Did Plato philosophise freely when he was in love? Were there interruptions in the world's great revolutions, histories, dramas, reforms, poems, and marbles when their creators fell for a brief moment under the spell of the little blind tyrant who makes slaves of us all?
Well, all we want, for my little dream to be realised, is that among these precocious wielders of the pencil there should arise here a Dickens, there a Thackeray, there a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope, who, finding quite early in life that he can draw as easily as other men can spell, that he can express himself, and all that he hears and sees and feels, more easily, more completely, in that way than in any other, will devote himself heart and soul to that form of expression as I and others have tried to do but with advantages of nature, circumstances, and education that have been denied to us!
There is certainly a property in Thackeray that somehow flatters the reader into the belief that he is better than other people.
Passages that to men like William Thackeray and Francis Jeffrey were expressive only of inimitable tenderness, might be read dry-eyed by less keen appreciators, from the printed page, might even be ludicrously depreciated by them as mere mawkish sentimentality.
Perhaps other born romancers would have thrown into it more life, energy, jollity, or passion. Thackeray would have made the weaver a serio-comic hermit: Dickens would have made Eppie a sentimental angel; Charlotte Brontë would have curdled our blood; Trollope might have made more of Nancy's courting.
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