period
under review is the immense preponderance in its imaginative literature
of prose fiction, of the novel of real life. The novel has become to
the solitary reader of to-day what the stage play was to the audiences
of Elisabeth's reign, or the periodical essay, like the _Tatlers_ and
_Spectators_, to the clubs and breakfast-tables of Queen Anne's. And,
if its criticism of life is less concentrated and brilliant than the
drama gives, it is far {267} more searching and minute. No period has
ever left in its literary records so complete a picture of its whole
society as the period which is just closing. At any other time than
the present, the names of authors like Charlotte Bronte, Charles
Kingsley, and Charles Reade--names which are here merely mentioned in
passing--besides many others which want of space forbids us even to
mention--would be of capital importance. As it is, we must limit our
review to the three acknowledged masters of modern English fiction,
Charles Dickens (1812-1870), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863),
and "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880).

It is sometimes helpful to reduce a great writer to his lowest term, in
order to see what the prevailing bent of his genius is. This lowest
term may often be found in his early work, before experience of the
world has overlaid his original impulse with foreign accretions.
Dickens was much more than a humorist, Thackeray than a satirist, and
George Eliot than a moralist; but they had their starting-points
respectively in humor, in burlesque, and in strong ethical and
religious feeling. Dickens began with a broadly comic series of
papers, contributed to the _Old Magazine_ and the _Evening Chronicle_,
and reprinted in book form, in 1836, as _Sketches by Boz_. The success
of these suggested to a firm of publishers the preparation of a number
of similar sketches of the misadventures of cockney sportsmen, to
accompany plates by the {268} comic draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour. This
suggestion resulted in the _Pickwick Papers_, published in monthly
installments, in 1836-1837. The series grew, under Dickens's hand,
into a continuous, though rather loosely strung narrative of the doings
of a set of characters, conceived with such exuberant and novel humor
that it took the public by storm, and raised its author at once to
fame. _Pickwick_ is by no means Dickens's best, but it is his most
characteristic, and most popular, book. At the time that he wr