DICKENS AND THACKERAY.

WHAT the epic was to the old world—a continuous narration of stirring events, with linked sweetness long drawn out-that is the romance to the modern world. With the change of matter there has been a change of form; it is no longer the story of "physical force" that absorbs and delights mankind, it is the battle of life,—not the encounter of flesh and blood, but the clash of principles and the conflict of passions. The decease of the three-volume fiction has often been foretold, but has never come to pass, because it exists as the supply of a want, and a very complex want. All men want amusement; but, more than this, mankind, however civilised, require some stimulus of the simpler emotions; overlaid as these may be by habit, perverted by selfishness or dilapidated by overwear, they are still the chief source of pleasure. That, therefore, must be welcome which awakes them. The novel has, for the unimaginative, incidents, for the student of human nature, character, for the critical ear, vigour or beauty of language, for the theorist, an ample store of cobwebs. It offers love and children to the spinster, red coats and glory to the legal or the literary drudge; and, if it does harm by exhausting the sympathies of some, it does good by exalting and keeping them fresh in sluggish and mechanical natures. The romance, we

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say, occupies the place of the epic; it is more various, because the forms of society are more manifold, and men's knowledge and their requirements alike more diverse.

It is not long since two of our best-known epopoists, or, to use the more common term, of our novel-writers, have concluded each a work published by instalments, and sent them forth in their perfect form from the presses of Bradbury and Evans. Little matter to us whether it was the lust of scribbling, the desire of fame, or the appetite for what university statutes still term "solids" which prompted them to utterance. We need not, with Mr. Wickfield, decipher the motives which induced Mr. Dickens and Mr. Thackeray to compile respectively the lives of David Copperfield and Arthur Pendennis; enough for us that each of them has produced something neither devoid of interest nor unworthy of his fame.

There is one virtue in the autobiographical form in which Mr. Dickens has cast his tale, namely, that it imparts in this case an additional reality; there cannot but be some idea when an author is speaking under an author's mask, and in the first person, that he is retailing, if not circumstances of his own career, at least fancies and feelings which have been present to him in that capacity. We should not, however, expect this reality to extend itself over all the abundance of personages who throng the stage in Mr. Dickens's narrative; if at all so, rather to those who stand in most immediate connection with the central figure and form, as it were, a part of him. In other words, we might expect that there should be a division manifest in the story, and that one portion

VOL. II.

Y

should be assimilated to former works of the writer, another portion bear a different impress; nor will such expectation be belied.

It is not unreasonably with a view to the final result that the life of David Copperfield is made somewhat eventful at the outset, more eventful, indeed, than the summary heading of the earlier chapters, "I am born; I observe; I have a change," would lead us to believe. David's mamma is a widow, widowed before the boy is born. She is also, in the opinion of strong-minded Betsy Trotwood, a wax doll, whom David senior was a fool to marry. The waxen widow, a weak, amiable creature, marries again one Murdstone, black-whiskered and shalloweyed, who, by the aid of a sister, likewise black-haired, bullies the poor lady to death. The child in this case is, happily, not so fragile a creature as was Paul Dombey, and we have less of mystical precociousness revealed. Natural enough is the detail of that one particular cock, whose voice and gesture had in them something terrible; of that one particular closet, redolent of jam and ghosts; of the dial which was conjectured to feel glad when the morning sun shone out again, and of the nurse with the forefinger like a nutmeg-grater, whose buttons would fly off with a bang under any casual excitement, starting reflections in the child's mind just as the buttons of Munchausen's dogskin jacket used to spring a covey of birds. There are ladies, we do not doubt, who would willingly bear testimony to these occasional misunderstandings between dresses and emotions. With the advent of Murdstone a cloud comes over the child's existence. His education commences

under one Creakle, at an establishment after the Dotheboys type, where he acquires an affection for James Steerforth, a hero with curls and pocket-money, and Tommy Traddles, a youth with rebellious hair, inexhaustible good nature, and a passion for designing skeleton faces. Ere this, however, he has been introduced by Peggotty, the nurse, to her Yarmouth friends, and dwelt, while by the sea-shore, with Mr. Peggotty, fisherman, Ham, his orphan nephew, Emily, his orphan niece, and lachrymose Mrs. Gummidge, his housekeeper. The mother dead, Murdstone consigns the child to his partner, Quinion, and bottle-washing at a warehouse by the river at Blackfriars. Here he has a taste of life in the streets, and puts up under the roof of Wilkins Micawber, Esq., a general waiter upon Providence, with a weakness for drawing upon the future by means of "acceptances," and more than a viceroy's zest for writing diplomatic and confidential letters. Mr. Micawber, with his wife and family, are a part of portion No. 2, as above described. They live better on nothing than most people do on a little; they fluctuate between tears and smiles; they pass from despair to hot punch, and from the immediate prospect of starvation to a sanguine gaiety. Alnaschar is a joke to them; in a forlorn tenement, beyond the City-road, they calculate the expense of putting out a bow-window from their house in Piccadilly. As to exterior, Mr. Micawber is stout and bald, he wears shabby clothes, an enormous shirtcollar, and an eyeglass, dangling "for ornament, not use. A daring design upon the Custom-house, and visions of assistance from Mrs. M.'s family, carry

them to Plymouth; on their departure, David determines to seek his sole relative, the Betsy Trotwood, whom he unconsciously alienated at his birth. Robbed at the outset by an ingenious costermonger, he accomplishes the journey to Dover on foot, subsisting on the produce of his jacket and waistcoat, and arrives at the cottage in rags. Miss Trotwood lives on an eminence in the suburbs, overlooking the sea. With her on the first floor is Mr. Richard Batley, a harmless, gentlemanly monomaniac, whom she has rescued from the less pleasant seclusion his friends designed for him. The boy is housed, and after an interview with Murdstone and sister, the nephew becomes the exclusive property of his aunt, who is eccentric and determined, but kind. She sends David to school at Canterbury, to one Dr. Strong, pedagogue and lexicographer, an old, abstracted, kindly sort of man, with a very young and pretty wife; but he is to lodge with Mr. Wickfield, Miss Trotwood's solicitor, in an old house, low browed and wainscoated, fit shrine for a daughter Agnes, “a quiet, good, calm spirit," the heroine of the tale. By way of contrast there is Heep, articled clerk, articled out of charity, whom to describe description fails; he is a sinister, crouching, fawning imp of humility; viperous in soul and body; long-fingered and splayfooted and red-eyed, with damp exudations of the cuticle, a froglike hand; altogether "a moist unwholesome body;" him, too, we are inclined to put in the category of the hypernaturals. Schooldays over, Miss Trotwood will have David to see a little of the world before he decides on a profession. In London he falls in with the hero of the curly hair,