The first supreme work of the kind was perhaps in Vanity Fair and Pendennis, the former admitting exceptional and irregular developments as an integral part of its plot and general appeal, the latter doing for the most part without them.  But Pendennis exhibited in itself, and taught to other novelists, if not an absolutely new, a hitherto little worked, and clumsily worked, source of novel interest.  We have seen how, as early as Head or Kirkman, the possibility of making such a source out of the ways of special trades, professions, employments, and vocations had been partly seen and utilised.  Defoe did it more; Smollett more still; and since the great war there had been naval and military novels in abundance, as well as novels political, clerical, sporting, and what not.  But these special interests had been as a rule drawn upon too onesidedly.  The eighteenth century found its mistaken fondness for episodes, inset stories, and the like, particularly convenient here:  the naval, military, sporting, and other novels of the nineteenth were apt to rely too exclusively on these differences.  Such things as the Oxbridge scenes and the journalism scenes of Pendennis—­both among the most effective and popular, perhaps the most effective and popular, parts of the book—­were almost, if not entirely, new.  There had been before, and have since been, plenty of university novels, and their record has been a record of almost uninterrupted failure; there have since, if not before, Pendennis been several “press” novels, and their record has certainly not been a record of unbroken success.  But the employment here, by genius, of such subjects for substantial parts of a novel was a success pure and unmixed.  So, in the earlier book, the same author had shown how the most humdrum incident and the minutest painting of ordinary character could be combined with historic tragedy like that furnished by Waterloo, with domestic drame of the most exciting kind like the discovery of Lord Steyne’s relations with Becky, or the at least suggested later crime of that ingenious and rather hardly treated little person.

Most of the writers mentioned and glanced at above took—­not of course always, often, or perhaps ever in conscious following of Thackeray, but in consequence of the same “skiey influences” which worked on him—­to this mixed domestic-dramatic line.  And what is still more interesting, men who had already made their mark for years, in styles quite different, turned to it and adopted it.  We have seen this of Bulwer, and the evidences of the change in him which are given by the “Caxton” novels.  We have not yet directly dealt with another instance of almost as great interest and distinction, Charles Lever, though we have named him and glanced at his work.