Charles Dudley Warner writes:  “After all, there is something about a boy I like.”  Dickens, using the phrasing for a wider application, might have said:  “After all, there is something about men and women I like!” It was thus no accident that he elected to write of the lower middle classes; choosing to depict the misery of the poor, their unfair treatment in institutions; to depict also the unease of criminals, the crushed state of all underlings—­whether the child in education or that grown-up evil child, the malefactor in prison.  He was a spokesman of the people, a democratic pleader for justice and sympathy.  He drew the proletariat preferably, not because he was a proletariat but because he was a brother-man and the fact had been overlooked.  He drew thousands of these suppressed humans, and they were of varied types and fortunes:  but he loved them as though they were one, and made the world love them too:  and love their maker.  The deep significance of Dickens, perhaps his deepest, is in the social note that swells loud and insistent through his fiction.  He was a pioneer in the democratic sympathy which was to become so marked feature in the Novel in the late nineteenth century:  and which, as we have already seen, is from the first a distinctive trait of the modern fiction, one of the explanations of its existence.

CHAPTER IX

THACKERAY

The habit of those who appraise the relative worth of Dickens and Thackeray to fall into hostile camps, swearing by one, and at the other, has its amusing side but is to be deprecated as irrational.  Why should it be necessary to miss appreciation of the creator of “Vanity Fair” because one happens to like “David Copperfield”?  Surely, our literary tastes or standards should be broad enough to admit into pleasurable companionship both those great early Victorian novelists.

Yet, on second thought, there would appear to be some reason for the fact that ardent lovers of Thackeray are rarely devotees of the mighty Charles—­or vice versa.  There is something mutually exclusive in the attitude of the two, their different interpretation of life.  Unlike in birth, environment, education and all that is summed up in the magic word personality, their reaction to life, as a scientist would say, was so opposite that a reader naturally drawn to one, is quite apt to be repelled by (or at least, cold to) the other.  If you make a wide canvass among booklovers, it will be found that this is just what happens.  Rarely does a stanch supporter of Dickens show a more than Laodicean temper towards Thackeray; and for rabid Thackerians, Dickens too often spells disgust.  It is a rare and enjoyable experience to meet with a mind so catholic as to welcome both.  The backbone of the trouble is personal, in the natures of the two authors.  But I think it is worth while to say that part of the explanation may be found in the fact that Thackeray began fiction ten years later