We have now noticed fifteen women, from Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen to George Eliot, who have contributed to the single department of fiction concerned with English domestic life.  Many other names almost equally deserving and equally celebrated might be added to the list.  The enduring popularity of their works is sufficient commentary on the success with which woman’s talent has been directed toward fiction.  Not only have the productions of these writers a high literary value, but their widespread circulation has afforded a really healthful amusement to tens of thousands, and their influence has been uniformly for good.[206]

The novels of English domestic life written by men have been little more numerous or able, but much more extended in scope.  “Tremaine” and “De Vere,” of R. Plumer Ward, contain clever sketches of character, but the narrative is loaded down with political and philosophical disquisitions.  Theodore Hook’s stories were as unequal as his life.  Almost all bear the marks of haste and carelessness, and yet very few are without some portion of that pointed wit and delicate humor which delineated Jack Brag, or described Mr. Abberley’s dinner party in the “Man of Many Friends.”  Richard Harris Barham is well known as the author of the witty “Ingoldsby Legends,” and Samuel Warren as the author of “Ten Thousand a Year.”  Charles Kingsley described the life and grievances of mechanics in “Alton Locke.”  Charles Reade began a long series of popular novels with “Peg Woffington” and “Christie Johnstone.”  His best work is “Never Too Late to Mend,” in which he criticized prison discipline, and described the striking scenes of the Australian gold-fields.  Few novels of the present day contain a more interesting story or more lifelike delineations of character.  Wilkie Collins’ greatest power lies in the construction of his plot; the “Moonstone” and the “Woman in White,” are among the most absorbing narratives in the whole range of fiction.  His studies of the morbid workings of the mind are often striking, but with the exception of Count Fosco and a few others, his characters are not strongly marked.  Thomas Hughes accomplished a truly noble work in the composition of “Tom Brown’s School Days” and “Tom Brown at Oxford,”—­books which have found their way to every boy’s heart, and have appealed to all that was most healthful and manly there.  The novels of Benjamin d’Israeli are chiefly interesting in their relation to the character of their illustrious author.  As works of art they are faulty in construction, exaggerated in description, and unnatural in effect.  “Vivian Gray” and “Lothair” cannot pretend to be truthful studies of English life, nor would their author, probably, have represented them as such.  But so much of the great statesman’s power was instilled into his novels that they have a certain interest even for those who are most alive to their faults.  They are the conceptions of a very rich imagination, and contain many pictures which, if untrue to nature,