and gambling, he began to contribute to _Fraser's_,
and thereafter to the _New Monthly_, _Cruikshank's Comic Almanac_,
_Punch_, and other periodicals, clever burlesques, art criticisms by
"Michael Angelo Titmarsh," _Yellow Plush Papers_, and all manner of
skits, satirical character sketches, and humorous tales, like the
_Great Hoggarty Diamond_ and the _Luck of Barry Lyndon_. Some of these
were collected in the _Paris Sketch-Book_, 1840, and the _Irish
Sketch-Book_, 1843; but Thackeray was slow in winning recognition, and
it was not until the publication of his first great novel, _Vanity
Fair_, in monthly parts, during 1846-1848, that he achieved any thing
like the general reputation which Dickens had reached at a bound.
_Vanity Fair_ described itself, on its title-page, as "a novel without
a hero." It was also a novel without a plot--in the sense in which
_Bleak House_ or _Nicholas Nickleby_ had a plot--and in that respect it
set the fashion for the latest school of realistic fiction, being a
transcript of life, without necessary beginning or end. Indeed, one of
the pleasantest things to a reader of Thackeray is the way which his
characters have of re-appearing, as old acquaintances, in his different
books; just as, in real life, people drop out of mind and then turn
{274} up again in other years and places. _Vanity Fair_ is Thackeray's
masterpiece, but it is not the best introduction to his writings.
There are no illusions in it, and, to a young reader fresh from Scott's
romances or Dickens's sympathetic extravagances, it will seem hard and
repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its
bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray
does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the
false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery--the "mean admiration of mean
things"--in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing
vision detects the base alloy in the purest natures. There are no
"heroes" in his books, no perfect characters. Even his good women,
such as Helen and Laura Pendennis, are capable of cruel injustice
toward less fortunate sisters, like little Fanny; and Amelia Sedley is
led, by blind feminine instinct, to snub and tyrannize over poor
Dobbin. The shabby miseries of life, the numbing and belittling
influences of failure and poverty upon the most generous natures, are
the tragic themes which Thackeray handles by preference. He has been