The
appearance of his masterpiece, 'Vanity Fair' (the allegorical title taken
from a famous incident in 'Pilgrim's Progress'), in 'Fraser's Magazine' in
1847-8 (the year before Dickens' 'David Copperfield') brought him sudden
fame and made him a social lion. Within the next ten years he produced his
other important novels, of which the best are 'Pendennis,' 'Henry Esmond,'
and 'The Newcomes,' and also his charming essays (first delivered as
lectures) on the eighteenth century in England, namely 'English Humorists,'
and 'The Four Georges.' All his novels except 'Henry Esmond' were published
serially, and he generally delayed composing each instalment until the
latest possible moment, working reluctantly except under the stress of
immediate compulsion. He was for three years, at its commencement, editor
of 'The Cornhill Magazine.' He died in 1863 at the age of fifty-two, of
heart failure.
The great contrast between Dickens and Thackeray results chiefly from the
predominance in Thackeray of the critical intellectual quality and of the
somewhat fastidious instinct of the man of society and of the world which
Dickens so conspicuously lacked. As a man Thackeray was at home and at ease
only among people of formal good breeding; he shrank from direct contact
with the common people; in spite of his assaults on the frivolity and vice
of fashionable society, he was fond of it; his spirit was very keenly
analytical; and he would have been chagrined by nothing more than by
seeming to allow his emotion to get the better of his judgment.
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