Thackeray drew a picture of the life and struggles of the
rich and powerful middle class. He filled his books with
the people of Bloomsbury and Mayfair and Kensington. He
described their lives and their ideals so that they could enjoy
the mirror, and so that suburbia could imitate them; and he
did it because all his readers preferred that to anything else
he offered them. Even while he was still producing the
Pendennis novels, Bagehot wrote of Thackeray's suburban
public: 'The delicate touches of our great satirist have, for
such readers, not only the charm of wit, but likewise the
interest of valuable information; he tells them of the topics
which they want to know.'

Thackeray has many pleasures to offer. He can tell a story,
Barry Lyndon and Esmond. He can make characters; no one
more quickly and easily except Dickens; and Thackeray
supplements the Dickens world with characters Dickens
could never have drawn. Dickens could never have given
us a mature man like Colonel Lambert, or a sophisticated
one like Major Pendennis. Dickens's characters had quite
remarkably undeveloped minds. For the same reason,
Dickens could never have given us Becky or Beatrix or
that most wonderful young woman, Ethel Newcome. The
special pleasure Thackeray offers is that he can write. Again,
so can Dickens. But not every English novelist writes well,
and Thackeray could manage this difficult language,
English, with most enviable skill.

He exercised his skill in two ways. He had a narrative
style of weight and pace, best enjoyed in Barry Lyndon,
Vanity Fair and Esmond, and developed in a special way in
The Virginians. In Denis Duval, at the end, he uses a narra-
tive style that is much more modern. The other style,
which he used in the Pendennis series, was informal, con-
versational, diffuse. This was Thackeray himself; this, so
far as technique is concerned, was his unique excellence. His
early writing is good, well-paced narrative, with the osten-
tatious energy of Regency. His writing in the golden
decade, the fifties of last century, and just beyond it, is

-8-