though necessity made him a journalist, he wished to be an actor. As a young man he tried to get a position at Covent Garden Theatre. For years he was the leading spirit in a famous company of amateurs who played in various cities of England; and, as we have seen, his chief interest came to be his public readings. These two professional instincts account for much in Dickens's work. As reporter and as editor he studied his public; as actor, he taught himself to play upon it, through his writings and his dramatic readings from them, with incomparable skill.

Dickens's Characters. From Dickens's success in Sketches by Boz came, in 1836, an engagement to write the letterpress for a series of cartoons representing the humors of sporting life. For this purpose he invented the "Pickwick Club," which at once made a popular hit. The death of the artist who was engaged upon the drawings left Dicken free to widen the scope of the adventures of the club, and t add other characters without stint. The complete result was a great book, formless as to plot, crowded with humorous figures. These figures are given with broadly exaggerated traits, as if Dickens had always in mind the cartoon which was to accompany the text. The characters talk freely, not to say inexhaustibly, and all differently. But the author's chief resource is his faculty for bringing his caricatures into contact with the actual world, in situations that expose their oddities in high relief. Mr. Tupman as a lover, Mr. Winkle as a duellist or a sportsman, Mr. Pickwick in a breach-of-promise suit with the Widow Bardell, the Pickwick Club contending with a recalcitrant horse, the Reverend Mr. Stiggins drunk at a temperance meeting—these incongruities are narrated in a style always copious, but often rapid and piquant.

În his later novels Dickens improved on his first attempts. He continued to be a caricaturist, to rely on distortions and exaggerations of feature or of manner, but his pencil became more subtle and his figures more significant. Micawber 'waiting for something to turn up," Sairy Gamp haunted by the mythical Mrs. Harris, 'umble Uriah Heep, sanctimonious Pecksniff, cheerful Mark Tapley, all have distinct individ

uality, yet all label so conveniently common attitudes and habits of mind that we use their names freely to describe whole classes of mankind.

In Pickwick Dickens is purely a humorist; in the novels which followed he created figures of a different sort, to excite not laughter, but loathing and terror. In the portrayal of these types also he gained subtlety with practice. Fagin and Sykes in Oliver Twist (1838), Quilp, the dwarf, in Old Curiosity Shop (1841), monstrous as they are, do not haunt the reader with the terrible suggestion of inhumanity that lurks behind the placid, smiling face of Mme. Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), as she sits in front of the guillotine, knitting, and counting the heads as they fall. In the stories just mentioned Dickens showed again his fertility in inventing situations for his characters, using his dramatic power as freely in melodrama as in farce. The part of Fagin at his trial and in prison is worked out as if for the stage, by an actor careful to make every gesture, every expression, tell on his audience.

His Purpose. A third type of character which Dickens developed, and which in his time made immensely for his popularity, was the victim of society-usually a child. In his second novel, Dickens made his story centre about a child, Oliver Twist, and from that time forth children were expected and necessary characters in his novels. Little Nell, Florence Dombey, David Copperfield, represent in most telling form the case of the individual against society. For with Dickens the private cruelty which his malign characters inflict, is almost always connected with social wrong. Bumble's savage blow at Oliver Twist asking for more food, Little Dorrit's life in the Marshalsea. are carried back and laid at the door of a society which permitted the poor-house and the debtor's prison to exist. The championship of the individual against institutions, which had been a leading motive in later eighteenth-century fiction, had been checked by the reaction against the French Revolution; but in Dickens's day the "redress of wrongs" had become again a great public movement. The workings of later romanticism had begun to be reflected in a kind of sentimental hatred of organized

authority, a feeling to which Dickens constantly appealed. Undoubtedly there was something theatrical in Dickens's adoption of social wrong as a motive in fiction, but there was great sincerity also. He had himself known the lot of the persecuted; at the root of his zeal for reform was the memory of his own bitter childhood.

Dickens's Plots.-The types of character already discussed were sufficient to sustain the movement of Dickens's earlier books, which were usually simple in structure. In most of them we begin with the hero in childhood, and follow his personal adventures into the thick of a plot involving the popular romantic material of the day, kidnapping, murder, mob-justice, and other incidents of criminal life. In his later books, however, Dickens gained the power of constructing elaborate plots, and of creating characters of heroic dignity and tragic intensity, such as Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities and Lady Dedlock in Bleak House (1853). These are the most enduringly powerful of his novels, but they are not those upon which his fame rests. Dickens is remembered not as a dramatic artist in the novel form, but as a showman of wonderful resources. He is master of a vast and fascinating stage, crowded with farcical characters, with grotesque and terrible creatures, more devils than men, and with the touching forms of little children. The action is sometimes merry, sometimes exciting, sometimes pathetic. We have laughter, and horror, and tears; but the prevailing atmosphere is one of cheerfulness, as befits a great Christmas pantomime.

Dickens dealt in the main with the world of his own day, but his spirit was not that of a realist bent on representing things as they are. On the contrary, his humor lies largely in exaggeration, and the interest of his stories generally in their use of the unusual and romantic elements in life. A further step in bringing the novel down to the world as it exists for the average man was taken by Thackeray.

V. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-1863)

Thackeray's Life.-Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India, in 1811. He was educated at the Charterhouse School and at Cambridge. He gave some time to art study on the Continent, and after losing his small patrimony in a journalistic venture he tried to make a living as an artist. He applied, indeed, for the position as illustrator of Dickens's Pickwick Papers. Unsuccessful in this, he turned to literature, and became a contributor to Punch and to Fraser's Magazine. His first work consisted of light essays, sketches of travel, and burlesques in which the weaknesses of the romantic school are cleverly hit off in imitations of Scott, Bulwer and others. His intention to write of the world as it is was rather broadly proclaimed in his first considerable tale, Catherine (1839), of which the heroine is a female rogue, drawn with unsympathetic realism as a rebuke to the sentimental treatment of criminals exemplified by Dickens's Nancy, in Oliver Twist.

Thackeray gave his realistic theories larger scope in Barry Lyndon (1844), a spirited account of the exploits of an eighteenth-century adventurer, and in Vanity Fair, which was published in parts between 1846 and 1848. This au length gave Thackeray an assured position in English literature, but with a singular distrust in his future he made various attempts, fortunately unsuccessful, to escape into the civil or the diplomatic service. Thrown back upon his real vocation, he produced his other masterpieces, Pendennis (1848–50), Henry Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1853–55). and The Virginians (1857-59). Meanwhile he delivered his lectures on The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century and The Four Georges, in England and in America. In 1860 he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine, which position he resigned shortly before his death.

Thackeray's Temperament.-Thackeray was not happy either in circumstances or altogether in temperament. His long period of unsuccess, his wife's insanity, which came upon her soon after their marriage, and his own ill-health,