clubs and breakfast-tables of Queen Anne’s.  And if its criticism of life is less concentrated and brilliant than the drama gives, it is far more searching and minute.  No period has ever left in its literary records so complete a picture of its whole society as the period which is just closing.  At any other time than the present, the names of authors like Charlotte Bronte, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Reade—­names which are here merely mentioned in passing—­besides many others which want of space forbids us even to mention—­would be of capital importance.  As it is, we must limit our review to the three acknowledged masters of modern English fiction, Charles Dickens (1812-1870), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), and “George Eliot” (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880).

It is sometimes helpful to reduce a great writer to his lowest term, in order to see what the prevailing bent of his genius is.  This lowest term may often be found in his early work, before experience of the world has overlaid his original impulse with foreign accretions.  Dickens was much more than a humorist, Thackeray than a satirist, and George Eliot than a moralist; but they had their starting-points respectively in humor, in burlesque, and in strong ethical and religious feeling.  Dickens began with a broadly comic series of papers, contributed to the Old Magazine and the Evening Chronicle, and reprinted in book form, in 1836, as Sketches by Boz.  The success of these suggested to a firm of publishers the preparation of a number of similar sketches of the misadventures of cockney sportsmen, to accompany plates by the comic draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour.  This suggestion resulted in the Pickwick Papers, published in monthly installments in 1836-1837.  The series grew, under Dickens’s hand, into a continuous though rather loosely strung narrative of the doings of a set of characters, conceived with such exuberant and novel humor that it took the public by storm and raised its author at once to fame. Pickwick is by no means Dickens’s best, but it is his most characteristic and most popular book.  At the time that he wrote these early sketches he was a reporter for the Morning Chronicle.  His naturally acute powers of observation had been trained in this pursuit to the utmost efficiency, and there always continued to be about his descriptive writing a reportorial and newspaper air.  He had the eye for effect, the sharp fidelity to detail, the instinct for rapidly seizing upon and exaggerating the salient point, which are developed by the requirements of modern journalism.  Dickens knew London as no one else has ever known it, and, in particular, he knew its hideous and grotesque recesses, with the strange developments of human nature that abide there; slums like Tom-all-Alone’s, in Bleak House; the river-side haunts of Rogue Riderhood, in Our Mutual Friend; as well as the old inns, like the “White Hart,” and the “dusky purlieus