Dickens’ vast popularity resulted only in part from the artistic merit of his works.  The breadth of his canvas, his intense realization of fictitious scenes, and his extraordinary descriptive power are qualities enough to win for him his eminent position in fiction.  But the affection felt for Dickens as a man, which has made him occupy so much the hearts as well as the minds of the reading public, was attracted by qualities apart from those which excited admiration for the author.  Dickens was essentially a national writer in the variety of the characters with whom he brought his readers into communion.  He was essentially popular, from the fact that he dealt with the masses and not with any particular class.  He was essentially English, in that he was the apostle of home.  No novelist who has treated domestic life has so thoroughly caught its spirit, and has so sympathetically traced its joys and sorrows, its trials and recompenses.  Family life has been for more than two centuries gradually supplanting the life of the camp and the court.  It is in the domestic circle that men now find the interest which was formerly sought in adventure or publicity.  Not only in the Christmas stories, especially devoted to the celebration of home, but through all his great fictions Dickens made domestic life his chief study.  And he is, above all others, the favorite household novelist.  While he lived, each new work of his was welcomed alike by parent and child, and when he died, there were few homes where books ever came that the loss of a friend was not felt.

Scott, Dickens, almost all the great English novelists described heroes and heroines.  They made their chief character an embodiment of virtue or strength, and strove to win for him the admiration of the reader.  Even Tom Jones was a hero to Fielding, and Roderick Random to Smollett.  But Thackeray said to himself as he looked out on the world, that humanity was not made up of heroes and villains.  He had never met with the truly heroic, nor with the utterly depraved.  It seemed to him that human nature lay between the two extremes.  In “Vanity Fair,” in “Pendennis” and in “The Newcomes” he resolved to describe man as he was, with virtues and failings, with occasional glimpses of the noble, and more common exhibitions of the mean and the little.  Young men were to appear in his pages with their weakness and selfishness; young girls with their silliness and affectation.  Thackeray, in a word, was to be more realistic than his predecessors in fiction had dared to be.  He was to show his readers what they really were, and not what they would wish to be.