Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first.  The lines of development, as well as the chief individual practitioners, may be best indicated by short discussions of Hook, Bulwer, Disraeli, Ainsworth, James, Marryat, and Peacock.

The most probable demur to this list is likely to be taken at the very first name.  Theodore Hook has had no return of the immense popularity which his Sayings and Doings (1826-1829) obtained for him; nor, perhaps, is he ever likely to have any; nor yet, further, save in one respect, can he be said to deserve it.  Flimsily constructed, hastily written, reflecting indeed the ways and speech of the time after a fashion, but in a distorted mirror and with a thin and superficial representation, nearer to bad drama than to good literature, full of horseplay and forced high jinks—­his stories have all the inseparable faults of improvisation together with those of art that is out of fashion and manners-painting (such as it is) of manners that are dead, and when alive were those of a not very picturesque, pleasing, or respectable transition.  Yet, for all this, Hook has a claim on the critical historian of literature, and especially of the novel, which has been far too little acknowledged.  And this claim does not even consist in the undoubted fact that his influence both on Dickens and on Thackeray was direct and very great.  It lies in the larger and more important, though connected, fact that, at a given moment, his were the hands in which the torch of the novel-procession was deposited.  He stands to fiction almost exactly as Leigh Hunt stands to the miscellaneous essay.  He modernised and multiplied its subjects, attractions, appeals:  he “vulgarised” it in the partly good French sense, as well as in the wholly bad English one; he was its journalist and colporteur.  He broke up the somewhat stock-and-type moulds of eighteenth-century tale-telling; admitted a plurality, almost an infinity, of interest and incident; gave a sort of universal franchise to possible subjects of novel; and (perhaps most important of all) banished from that novel the tendency to conventional “lingo” which, though never so prevalent in it as in eighteenth-century drama, had existed.  It may seem to some readers that there is an exaggerated and paradoxical opposition between this high praise and the severe censure pronounced a little above—­that both cannot be true.  But both are true:  and it is a really natural and necessary cause and proof at once of their truth that Hook never wrote a really good novel, hardly even a really good tale ("Gervase Skinner” is probably the best), and yet that he deserves the place here given to him.